Hey there, hope you’ve had a great week. Inflation may well have won President Donald Trump reelection, so why does buying groceries, dining out and just heating my home feel so punishingly expensive? We’ll get into it in today’s newsletter.

 

But first: you know what’s really affordable? DVDs! You probably have a few plastic cases gathering dust somewhere, and your library is likely full of ‘em. It’s cheaper than streaming, and better video quality, too.

 

We’ll start this week with my colleague Nova Safo, who immersed himself in the growing physical video scene in Los Angeles and beyond.  — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor

It may feel like we’ve been in the streaming era forever, but it wasn’t that long ago Friday night meant popping in a DVD from Hollywood Video.

 

“We grew up watching DVDs. I think it was still definitely within our generation,” said Fay Vavra, who was perusing the anime aisle at Vidiots, a nonprofit rental store in Los Angeles.

 

Vavra’s fellow 20-somethings, Isabelle Torres and Danielle Rathbun, reminisced about watching Disney films on VHS, too. Vidiots, they said, offers lots of viewing options while cutting down streaming subscriptions. The store boasts 70,000 titles on its crowded shelves, including rare stuff you’ll only find on tape, and five-day rentals are $3. 

 

LPs have outsold CDs for a couple years, and now physical video is having its vinyl moment. A survey from Consumer Reports found that nearly half of Americans are still watching DVDs and Blu-rays, while 15% of those surveyed are still playing and rewinding those VHS tapes. Why?

 

“It's probably really a mix of emotional, practical, and cultural reasons that we're seeing this sort of renewed fondness for older technologies,” said James Willcox, senior electronics editor at Consumer Reports, who conceived of the survey. 

 

Movies and TV can disappear from streaming in an instant, even titles you’ve “bought.” Amazon was sued over that practice last year, and California passed a law trying to address the problem. 

 

“Sometimes they don't renew the licenses for content,” Willcox explained. “With physical media, you own that, and so you know it's always going to be there. And I think that there's an uncertainty with streaming as to whether or not you're going to have access to that stuff.”

 

We’re not talking about big money here. The streaming business totals about $50 billion in annual revenues, compared to about $1 billion for newly-released physical media.  

 

But the trendline, which can be measured for new releases at least, shows physical media is getting more attention. Sales  are increasing for high-definition Blu-ray discs. 

 

“The streaming services have kind of pushed their customers away,” Vidiots video store director Robbie McCluskey said. “People have become disillusioned that if you want to watch like a handful of movies, you have to have subscriptions to like 12 different places.” 

 

The physical stores hope to become an antidote to digital overload, and Vidiots’ trajectory traces physical video’s demise and resurgence.

It has been absolutely frigid in much of the country this winter, including in places that aren’t used to it.

 

“We had freezing temperatures all the way into southern Florida this winter. Those types of conditions make a difference in people's bills and their ability to pay those bills,'“ said Katrina Metzler, executive director of the National Energy & Utility Affordability Coalition.

 

Lots of low-income households struggle to afford heat every year, she said, but this winter is worse, both because of the weather and because electricity and natural gas prices are higher.The National Energy Assistance Directors Association projects that people will have to spend over $1,000, on average, to heat their homes this winter — about 11% more than last year.

 

“I consider myself a middle-income household, and I've struggled this winter in Virginia with paying my utility bills.” Metzler said. “I’ve seen those same price increases that everyone has seen.”

 

About one in six households is currently behind on their utility bills, according to Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association.

 

“It's like everything is going wrong. You have higher prices, colder winter, and people need to buy more of an expensive product,” he said.

 

When utility bills go up, people are just stuck, he said. “With electricity, for example, you can't say, ‘Gee, ‘I'll go down the street and buy a different brand of electricity.’ You can't shop around.”

 

We sometimes talk about the Federal Reserve in terms of a toolkit. As in, a rate change is the tool that the Federal Open Market Committee is using to guide monetary policy. 

 

But there is no actual tool, per se: Instead, there’s a lot of work being done by Fed employees. 

 

“Basically what the Federal Reserve does is instruct the desk at the New York Fed to carry out the policy as stated,” said Tim Duey, chief U.S. economist at SGH Macro Advisors. “The New York Fed is the agent for the Federal Reserve that buys and sells or purchases themselves Treasury securities, in order to follow the objectives of the FOMC as far as interest rate policy.”

 

The FOMC decides rates, open market operations make them happen — traditionally by buying and selling government securities to change the money supply and influence interest rates.

 

And it’s all happening in the open market where banks and dealers can get in on the action.

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David Brancaccio didn’t get much opportunity to meet his neighbors. The host of “Marketplace Morning Report” bought a house in fall 2024, moved in some basics and hosted one Thanksgiving dinner. In January of 2025 the home had burned down in Eaton Fire. By the end of the month, AT&T was bugging him to get their wireless router back.

 

Disaster has a way of bringing people together, and David has covered his neighborhood’s recovery efforts throughout the past year. This month, he teamed up with “This Old House” to go deeper on the new techniques his neighbors are using to make their rebuilt homes more resilient to climate change. 

 

One of those neighbors is the musician Aloe Blacc. He’d originally bought the property, just a few blocks from David, for his late father. To help address California’s housing shortage, Blacc decided to replace the burned home with three prefab homes, brought in on a crane. They’re made from fire-resistant fiber cement. 

 

“What I did not want was the headache of the trauma of a fire, and then the headache of a contractor,” Blacc said. “Who will sign and then go take a bunch of other work and never show up, or have supply issues.”

 

Instead, Blacc did it his way.

PS: Frederick Wiseman, a documentarian who spent decades finding profound truths in hours of footage of societal institutions, died this week at 96. Marketplace has run a few stories analyzing “The Store,” Wieseman’s lesser-known but very accessible 1983 film about the staff and clientele at the Dallas Neiman Marcus. That one’s free to watch on Kanopy with a library card.