Time to strike out on your own?

This marketplace podcast is supported by Wealth Enhancement who ask, do you have a blueprint for your money? Wealth Enhancement can help you build the right blueprint for investing, retirement, tax, and more. With offices nationwide, there's an advisor who's ready to listen and craft a blueprint for your future. Find out more at wealthenhancement.com/build. This podcast is supported by Odoo. Some say Odoo business management software is like fertilizer for businesses because the simple efficient software promotes growth. Others say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it scales with you and is magically affordable. And some describe Odoo's programs for manufacturing, accounting, and more as building blocks for creating a custom software suite. So Odoo is fertilizer, magic beanstalk building blocks for business. Odoo, exactly what businesses need. Sign up at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. You want government data? We are finally getting some government data. Now is it gonna make us feel better? I don't know. From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdall. It is Monday today. This one is the December 15. Good as always to have you along, everybody. This is gonna be, relatively speaking, I guess, a Datapalooza kind of week. The November jobs report comes out tomorrow. Yes. Tomorrow. It will be the rare Tuesday jobs day. Retail sales tomorrow too. That'll be for October. On Thursday, it's the consumer price index that is for November. I know it's tough to keep track. Also, at the end of last week, from the Census Bureau came data on applications to start new businesses. Not all of those applications turn into actual companies, of course, but the number of people thinking about it is pretty strong. Applications up 7% from October to November, up more than 20% from one year ago. So marketplace's Henry Epp gets us going with why so many people might be looking to strike out on their own right now. A quick caveat about these numbers. These data are kinda messy, and so it is hard to figure out what's going on underneath. Joyce Klein is senior director of the Business Ownership Initiative at the Aspen Institute. Some of the applications could be existing companies changing their corporate structure, she says. This can happen when there are big changes in tax law, like the GOP bill that passed in the summer. But there is one trend in the data that might tell us something, tons of applications for new retail trade businesses. And the last time we saw, like, a really big spike in applications for retail trade, was during the pandemic. You know, when the economy was thrown for a loop and people were trying to come up with ways to make extra cash, maybe sell all that sourdough they were baking, This appears to be happening again, says Sarah Koons at Clio Capital. People hear that, you know, AI is coming to take your job and and wages are stagnating. We're seeing layoffs, you …