Sarah Randazzo
Appearances
WSJ What’s News
Tariffs Are About to Separate Retail’s Winners and Losers
The volatility of the tariffs creates a lot of uncertainty and it's changing day by day.
WSJ What’s News
Tariffs Are About to Separate Retail’s Winners and Losers
In order to meet the customer needs, we have to have product on the floor. And so we were not one of the retailers that chose to leave product in the ports or at the factories. We brought it in. We have full stores.
WSJ What’s News
Tariffs Are About to Separate Retail’s Winners and Losers
We've sold almost 200,000 pairs of the baggy jean on TikTok shop over the last 12 months, which is pretty significant. And we've made an effort to bring in the product that we need to continue to drive those sales.
WSJ What’s News
Tariffs Are About to Separate Retail’s Winners and Losers
Taking PacSun on a global scale has been something that we've been wanting to do for many years and it does feel like an exciting moment to do so and so we're also exploring other international territories.
WSJ What’s News
How a Secret Mortgage Blacklist Is Making It Hard for Condo Owners to Sell
There's a few factors. One is just the squeeze that middle-income families, those making above six figures, face. They don't qualify for the typical financial aid that those who have very low salaries can pretty much go to many colleges for free, but they don't make enough to comfortably be able to pay $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 a year to send their children to a private school.
WSJ What’s News
How a Secret Mortgage Blacklist Is Making It Hard for Condo Owners to Sell
And so a lot of schools like Harvard have been
WSJ What’s News
How a Secret Mortgage Blacklist Is Making It Hard for Condo Owners to Sell
increasing the aid for this group of families over time and then secondly we are in this climate right now of political strife around a lot of elite universities and so I don't know if the timing is just a coincidence but there is public pressure on Harvard and others around some of the Israel Hamas war protests and so this is a bit of good publicity for them in that climate as well.
WSJ What’s News
Consumer Sentiment in U.S. Falls for Fifth Straight Month
The totality of these cuts is going to mean that there's more than just the research that has to be hit because a lot of the infrastructure for this research still exists and needs to be funded.
WSJ What’s News
Consumer Sentiment in U.S. Falls for Fifth Straight Month
When these funding cuts first started to come around back in March, a lot of schools did really basic things like saying hiring freezes or just look at your spending, be a little more careful, surface level things. As the months have gone on for schools, particularly like Columbia and Harvard that have had
WSJ What’s News
Consumer Sentiment in U.S. Falls for Fifth Straight Month
really large sums of money pulled, they're now having to do, you know, some pretty substantial cutbacks. And so in Harvard School of Public Health, for instance, which is almost half funded with federal research dollars, they've had to do layoffs.
WSJ What’s News
Consumer Sentiment in U.S. Falls for Fifth Straight Month
They're doing austerity measures that include no coffee in the lounge anymore, no more ordering food for lunch, cutting back printers and physical desktop phones, even little things like that. And then We have other places that are doing some layoffs or pausing research or saying that cuts could be coming. So it's a real gradient depending on how much each university relies on that money.
WSJ What’s News
Consumer Sentiment in U.S. Falls for Fifth Straight Month
That's what a lot of schools are analyzing right now. But the totality of these cuts is going to mean that there's more than just the research that has to be hit because a lot of the infrastructure for this research still exists and needs to be funded. Buildings, some staffing, just things that they won't be able to cut related to the research.
WSJ What’s News
Consumer Sentiment in U.S. Falls for Fifth Straight Month
And so that means that they'll have to look elsewhere to make all the numbers work.
WSJ What’s News
Consumer Sentiment in U.S. Falls for Fifth Straight Month
The dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, her name's Hopi Hoekstra, she had a meeting with faculty earlier this month and she said, quote, these federal actions have set in motion changes that will not be undone, at least not in the foreseeable future.
WSJ What’s News
Consumer Sentiment in U.S. Falls for Fifth Straight Month
And so Harvard is suing the Trump administration trying to restore some of the federal funding cuts, but the dean acknowledged that even if they win that lawsuit, she thinks these cuts are still going to be impactful and that really we've turned a corner that we're never going to turn back from.
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
Universities are really facing headwinds on a few different fronts here. And so one of them is around a lot of the Trump administration's directives around DEI and getting rid of DEI programs. Schools are also reacting to changes in federal funding to research the National Institutes for Health.
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
There's a big formula change potentially coming that would cost universities potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. And then there's also a task force project into antisemitism at the federal level that schools are responding to. And so there's really a lot of different fronts at this point that they're responding to. So what are universities doing?
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
A lot of schools are preemptively doing hiring freezes, for instance. We've seen dozens of universities across the country from elite ones on down. saying that they're having temporary hiring freezes because they need to figure out whether that money for research grants is coming or not.
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
And as part of that, PhD students are also having some offers withdrawn because they just don't know if they can support those PhD students for the next five years. So those ones are a little in the preemptive bucket around the DEI. You know, there was a letter that the education department put out that didn't have the force of law, but gave a kind of deadline of the end of February deadline.
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
to get rid of a lot of dei related things and so some schools were worried about that and didn't want to get in the crosshairs so again it didn't totally have legal bearing but it was kind of a big scary letter that went out from the education department and then obviously there are some schools facing immediate backlash like columbia
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
It permeates across campuses. The research grants themselves are mostly focused on the sciences, but it's interesting because schools are saying that even if there's cuts... To the science research grants, that's going to have trickle effects because they'll have to maybe move money from elsewhere to accommodate.
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
And culture-wise, if you do things like some of the schools we found that canceled a Black student alumni event or are no longer going to have graduation ceremonies for different ethnic or affinity groups, it's going to be smaller changes that impact the overall culture of a place and then also some larger changes when it comes to, say, employment or opportunities for graduate programs that are more tangible.