Marketplace All-in-One

Oil prices hit an 18-year low. Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island are planning a strike for Monday. How this “cancellation economy” is affecting places like the Coachella Valley in California.

The COVID-19 relief bill signed into law last week sets aside more than $350 billion for loans to small businesses. How are convenience stores faring? Egg and orange juice prices soar.

From the BBC World Service: With hospital parking lots busier due to COVID-19, what can health workers do? Global governments add more stimulus. Developing countries need increased health spending to tackle the pandemic.

Host Molly Wood speaks with Jacqueline Linnes, a professor of biomedical engineering who runs a lab at Purdue University, about what sort of tech is needed to produce COVID-19 tests in the face of a shortage. She says production at scale during the pandemic is the biggest challenge. Linnes also says academia may be prompted by the accelerated work during the pandemic to rethink how peer reviews are conducted. A lot of peer reviewers are usually excited to read about the next big thing around biosensors, for example, but pay little attention to more mundane things regarding manufacturing.

It’s Friday. Kai and Molly raise a glass to a very hard week and talk through everything you need to know: what’s ahead for states that are losing their tax base, what the Instacart workers are threatening to strike over and what kind of recession we might be facing. We might even talk about something that will make you smile (we hope).