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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to the Daily Dive Weekend edition. I'm Oscar Ramirez,
and every week I explore the top stories making waves
in the news and some that are just playing interesting.
I'll connect you with the journalists and the people who
know the story and bring you news without the noise
so you can make an informed decision. You can catch
a new episode of The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday,
and it's ready when you wake up. On the weekend edition,
(00:27):
I'll be bringing you some of the best stories from
the week. Many of the entertainment industry had been waiting
on numbers from Netflix on how many subscribers they lost
in the last quarter. They lost just under one million
subscribers instead of the two million they had predicted. It
still leaves a lot of questions on what they can
do to stop the people from leaving in droves. To
(00:47):
go over whether this is a Netflix specific issue or
if the entire streaming business has a problem, We'll speak
to Peter Kafka, senior correspondent at RECOD. It's less bad
than they predicted, but it's still not good to lose
a million subscribers. The reality is whether they lost a million,
or two or three they started already baked in the
bad news for Wall Street. What Wall Street and everyone
else wants to figure out, what are you gonna do
(01:07):
about it? And the short answer is not a lot.
I mean, Netflix is gonna make some tweaks and we
can talk about those. But the last three months is
and a lot of folks trip in Hollywood weighing in
on what Netflix ot to too and what they really
want Netflix to two is to act like sort of
everyone else, to stop doing avenge releases of all their
episodes to promote movies and TV shows instead of just
the service to make better stuff and put it in theaters.
(01:30):
And essentially Netflix is saying, no, we're we think we're
doing it right. We just need to tweak some stuff
along the edges. Now they may not be either accepting
reality or they may just not want to come out
and say what they're doing. But if you're looking for
Netflix to make huge wholesale changes, at least for right now,
they're saying they're not going to there. They're making some
tweaks and we can talk about the Yeah, and so
(01:50):
we get did get some answers to some questions. There's
a lot of questions still left over when it comes
to content specifically, right you You mentioned that there was
a criticism of putting out too much stuff, a lot
of people really not liking a lot of it. They
did say that they're going to kind of cap almost
what they're going to be spending on content to about
seventeen billion dollars. They said that's going to be the
number we're gonna stick with for a few years at least.
(02:13):
That is a meaningful announcement from them. It's both probably
something they wanted to do. It's also very much assigned
to Wall Street saying, you know how we've had more
viewers every year, made more revenue, and then spend more
on on content. Well, now we're at the point where
we don't need to spend more on content, or we're
not going to spend more on content. Seventeen billion dollars
is still a lot of money. You can find all
kinds of stuff with that, but they're not going to
(02:33):
keep bumping that number up and up and up. And
you can call that being choosier or more efficient or
more thoughtful about the way they're spending. But that's sort
of a reality that I think people expected to show
up sooner than later announced here. Password sharing is an
interesting one that they're trying to get a handle on.
They think that there's more than a hundred million households
using a Netflix account without paying for it. Obviously, this
(02:54):
would go huge for losing all the subscribers there, and
they're experimenting with what to do to control that problem.
In Latin America, they're adding a feature called at a
home for so for two you can add basically your
access for your account to another household, another geographical location. Basically, yeah,
this is something that again is to change for them
(03:15):
because they used to say past fortaring, there's no problem.
Now they're at the point were the thing. You know what,
we have two d and twenty million subscribers, and it's
harder and harder to increase that number. In fact, it's
been going down. So maybe we could try to get
some these people who aren't paying us to pay for us.
Wall Street likes to hear that because it's a very
cheap way to add subscribers, and also again it makes
more sense they're trying now in Latin America because it's
really just a nudge people saying, hey, you know, you're
(03:36):
getting our stuff for free, and you probably shouldn't do that,
would you like to pay? And you could expect that
to roll out in other countries as well. Totally Yeah,
and then it eventually probably come here the advertising part,
the ads, the ad tier that they're planning on rolling out.
They're saying it should be coming maybe sometime early next year.
But this is a big one, something that it seems
(03:56):
like they haven't fully started on yet. I guess they're
going to rely on a t on Microsoft and a
team that they still have to hire to really handle
all of this, So they could be in for a
rocky rollout for this. Yeah. Yeah, I mean again that
it's a very big deal in one hand for Netflix
to say we're gonna have ads, because Netflix has always
said we don't want to adds. They're bad for the service.
(04:17):
They complicate things. They mean, you have multiple constituencies, insider
just trying to please your customers. You're not trying to
play advertisers. And I was saying forget about that. Actually
turns out we'd like the money from that, and also
it makes it so we can have a cheaper offering
maybe help keep subscribers. So this is something they've embraced grudgingly.
And you can also see how grudgingly it is because
they're not really investing any money up front of this.
(04:37):
They're sort of renting out Microsoft's help for the near
term with the promise that one day they'll figure this
out on their own. It's a little on Netflix ee
for them to sort of come in with a half
baked product and their argument as well, always done this before,
but but we'll see. And to reiterate you, the Netflix
you have now is not going to have ads unless
you want it to happen, unless you're gonna have some
kind of offering it right, They're gonna have some kind
(04:59):
of off ring absess for this much money, you can
have this stuff and adds where you can pay more
and not have ads, so you don't have to have
ads in your Netflix. And so in the near term,
if you have Netflix, nothing will change. But you know
eventually there are going to be compromises that Netflix is
going to have to make one way or other about
stuff that has audience versus stuff that advertisers want versus
stuff that subscribers want. IM don't have to balance all
(05:20):
of that. And well, one last interesting thing too, because
you had recently written about how Netflix is having a
hard time hanging onto some of its new and subscribers
leaving early. So you opened it up and got a
lot of comments on this, and and you know, the
comments really range, but a lot of people just open about, hey,
you know, I just dripped around from service to service
when I'm getting the content that I want. Some people
(05:41):
were saying that they're not happy with the programming that
Netflix is offering up. So there's a big range of
reasons why people are just coming in and then leaving
right away. I mean, the thing that is universally true,
and you know, the people who write to you have
different motivations for writing you, But one thing that is
true for Netflix and everyone else is that, and this
is a good thing for consumers and bad for the companies,
(06:02):
is that it's much much easier to turn off your subscription.
If you ever had an A O L dial up
subscription or a cable TV subscription and tried canceling those,
you you know very well how difficult intentionally it used
to be. And now you know, it's basically a couple
of clicks if you're motivated to do it. And more
and more consumers are sort of figuring that out. I
think that's good for consumers. It allows you to sample
(06:24):
shows when you want and how you want um and
it's still an edge case. I don't think it's that
at evil, but it's certainly a problem for Netflix and
for everyone else that it's easy to sign up, and
it's easy to stop signing up, are easy to stop paying?
All right, Well, we'll see how how all of this
continues to develop. Peter Kafka, senior correspondent at Recode and
host of the Recode Media podcast, Thank you very much
(06:45):
for joining us. Thank you. Costco has two recession proof
items at their stores, the one fifty hot dog combo
and their four ninety nine rotisserie chickens. When it comes
to the chicken, Costco is built out its own chicken business,
contracting with farmers to raise their birds, building a feed mill,
(07:05):
a hatchery, and their own slaughter plant. For more on
how Costco uses these chickens just to get you in
the door to buy more stuff, we'll speak to Kenny
Terrella reporter and Vox. So, the typical grocery business like
Costco buys chicken from some of the big meat producers
like Tyson Foods or Pilgrim's pride. But in nineteen Costco
(07:26):
took a really unprecedented move and said, you know, we're
going to cut out the middleman and we're going to
raise our own chickens. So, as you mentioned, they set
up their own seed mill, their own hatchery, their own
slaughter plant, and they also contracted farmers to set up
around five barns in Nebraska and Iowa, each one housing
tens of thousands of chickens for the Costco supply chain.
(07:50):
And you know, that's really help them keep their for
being a rotisserie chicken price, which is quite low. Most
more rotisserie chickens will cost anywhere from six to ten dollars.
And of course that's benefited consumers as inflation has just
been skyrocketing, especially for food over the last year. But
it's also really upset some people who are critical of
(08:12):
industrialized animal farming. And just to give you one example,
one of those people is someone who lives near a
lot of these barns that are raising chickens for Costco.
I spoke with a man by the name of Greg
Lance who lives in Butler County, Nebraska, and he has
about forty eight of these chicken barns within a mile
(08:32):
and a half radius of his home. So there's about
two million chickens being raised for Costco at any given
point near this guy's house, and he says it's really
affected as quality of life. The smell is awful, two
million chickens and all their manure kind of condensed into
one area, but also the smell of you know, dead
decomposing birds. Is around five percent of chickens raised for
(08:55):
meat don't even make it to the slaughterhouse. They die
on the farm or on the way to the waterhouse.
And Greg Lance said that it's really it's really been
affecting him because it just smells awfully. He can't open
his windows they're swarms of flies. So that's just one
example of how a company setting up its own chicken
supply chain and a very condensed geography can affect that
(09:18):
people who live near them, right. I mean, I remember
as a kid growing up on near a freeway on
ramp there, you know, by where I lived, there was
a duck farm there, very small scale, but men you'd
always have to roll up the windows driving by there.
So this is just amplified so much more than that
for Costco you know, they keep that price low for them.
It's a loss leaders what they called in the business.
(09:38):
They're not really making any money on that. What they
make money on is you coming in and buying all
the other stuff that you get. And you know, just
anecdotally me for myself, you know, it's hard to get
in there without spending a minimum like three dollars just
and all the other stuff that you're buying. So for them,
that business model works. As going back to what you're
talking about, some of their practices and everything, thedustry has
(10:00):
at least given Costco some praise for doing some things right.
They do treat their birds a little better when we're
talking about industry standards, right, So it's all kind of
relative there. They help out with that a little bit,
and some of the contracts that they make with their
farmers are a little bit better on average than the
normal farmer would get. Costco, you know, has the size
and the leverage to be able to set some of
(10:22):
its own standards and some of them are slightly better
than industry standards. So, as you mentioned in a Costco slaughter,
in the Costco slaughter plant, they use a slaughter method
that is a little more humane than the typical slaughter plant,
and what that means is that the chickens are stunned
using a kind of gas that renders them on conscious
(10:45):
before they're slaughtered, which you know, reduces some of their suffering.
And also in the chicken industry, most chicken is not
raised by employees of the meat company, say like Tyson
Foods or Pilgrim's Pride, but rob are farmers are contractors,
kind of like an uber driver, and in this contract
system they take on much of the liability of the business.
(11:10):
So they take out loans worth hundreds of thousands or
millions of dollars to build their barns, and some of
them really struggle to pay it off because the margins
in the poultry business are razor thin. And so one
thing that Costco is doing a little differently is their
their contracts are a little more fair. They're paying their
farmers a base rate instead of paying the best farmers
(11:31):
a higher rate the worst farmers a lower rate. Everyone
gets the same amount, and then they award bonuses to
the best farmers. So that's a little different. But by
and large, Costco chicken supply can you look nearly identical
to that of they typhon or poster farms. We know
that Americans love eating their chicken. We eat about seven
(11:52):
point five billion of them every year. The stat I
love the way you put in the article that's about
twenty three birds or every man, woman and child in
the country. Kenny Terrella, reporter at VOX, thank you very
much for joining us, Thanks for having me. Finally for
this week, we'll tell you about the preliminary report about
(12:12):
the shooting at rob Elementary School in Uvality, Texas. The report, unfortunately,
was all bad news and found problems at every level.
Despite their being almost four hundred officers from various agencies,
no one took command in the situation. The school itself
also didn't follow their own safety protocols, and those that
knew the shooter missed several warning signs. For more on
how a lack of leadership and communication delayed a confrontation
(12:35):
with the gunman, will speak to Alicia Caldwell, reporter at
the Wall Street Journal. Report is scathing from top to bottom.
Its body is seventy seven pages of just top to
bottom failures at every level. Did you put out law
enforcement exhibited or were marked with with systemic failures. There
was apparently confusion who was in charge, and it turned
(12:57):
out ultimately that no one sort of took charge, and
in the way things are supposed to happen in this instance,
the Uvaldi School District police chief Pete Aredondo would have
been the one in charge, and in fact he was
the one initially thought to have been in charge. Right,
So the State of Texas, the head of DPS, Stephen McCraw,
has said he made the wrong decision. Pete are Donno
(13:18):
made the wrong decisions in declaring this a barricaded person
situation as opposed to an active shooter. And you can
see throughout the report that again almost four hundred other
law enforcement state, federal, local, many many boarder patrol agents
over a hundred, and I believe about state police officers,
including the vaunted Texas Rangers. None of those folks took control.
(13:40):
And obviously all four hundred or almost four hundred were
not in the school building or in the hallway. A
lot of your listeners have probably seen snippets of video
footage from in the hallway or police body camera footage,
and that a company as a report the bodycam footage
along with hallway footage that was leaked last week to
the Austin American Statesman in k VU television in often
(14:03):
but also the city of You've all, they released many
hours of body camera footage. It again shows confusion, disarray,
a lack of anyone standing up and saying I'm in charge,
though it does appear that in the hallway Chief Aredondo
was in charge. The report, though, the seventy seven report
by the committee finds any number of these other officers
(14:24):
or agencies could have and perhaps should have taken over
from a more experienced department. Right, and you've all the
city police department and just kind of continue on all this, Right,
So the school police chief, Pete Aredondo, he should have
been the incident commander, And a lot of this has
to do with that leadership, the incident commander, who a
lot of law enforcement experts say should have set up
(14:45):
that incident command outside of the school. That way he
could have had clearer communication, really been kind of that
filter of information to relay things to the officers inside
which were just didn't know. Nobody really knew what was
going on. And Pete Arodondo himself said, I just assumed
somebody else outside would have taken command, and really that's
that that whole leadership vacuum is is one of the
(15:06):
saddest things. Now we don't know how much even if
a perfect police response would have changed things inside. They
said that the shooter fired over a hundred rounds in
the within the first three minutes, really before police were
on the scene, so that's really tough to tell. But still,
as you mentioned before, right, it was a barricaded suspect situation,
not an active shooter situation, which would have prompted everybody
(15:27):
to go in sooner. And there's police that are in
that hallway saying should we go in? Are we supposed
to go in? It's just no information, no communication whatsoever
when it seems like it should have been coming from
Pete Erdondo police radios did not work inside that building.
So you can see in the original release of video
footage a lot of these guys are on their cell phones.
(15:49):
But we know, unfortunately, that there were people inside the room,
alive victims. We know a teacher survived. We know one
of the teachers who succumbed to her injuries was texting
and calling her husband, a local police officer, local law enforcement,
telling him she was injured. She was surrounded by injured children.
We have nine one one calls from injured children who
(16:09):
are describing the scene as being surrounded by other injured people.
So we do know that people were survived the initial armplot. Unfortunately,
we don't know and may never know to be clear
and fair to everybody, if someone could have survived their injuries.
But at least two children were not declared deceased until
arriving at hospitals or in ambulances, along with one of
(16:32):
the teachers who died of her injuries. Tragedy is all
around this, and at seventy seven pages of tragedy that
was a little bit on the law enforcement angle of things.
There was also failures at the schools. At the school level,
things that the school system did. They had an active
shooter plan, you know, something for that that they'd have
to use in this, but they had this kind of
(16:53):
history of complacency. It seemed like, I guess there was
nearby alarms that would always go off, so when maybe
they heard this alarm, they were kind of ambivalent to
it a little bit. Some teachers maybe, but they'd constantly
be propping doors open with rocks or other things. There
was a shortage of keys at the school. All of
these things again, right, not to say that a perfect
response would have stopped anything, but it could have slowed
(17:16):
the shooter down initially. I mean, it would have been
harder for him to access some of these school classrooms.
And that was one of those things that they were
just kind of very lax in how they handled all that.
It's sort of a perfect storm of failures or missed opportunities. Right.
The doors didn't lock. The school classroom doors, including one
(17:37):
eleven and one twelve where this took place. One of
the teachers whose classroom that was the surviving teacher, had
put in request, Hey, you've got to fix this lock.
It never got done. I believe the most recent request
for that assistance was around spring break, so several weeks
before this incident. It was pretty well known around the
school campus that some of these locks didn't work or
(17:58):
they were very difficult to lock, to get latched, if
you will. All of that adds up and the complacency. Yes, absolutely,
there's what's called bailouts, right, police chases of suspected folks,
suspected criminal activity related potentially to the border. But you know,
this town is seventy miles east of the Mexican border,
but there's a lot of activity in town of late
There were fifty of these so called bailouts between February
(18:20):
and May, and the report the committee found, as you described,
a complacency. Now, we know from a nine one one
call at the beginning of this incident that a teacher
from the schools inside shouting to kids to get down
and lock in their classroom. She's telling nine one one
that there is an active shooter. So at least teachers
on that side or a teacher on that side of
the building was aware that this was not a bailout,
(18:42):
where it was something more severe that someone was shooting
at them or at the building. But perhaps you know
other teachers on the other side. Right, this is necessarily
spread out campus. It's an elementary school of I believe
three grades. I believe it's three through fiveth and she've
got multiple building and obviously the attacker went into a
single building when into classrooms one eleven and one twelve,
(19:03):
which appears, uncincidentally were his fourth grade classrooms, like he
attended rob elementary school many years ago, and he waved
to that classroom. There's other investigations going on, so we'll
learn more even beyond this. But you're right, just failures
all around. Alicia Caldwell, report at The Wall Street Journal.
Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. That's
(19:26):
it for this weekend. Be sure to check out The
Daily Dive every Monday through Friday. Join us on social
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the Daily Dive and I Heard Radio, or subscribe wherever
you get your podcast. This episode of The Daily Dive
(19:47):
has been engineered by Tony Sorrentina. I'm Oscar Ramirez in
Los Angeles and this was your Daily Dive weekend edition
Welcome to the Daily Dive Weekend edition. I'm Oscar Ramirez,
and every week I explore the top stories making waves
in the news and some that are just playing interesting.
I'll connect you with the journalists and the people who
know the story and bring you news without the noise
so you can make an informed decision. You can catch
a new episode of The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday,
and it's ready when you wake up. On the weekend edition,
(00:27):
I'll be bringing you some of the best stories from
the week. Many of the entertainment industry had been waiting
on numbers from Netflix on how many subscribers they lost
in the last quarter. They lost just under one million
subscribers instead of the two million they had predicted. It
still leaves a lot of questions on what they can
do to stop the people from leaving in droves. To
(00:47):
go over whether this is a Netflix specific issue or
if the entire streaming business has a problem, We'll speak
to Peter Kafka, senior correspondent at RECOD. It's less bad
than they predicted, but it's still not good to lose
a million subscribers. The reality is whether they lost a million,
or two or three they started already baked in the
bad news for Wall Street. What Wall Street and everyone
else wants to figure out, what are you gonna do
(01:07):
about it? And the short answer is not a lot.
I mean, Netflix is gonna make some tweaks and we
can talk about those. But the last three months is
and a lot of folks trip in Hollywood weighing in
on what Netflix ot to too and what they really
want Netflix to two is to act like sort of
everyone else, to stop doing avenge releases of all their
episodes to promote movies and TV shows instead of just
the service to make better stuff and put it in theaters.
(01:30):
And essentially Netflix is saying, no, we're we think we're
doing it right. We just need to tweak some stuff
along the edges. Now they may not be either accepting
reality or they may just not want to come out
and say what they're doing. But if you're looking for
Netflix to make huge wholesale changes, at least for right now,
they're saying they're not going to there. They're making some
tweaks and we can talk about the Yeah, and so
(01:50):
we get did get some answers to some questions. There's
a lot of questions still left over when it comes
to content specifically, right you You mentioned that there was
a criticism of putting out too much stuff, a lot
of people really not liking a lot of it. They
did say that they're going to kind of cap almost
what they're going to be spending on content to about
seventeen billion dollars. They said that's going to be the
number we're gonna stick with for a few years at least.
(02:13):
That is a meaningful announcement from them. It's both probably
something they wanted to do. It's also very much assigned
to Wall Street saying, you know how we've had more
viewers every year, made more revenue, and then spend more
on on content. Well, now we're at the point where
we don't need to spend more on content, or we're
not going to spend more on content. Seventeen billion dollars
is still a lot of money. You can find all
kinds of stuff with that, but they're not going to
(02:33):
keep bumping that number up and up and up. And
you can call that being choosier or more efficient or
more thoughtful about the way they're spending. But that's sort
of a reality that I think people expected to show
up sooner than later announced here. Password sharing is an
interesting one that they're trying to get a handle on.
They think that there's more than a hundred million households
using a Netflix account without paying for it. Obviously, this
(02:54):
would go huge for losing all the subscribers there, and
they're experimenting with what to do to control that problem.
In Latin America, they're adding a feature called at a
home for so for two you can add basically your
access for your account to another household, another geographical location. Basically, yeah,
this is something that again is to change for them
(03:15):
because they used to say past fortaring, there's no problem.
Now they're at the point were the thing. You know what,
we have two d and twenty million subscribers, and it's
harder and harder to increase that number. In fact, it's
been going down. So maybe we could try to get
some these people who aren't paying us to pay for us.
Wall Street likes to hear that because it's a very
cheap way to add subscribers, and also again it makes
more sense they're trying now in Latin America because it's
really just a nudge people saying, hey, you know, you're
(03:36):
getting our stuff for free, and you probably shouldn't do that,
would you like to pay? And you could expect that
to roll out in other countries as well. Totally Yeah,
and then it eventually probably come here the advertising part,
the ads, the ad tier that they're planning on rolling out.
They're saying it should be coming maybe sometime early next year.
But this is a big one, something that it seems
(03:56):
like they haven't fully started on yet. I guess they're
going to rely on a t on Microsoft and a
team that they still have to hire to really handle
all of this, So they could be in for a
rocky rollout for this. Yeah. Yeah, I mean again that
it's a very big deal in one hand for Netflix
to say we're gonna have ads, because Netflix has always
said we don't want to adds. They're bad for the service.
(04:17):
They complicate things. They mean, you have multiple constituencies, insider
just trying to please your customers. You're not trying to
play advertisers. And I was saying forget about that. Actually
turns out we'd like the money from that, and also
it makes it so we can have a cheaper offering
maybe help keep subscribers. So this is something they've embraced grudgingly.
And you can also see how grudgingly it is because
they're not really investing any money up front of this.
(04:37):
They're sort of renting out Microsoft's help for the near
term with the promise that one day they'll figure this
out on their own. It's a little on Netflix ee
for them to sort of come in with a half
baked product and their argument as well, always done this before,
but but we'll see. And to reiterate you, the Netflix
you have now is not going to have ads unless
you want it to happen, unless you're gonna have some
kind of offering it right, They're gonna have some kind
(04:59):
of off ring absess for this much money, you can
have this stuff and adds where you can pay more
and not have ads, so you don't have to have
ads in your Netflix. And so in the near term,
if you have Netflix, nothing will change. But you know
eventually there are going to be compromises that Netflix is
going to have to make one way or other about
stuff that has audience versus stuff that advertisers want versus
stuff that subscribers want. IM don't have to balance all
(05:20):
of that. And well, one last interesting thing too, because
you had recently written about how Netflix is having a
hard time hanging onto some of its new and subscribers
leaving early. So you opened it up and got a
lot of comments on this, and and you know, the
comments really range, but a lot of people just open about, hey,
you know, I just dripped around from service to service
when I'm getting the content that I want. Some people
(05:41):
were saying that they're not happy with the programming that
Netflix is offering up. So there's a big range of
reasons why people are just coming in and then leaving
right away. I mean, the thing that is universally true,
and you know, the people who write to you have
different motivations for writing you, But one thing that is
true for Netflix and everyone else is that, and this
is a good thing for consumers and bad for the companies,
(06:02):
is that it's much much easier to turn off your subscription.
If you ever had an A O L dial up
subscription or a cable TV subscription and tried canceling those,
you you know very well how difficult intentionally it used
to be. And now you know, it's basically a couple
of clicks if you're motivated to do it. And more
and more consumers are sort of figuring that out. I
think that's good for consumers. It allows you to sample
(06:24):
shows when you want and how you want um and
it's still an edge case. I don't think it's that
at evil, but it's certainly a problem for Netflix and
for everyone else that it's easy to sign up, and
it's easy to stop signing up, are easy to stop paying?
All right, Well, we'll see how how all of this
continues to develop. Peter Kafka, senior correspondent at Recode and
host of the Recode Media podcast, Thank you very much
(06:45):
for joining us. Thank you. Costco has two recession proof
items at their stores, the one fifty hot dog combo
and their four ninety nine rotisserie chickens. When it comes
to the chicken, Costco is built out its own chicken business,
contracting with farmers to raise their birds, building a feed mill,
(07:05):
a hatchery, and their own slaughter plant. For more on
how Costco uses these chickens just to get you in
the door to buy more stuff, we'll speak to Kenny
Terrella reporter and Vox. So, the typical grocery business like
Costco buys chicken from some of the big meat producers
like Tyson Foods or Pilgrim's pride. But in nineteen Costco
(07:26):
took a really unprecedented move and said, you know, we're
going to cut out the middleman and we're going to
raise our own chickens. So, as you mentioned, they set
up their own seed mill, their own hatchery, their own
slaughter plant, and they also contracted farmers to set up
around five barns in Nebraska and Iowa, each one housing
tens of thousands of chickens for the Costco supply chain.
(07:50):
And you know, that's really help them keep their for
being a rotisserie chicken price, which is quite low. Most
more rotisserie chickens will cost anywhere from six to ten dollars.
And of course that's benefited consumers as inflation has just
been skyrocketing, especially for food over the last year. But
it's also really upset some people who are critical of
(08:12):
industrialized animal farming. And just to give you one example,
one of those people is someone who lives near a
lot of these barns that are raising chickens for Costco.
I spoke with a man by the name of Greg
Lance who lives in Butler County, Nebraska, and he has
about forty eight of these chicken barns within a mile
(08:32):
and a half radius of his home. So there's about
two million chickens being raised for Costco at any given
point near this guy's house, and he says it's really
affected as quality of life. The smell is awful, two
million chickens and all their manure kind of condensed into
one area, but also the smell of you know, dead
decomposing birds. Is around five percent of chickens raised for
(08:55):
meat don't even make it to the slaughterhouse. They die
on the farm or on the way to the waterhouse.
And Greg Lance said that it's really it's really been
affecting him because it just smells awfully. He can't open
his windows they're swarms of flies. So that's just one
example of how a company setting up its own chicken
supply chain and a very condensed geography can affect that
(09:18):
people who live near them, right. I mean, I remember
as a kid growing up on near a freeway on
ramp there, you know, by where I lived, there was
a duck farm there, very small scale, but men you'd
always have to roll up the windows driving by there.
So this is just amplified so much more than that
for Costco you know, they keep that price low for them.
It's a loss leaders what they called in the business.
(09:38):
They're not really making any money on that. What they
make money on is you coming in and buying all
the other stuff that you get. And you know, just
anecdotally me for myself, you know, it's hard to get
in there without spending a minimum like three dollars just
and all the other stuff that you're buying. So for them,
that business model works. As going back to what you're
talking about, some of their practices and everything, thedustry has
(10:00):
at least given Costco some praise for doing some things right.
They do treat their birds a little better when we're
talking about industry standards, right, So it's all kind of
relative there. They help out with that a little bit,
and some of the contracts that they make with their
farmers are a little bit better on average than the
normal farmer would get. Costco, you know, has the size
and the leverage to be able to set some of
(10:22):
its own standards and some of them are slightly better
than industry standards. So, as you mentioned in a Costco slaughter,
in the Costco slaughter plant, they use a slaughter method
that is a little more humane than the typical slaughter plant,
and what that means is that the chickens are stunned
using a kind of gas that renders them on conscious
(10:45):
before they're slaughtered, which you know, reduces some of their suffering.
And also in the chicken industry, most chicken is not
raised by employees of the meat company, say like Tyson
Foods or Pilgrim's Pride, but rob are farmers are contractors,
kind of like an uber driver, and in this contract
system they take on much of the liability of the business.
(11:10):
So they take out loans worth hundreds of thousands or
millions of dollars to build their barns, and some of
them really struggle to pay it off because the margins
in the poultry business are razor thin. And so one
thing that Costco is doing a little differently is their
their contracts are a little more fair. They're paying their
farmers a base rate instead of paying the best farmers
(11:31):
a higher rate the worst farmers a lower rate. Everyone
gets the same amount, and then they award bonuses to
the best farmers. So that's a little different. But by
and large, Costco chicken supply can you look nearly identical
to that of they typhon or poster farms. We know
that Americans love eating their chicken. We eat about seven
(11:52):
point five billion of them every year. The stat I
love the way you put in the article that's about
twenty three birds or every man, woman and child in
the country. Kenny Terrella, reporter at VOX, thank you very
much for joining us, Thanks for having me. Finally for
this week, we'll tell you about the preliminary report about
(12:12):
the shooting at rob Elementary School in Uvality, Texas. The report, unfortunately,
was all bad news and found problems at every level.
Despite their being almost four hundred officers from various agencies,
no one took command in the situation. The school itself
also didn't follow their own safety protocols, and those that
knew the shooter missed several warning signs. For more on
how a lack of leadership and communication delayed a confrontation
(12:35):
with the gunman, will speak to Alicia Caldwell, reporter at
the Wall Street Journal. Report is scathing from top to bottom.
Its body is seventy seven pages of just top to
bottom failures at every level. Did you put out law
enforcement exhibited or were marked with with systemic failures. There
was apparently confusion who was in charge, and it turned
(12:57):
out ultimately that no one sort of took charge, and
in the way things are supposed to happen in this instance,
the Uvaldi School District police chief Pete Aredondo would have
been the one in charge, and in fact he was
the one initially thought to have been in charge. Right,
So the State of Texas, the head of DPS, Stephen McCraw,
has said he made the wrong decision. Pete are Donno
(13:18):
made the wrong decisions in declaring this a barricaded person
situation as opposed to an active shooter. And you can
see throughout the report that again almost four hundred other
law enforcement state, federal, local, many many boarder patrol agents
over a hundred, and I believe about state police officers,
including the vaunted Texas Rangers. None of those folks took control.
(13:40):
And obviously all four hundred or almost four hundred were
not in the school building or in the hallway. A
lot of your listeners have probably seen snippets of video
footage from in the hallway or police body camera footage,
and that a company as a report the bodycam footage
along with hallway footage that was leaked last week to
the Austin American Statesman in k VU television in often
(14:03):
but also the city of You've all, they released many
hours of body camera footage. It again shows confusion, disarray,
a lack of anyone standing up and saying I'm in charge,
though it does appear that in the hallway Chief Aredondo
was in charge. The report, though, the seventy seven report
by the committee finds any number of these other officers
(14:24):
or agencies could have and perhaps should have taken over
from a more experienced department. Right, and you've all the
city police department and just kind of continue on all this, Right,
So the school police chief, Pete Aredondo, he should have
been the incident commander, And a lot of this has
to do with that leadership, the incident commander, who a
lot of law enforcement experts say should have set up
(14:45):
that incident command outside of the school. That way he
could have had clearer communication, really been kind of that
filter of information to relay things to the officers inside
which were just didn't know. Nobody really knew what was
going on. And Pete Arodondo himself said, I just assumed
somebody else outside would have taken command, and really that's
that that whole leadership vacuum is is one of the
(15:06):
saddest things. Now we don't know how much even if
a perfect police response would have changed things inside. They
said that the shooter fired over a hundred rounds in
the within the first three minutes, really before police were
on the scene, so that's really tough to tell. But still,
as you mentioned before, right, it was a barricaded suspect situation,
not an active shooter situation, which would have prompted everybody
(15:27):
to go in sooner. And there's police that are in
that hallway saying should we go in? Are we supposed
to go in? It's just no information, no communication whatsoever
when it seems like it should have been coming from
Pete Erdondo police radios did not work inside that building.
So you can see in the original release of video
footage a lot of these guys are on their cell phones.
(15:49):
But we know, unfortunately, that there were people inside the room,
alive victims. We know a teacher survived. We know one
of the teachers who succumbed to her injuries was texting
and calling her husband, a local police officer, local law enforcement,
telling him she was injured. She was surrounded by injured children.
We have nine one one calls from injured children who
(16:09):
are describing the scene as being surrounded by other injured people.
So we do know that people were survived the initial armplot. Unfortunately,
we don't know and may never know to be clear
and fair to everybody, if someone could have survived their injuries.
But at least two children were not declared deceased until
arriving at hospitals or in ambulances, along with one of
(16:32):
the teachers who died of her injuries. Tragedy is all
around this, and at seventy seven pages of tragedy that
was a little bit on the law enforcement angle of things.
There was also failures at the schools. At the school level,
things that the school system did. They had an active
shooter plan, you know, something for that that they'd have
to use in this, but they had this kind of
(16:53):
history of complacency. It seemed like, I guess there was
nearby alarms that would always go off, so when maybe
they heard this alarm, they were kind of ambivalent to
it a little bit. Some teachers maybe, but they'd constantly
be propping doors open with rocks or other things. There
was a shortage of keys at the school. All of
these things again, right, not to say that a perfect
response would have stopped anything, but it could have slowed
(17:16):
the shooter down initially. I mean, it would have been
harder for him to access some of these school classrooms.
And that was one of those things that they were
just kind of very lax in how they handled all that.
It's sort of a perfect storm of failures or missed opportunities. Right.
The doors didn't lock. The school classroom doors, including one
(17:37):
eleven and one twelve where this took place. One of
the teachers whose classroom that was the surviving teacher, had
put in request, Hey, you've got to fix this lock.
It never got done. I believe the most recent request
for that assistance was around spring break, so several weeks
before this incident. It was pretty well known around the
school campus that some of these locks didn't work or
(17:58):
they were very difficult to lock, to get latched, if
you will. All of that adds up and the complacency. Yes, absolutely,
there's what's called bailouts, right, police chases of suspected folks,
suspected criminal activity related potentially to the border. But you know,
this town is seventy miles east of the Mexican border,
but there's a lot of activity in town of late
There were fifty of these so called bailouts between February
(18:20):
and May, and the report the committee found, as you described,
a complacency. Now, we know from a nine one one
call at the beginning of this incident that a teacher
from the schools inside shouting to kids to get down
and lock in their classroom. She's telling nine one one
that there is an active shooter. So at least teachers
on that side or a teacher on that side of
the building was aware that this was not a bailout,
(18:42):
where it was something more severe that someone was shooting
at them or at the building. But perhaps you know
other teachers on the other side. Right, this is necessarily
spread out campus. It's an elementary school of I believe
three grades. I believe it's three through fiveth and she've
got multiple building and obviously the attacker went into a
single building when into classrooms one eleven and one twelve,
(19:03):
which appears, uncincidentally were his fourth grade classrooms, like he
attended rob elementary school many years ago, and he waved
to that classroom. There's other investigations going on, so we'll
learn more even beyond this. But you're right, just failures
all around. Alicia Caldwell, report at The Wall Street Journal.
Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. That's
(19:26):
it for this weekend. Be sure to check out The
Daily Dive every Monday through Friday. Join us on social
media at Daily Dive Pod on Twitter and Daily Dive
Podcast on Facebook. Leave us a comment, give us a rating,
and tell us the stories that you're interested in. Although
the Daily Dive and I Heard Radio, or subscribe wherever
you get your podcast. This episode of The Daily Dive
(19:47):
has been engineered by Tony Sorrentina. I'm Oscar Ramirez in
Los Angeles and this was your Daily Dive weekend edition
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