A touch of Trump in every phone call
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A touch of Trump in every phone call.

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. The Trump Organization, the president's family business, is getting into mobile phones. The company is promising a new wireless service called Trump Mobile and releasing a new smartphone called the T1 set for about $500.

The Trump Organization says the phone will be made in the U.S. and available starting in August, but industry experts are skeptical as to whether that is even possible. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes reports. No major phone manufacturer has built its devices in the U.S. for at least a decade. That's according to Roger Entner with Recon Analytics. We have made smartphones when we were still in the 2G and maybe in the 3G era. So like today's phones, super great-grandparents.

He says phone manufacturers left because it was cheaper to make devices in Asia. And now there's little infrastructure left here. You don't have the machines. You don't have the employees that can do it. You don't have the supply chain. According to a Trump mobile spokesperson, its new phone is going to be made in Alabama, California and Florida. Look, I think Trump's trying to seize the momentum and build in the U.S.,

Dan Ives is global head of tech research for Wedbush. But he says this only works for a limited number of phones. This is something that could be done at a very, very small scale. And that's probably what they're aiming for. But anything above 20, 30, 40,000 will be very, very difficult for them to actually make in the U.S.

He says to really build out and manufacture the kinds of phones consumers want here at a large scale. For it to even get off the ground would take a long time and significant amount of dollars to put in before they start any sort of profit. He calls it a non-starter. I'm Stephanie Hughes for Marketplace.

Trump's competition has put out a news release congratulating the president on his new phone venture. Patriot Mobile calls itself a trailblazer in the red economy. In a statement, Patriot Mobile's CEO said, quote, Our mission remains as strong as ever. We remain the only wireless provider that is both Christian and conservative. God is at the helm of our business, and we pray for the Trump organization's success.

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Now to our series on jobs off the beaten path. Today we meet Yonrin Jung, a sneaker entrepreneur. It's the secondary market, which started as a small project to resell shoes, has now opened multiple brick-and-mortar stores in Tennessee and Kentucky.

Hi, my name is Yonrim, but I go by Z. I am a full-time sneaker reseller. I personally own 600 to 700 pairs of sneakers. I think I have lost count at this point. I would say in the day, there's probably two or three hours on a normal day that I'm surrounded by shoes, as always. One of my main goal when I first started reselling sneakers was just to get my own pair for free.

And I soon realized that, oh, this is actually a little easier than I thought. So at some point, I stopped caring about my personal pair. And then we kind of snowballed all the profits together just to have more capital to go buy more sneakers. Growing up in a immigrant family, my mom has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. And one of the things that she did was

when we got here in America in the early 2000s was that she saw opportunity to buy and flip iPads. So that's a little bit of how I got my entrepreneurship started by just watching and learning from her. And then when I started taking this sneaker resale business a little bit more seriously, she actually gave me $2,000 as startup capital. ♪ Walk through ♪

After a short stint in Mississippi, we moved to Memphis, Tennessee. That's when I really fell in love with, you know, the basketball culture as well as the sneaker culture. And then we moved to Louisville, Kentucky, and I really grew up there. And I think just being an outsider for the first part of my life and looking at everything going on in the United States, you know, what the kids are wearing, becoming fascinated by that. And then that really let me have a different vantage point than a lot of kids maybe that grew up in America. ♪

When Kobe Bryant passed away, there was a huge stir in the community because LeBron James wanted to find a size 18 Kobe to wear on the first day back. Pretty much a ton of resellers all got the same contact information to say, hey, do you have any size 18 Kobe's in stock?

and the game is tomorrow night. So you had to get on a plane to fly to LA to drop the shoes off LeBron. And I was in Miami at the time for the Super Bowl. So I was like, oh man, I don't, you know, I can't even do anything. But just the idea of it, it's like, wow, it's like, you know, somebody's reaching out to ask me for some shoes for LeBron.

When you have a lot of high profile clients hit you up to looking for a shoe and there maybe is a time crunch or something like that. So be able to

reach out and make something happen, learning how to say yes instead of no's. That was one of the biggest things I think I learned. And to just be able to, you know, step outside of just, hey, this is just a sneaker store, but it allowed me to go backstage with some artists to have the opportunity to go meet some of my favorite, you know, basketball players. So Penny Harway, he's one of my favorite basketball players, had a chance to meet him through sneakers and actually get a pair of the Nike Penny shoes signed by him in person.

I saw Michael Jordan twice in person, you know, just stuff like that. I think that, you know, the 18 year old me probably wouldn't believe. At Z talking there, Yonron Jung, his sneaker stores in Nashville and Louisville are called 23 penny. Have you worked a niche job or heard of an odd job? You want to learn more about odd as in unusual, pop us an email morning report at marketplace.org. Now,

Now, our producers are James Graham, Linda Walker, Courtney Bergseger, Ariana Rosas, and Erica Soderstrom. Our senior producer is Alex Schroeder. Our supervisory senior producer is Meredith Gerritsen-Morby. In Los Angeles, I'm David Brancaccio. It's the Marketplace Morning Report from APM American Public Media.

This Old House has been America's most trusted source for all things DIY and home improvement for decades. And now we're on the radio and on demand. I think you're breaking into this wall regardless. I was hoping you wouldn't say that. I need to go and get some whiskey, I think. I would get the whiskey for sure. Subscribe to This Old House Radio Hour from LAist Studios, wherever you get your podcasts.