KPBS Anchor Maya Trabulsi and BottomLine Marketing co-founder and SDSU marketing lecturer Miro Copic discuss some of the week’s top business stories.
Q: We started Black Friday a little bit later than usual this year and that kind of condensed our shopping time. It's going to be a big weekend for local businesses. Tell us about the outlook.
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A: Well this Saturday is Super Saturday. It's one of the top five busiest shopping days of the year. About two-thirds of consumers are going to be out shopping or shopping online. Retailers kept discounts moderate at the beginning of the season at 25-to-30-percent. But right now retailers are looking to close out their quarter. They're really increasing those discounts. And in fact, one in seven consumers haven't even started shopping yet. So they're kind of waiting until the last minute and they're hoping those discounts will be greater.
Q: A boost for cross-border business this week. The San Ysidro Port of Entry is the busiest in the Western Hemisphere. How will the expansion help business, both on the U.S. and Mexico side?
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A: This is a 10-year $740 million investment that really expands this busiest port of entry. There was also a companion project for the Otay Mesa Port of Entry. But what this has done is it opened up eight new lanes. There are 64 inspection stations and 34 lanes. It's going to make it much easier to go both northbound and southbound for tourists, for workers, and for commercial trucks. A lot of companies that were waiting to see what was going to happen with the U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement now are actually starting to invest in operations on both sides of the border. So hopefully we'll see even greater commerce in 2020.
Q: Congress passed a budget before leaving D.C. this week. It doesn't include more incentives for things like solar and electric vehicles. How is that going to affect southern California, where the priority is renewable energy?
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A: So if you're going to get solar on your house you've got to do it and you should do it very quickly. The other part was there was no extension in the cap on electric vehicles. A manufacturer gets capped at 200,000 electric or plug-in vehicles. Once they exceed that, the tax credits decline for the following year and then they expire altogether.
So for example, a company like Tesla crossed that threshold last year. Right now the tax credits are going to be about a quarter of the tax credits that you can have, about $7,500 dollars per car. Now it's only $2,000 per car. And after the first of the year, if you buy a Tesla, you're not going to get a tax credit. You could buy another hybrid vehicle or electric vehicle and get a tax credit. The auto manufacturers were pushing to increase that cap from 200,000 vehicles to 600,000 vehicles, and that might again happen in 2020.
The third thing is storage. Storage is going to be one of those most important things that help us be energy self-sufficient. It will help harness that wind and solar power in particular. So when the sun is not shining at night, we can store that energy and use it in the evening and use it inexpensively. The industry was looking for a tax regime. What were the tax credits going to be? It was just ignored by Congress. And now the only way you can get a credit for storage is if you pair it with solar. So this this year is going to be a little bit lean in the solar space even though we have very aggressive goals as a state.
