Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at what a slowdown in hiring may mean for the city’s economy. We’ll also get details on why former Gov. David Paterson, who endorsed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for mayor, has now endorsed Mayor Eric Adams.
Only 956: That was how many private-sector jobs New York City gained in the first half of 2025 — 65,000 fewer than companies in the city hired in the same period last year. The upshot? “It’s clearly something to be worried about,” said James Parrott, a senior fellow at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs. The next six months “will give us a better idea of what’s going on,” including whether the economy is sliding into recession and whether President Trump’s tariff policy “settles down to where businesses can realistically plan.” We’ll come back to the tariffs — and what they have to do with 99-cent tea in a can — in a moment. The job figures for New York signaled the slowest growth in payrolls outside of a recession in decades, and well below the forecast that the city’s Independent Budget Office issued only three months ago. It said then that the city would gain only 31,900 jobs this year, far fewer than the roughly 100,000 that were created annually in the years before the pandemic. My colleague Matthew Haag writes that the city’s labor market set records last year in total employment (as well as bonuses for Wall Street employees). Now some economists say that as New York goes, so goes the nation. “New York is a leading indicator,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s analytics, told Matthew, “and the flattening of employment is now showing up nationally.” Inflation, too, is a concern. New York matched the national rate in June, at 3.1 percent on a year-over-year basis. But housing outpaced that rate, with rent up 4.7 percent since July 2024. Parrott said that the rise underscored why affordability was “probably the No. 1 thing on people’s minds,” as Election Day approaches and Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, promises to make the city more affordable. New York did show declines in some categories in the inflation report from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Prices for clothing, which often go down in July, fell 1.3 percent from June. Medical care was also less expensive after sliding 0.6 percent from June. But food was more expensive, with fruits and vegetables climbing 1.8 percent from June, the most of any category. Meat, poultry and eggs cost 1 percent more in July than in June. Gasoline was up 0.4 percent from June. Nationally, the July inflation data suggested that businesses were passing along tariff-related costs to customers. But some businesses are still undecided about whether to do so. That’s where tea comes in — specifically, AriZona Iced Tea, which is made by a company from Long Island that has a factory in New Jersey. A tallboy of AriZona Iced Tea has been priced at 99 cents since 1997. It would cost $1.99 if the price had kept up with inflation. But the company has made its just-under-a-dollar price a part of its identity, so much so that AriZona puts the price right on the can, to the chagrin of some retailers, which cannot mark it up themselves. But the Trump tariffs may doom the 99-cent tallboy. The reason is not the tea but the can. AriZona uses more than 100 million pounds of aluminum a year for cans. Roughly 80 percent comes from recycled material produced in the United States. The other 20 percent is imported from Canada. “Our price has been dramatically bumped up because of this tariff talk,” Don Vultaggio, the founder and chairman of AriZona Iced Tea, told my colleague Remy Tumin. Vultaggio added that he expected the few domestic aluminum manufacturers to raise their prices too. Vultaggio, 73, has been in the beverage business since high school, when he got a job at a brewery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. By the early 1990s, he was in the iced tea business. At the time, the Soviet Union was the leading supplier of aluminum. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and aluminum prices went up. AriZona raised the price of a can of ice tea above $1. Sales took a hit and, as aluminum prices eased, Vultaggio introduced the 99-cent tallboy. By 2000, sales were up 30 percent. Now AriZona sells about two billion cans annually, roughly half of which are tallboys. The company said it had “adjusted prices where absolutely necessary” on its other products. But not the iced tea. Vultaggio said that “at some point the consumer is going to have to pay the price” for the tariffs on aluminum. “I hate even the thought of it,” he said. WEATHER Today will be mostly cloudy with temperatures nearing 87 and a chance of showers and thunderstorms. Tonight, rain and cloudy conditions are expected to continue with a low near 74. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Friday (Feast of the Assumption). The latest New York news
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Ex-governor switches back to Eric Adams
Former Gov. David Paterson endorsed his successor, Andrew Cuomo, in the Democratic primary for mayor in June. Now Paterson is endorsing the underdog incumbent, Mayor Eric Adams. Paterson told my colleague Nicholas Fandos that Adams had been there for him when it counted and that he would be there for Adams. This, despite the fact that Paterson sounded skeptical of Adams’s chances of winning in November after a federal corruption indictment and accusations that the mayor had conspired with the Trump administration to have the charges dismissed. “There are certain times when, you know what, it’s a friend, you’re not hurting anyone by endorsing him,” Mr. Paterson said. “He’s the candidate who I think, if he did win, would run the city the best.” He added that Adams “almost dropped the phone when I told him that about a week ago.” Paterson, the state’s first Black governor, could help persuade other Democratic leaders and some voters to give Adams, the city’s second Black mayor, another look. But polls suggest that most voters are tuning out the mayor. Paterson’s support for Adams had not been a given. Though he backed the mayor four years ago, Paterson was initially hired as the chief campaign strategist for Jim Walden, another independent candidate. Paterson then endorsed Cuomo, who lost to Zohran Mamdani in the primary. Adams skipped that race and is now running as an independent. METROPOLITAN DIARY Random shovel
Dear Diary: I stopped at a supermarket in the Bronx to pick up one item — refried beans for making nachos. In the canned food aisle, I saw a random shovel. No price, no idea where it came from, but I liked the shape for garden work, so I grabbed it and took it with me to the checkout. I asked the young woman behind the register to check the price before she rang it up. She looked at me and grinned. “Do you have a body in your car that you’re going to bury?” she said. I looked at her with a very serious expression on my face. “That’s amateur hour,” I said. “Everybody knows that the body is the last thing you put in the car before you bury it.” At $5.99, the shovel was quite a bargain. — David Handschuh Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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