Pod Insights Planet Money How bodegas led to the Yemeni coffeehouse explosion About this episode There is a long-standing tradition of different immigrant groups arriving in the U. S. and specializing in one particular type of business. Think, nail salons run by people from Vietnam or Gujarati Indians owning motels and hotels.
Yemenis are another immigrant community that has largely clustered around one industry, in their case, bodegas and small grocery stores. There are thousands of these shops all over the country, despite Yemeni-Americans only making up around one-fortieth of one percent of the U. S. population, according to the last census.
In the past 9 years, a new business success story has been built on top of that foundation: Yemeni coffee houses.
Today on the show, why some immigrant groups concentrate in a single industry, while others spread out to work in all sorts of jobs. And what it’s like for the next generation to try to expand on their parents’ success.
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0:25 Speaker 01 This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:31 Speaker 01 The other day, we invited an entrepreneur named Hakim Sulaimani to come into our studios.
0:36 Speaker 02 Hello, can you hear me? Is that OK? Mic check?
0:38 Speaker 03 We wanted to talk to him about a new trend that we had noticed in the world of coffee.
0:43 Speaker 01 Now, I did offer him tea or coffee before we went into the studio. Hakim politely declined both. He showed me his travel mug.
0:51 Speaker 02 Always stay prepared, you know? You never know when you might run into a Keurig machine at an office.
0:56 Speaker 01 Ours isn't even that. So you basically brought your own coffee because you thought our coffee would be bad?
1:01 Speaker 02 No, no. I keep coffee with me more than I keep my phone with me. Like, when I leave my house, it's mug, keys, wallet. It's never phone, wallet, keys.
1:11 Speaker 01 How many cups of coffee are you drinking a day?
1:13 Speaker 02 I think like six, seven, maybe eight.
1:16 Speaker 01 How are you this chill and also on six cups of coffee?
1:19 Speaker 02 And super caffeinated? I think it stops affecting you after a while. Yeah, I think the caffeine just gives up.
1:26 Speaker 03 Amanda, I actually think that is scientifically what happens. The caffeine just gives up.
1:31 Speaker 01 I do not think that is possible. But anyway, the reason we asked Hakim to come to our offices was not to reject our coffee, but to help us understand this thing that we had been noticing. A bunch of new Yemeni coffee houses opening all over the country.
1:48 Speaker 03 And if you've never been to one, a lot of these Yemeni coffee houses, they stay open really late. They sell fancy snacks, like this honeycomb pastry with cheese inside. Delicious. And you can usually buy a pot of coffee and sit there for hours. Hakim opened one of the first. It's called Yafa Cafe in Brooklyn back in 2019. But now Yemeni coffee houses are all over the country.
2:10 Speaker 01 How did this happen so fast?
2:11 Speaker 02 I think it's the demand for it. People saw a genuine demand for late night eating and drinking. And Yemenis were in a good place to kind of pick that up because of their role in coffee historically.
2:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, Yemen is considered one of the birthplaces of the coffee trade.
2:31 Speaker 01 And in the past nine years, a couple hundred Yemeni coffee houses have opened up. A lot of these are big chains with names like Kawah House and Haraz Coffee House.
2:40 Speaker 03 One of the original ideas was to create a kind of third space for the growing Muslim and Arab American population in the United States.
2:48 Speaker 02 They want a place that they can sit, that's family friendly, a place that doesn't feel like, oh, I have to get a drink here, or there's a bunch of drunk rowdy people here. I can't bring my kid. Or I'm a mom and I just want to hang out with other moms. And they've never had a place before like this.
3:06 Speaker 01 Yemeni coffee houses have also become popular near colleges. And yeah, they're playing the role that Starbucks once did.
3:12 Speaker 03 And Yemeni Americans do have a long history of entrepreneurship in the US. But for decades, they largely concentrated in a different kind of business. The corner store, the deli, you know, the neighborhood bodega, which is kind of where Hakim grew up, watching his father at work.
3:28 Speaker 02 When we first came to this country, he was working like 12, 15-hour workdays.
3:35 Speaker 02 And yeah, the only times we got to see him is if we begged him, hey, can you take us to the deli with you today? And we'd hang out and he'd let us behind the register, let us run around and hang out with the bodega cat.
3:46 Speaker 01 Hakim, and maybe the cat too, think that the success of the Yemeni coffee house is being built on his community's years of experience running all those bodegas. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Amanda Aronchik.
3:58 Speaker 03 And I'm Jeff Quill. What's happening with the Yemeni coffee houses is the latest twist on a longstanding tradition of different immigrant communities arriving in the US and specializing in one particular type of business.
4:11 Speaker 01 Think like nail salons run by people from Vietnam or immigrants from this one part of India owning motels and hotels. Or going further back, diners run by Greek immigrants.
4:21 Speaker 03 Today on the show, how this surge in new Yemeni coffee houses fits into that story. How a new generation can take their parents' playbook and make it their own.
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5:40 Speaker 03 The first of the two coffee shops Hakim owns is in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood called Sunset Park.
5:46 Speaker 01 This is your cafe.
5:47 Speaker 02 This is my shop. That's right.
5:48 Speaker 01 Nice. Good job.
5:51 Speaker 02 Appreciate it.
5:52 Speaker 01 The block where his cafe is located kind of tells the whole story of his family's entrepreneurial history. So picture this. There's the coffee shop, Yafa Cafe, which opened in 2019. And then just three doors down at the corner is Yafa Deli, which is his dad's store since 1995. And both are right by the subway.
6:11 Speaker 02 We have both entries of the train. If you see that, yeah.
6:15 Speaker 01 You do?
6:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, we got that end and this end. So it doesn't matter where you come out from, you're going to see Yafa.
6:21 Speaker 03 And in fact, if you come out of the subway on the other side of the street, there's another Yemeni bodega run by Hakim's uncle. That one is their family's original store, which they've been running since 1993.
6:32 Speaker 01 Now Hakim, he sells a spiced cold brew for $6 and a cardamom brown sugar latte for $7. His father also sells coffee at his bodega, but it is nowhere near as fancy or as expensive.
6:46 Speaker 02 He still thinks he's the best barista, even though he only dabbles in drip. He'll still tell me, like, I make the best coffee. That's why my customers have been coming to me for 30 years. All he does is mix in some sugar and milk. But I think he just has a magic touch, you know? I can't, he does make a good cup of coffee.
7:05 Speaker 01 Hakim and I head over to the store to find his dad.
7:07 Speaker 04 Hello.
7:08 Speaker 02 Hello.
7:09 Speaker 04 How you doing?
7:09 Speaker 02 I thought you were across the street today.
7:11 Speaker 01 To get the story-- that's the man of the hour-- of how he started working in the bodega business.
7:17 Speaker 04 What, an interview on Behind the Counter?
7:20 Speaker 01 Uh, maybe.
7:21 Speaker 04 Behind the counter, sure.
7:21 Speaker 01 I've never, I've never been behind the counter at a deli. I'm going back there.
7:25 Speaker 03 In this bodega, they sell all the essentials. There's an assortment of cereal in the back, paper towels, takis and chips. But in the front, it is taken up by the deli counter.
7:35 Speaker 01 It's a big counter, too. There's so many things I could do. I could, I could wrap muffins. I could fry things. I could make a sandwich.
7:41 Speaker 02 We'll put you to work, for sure.
7:42 Speaker 01 If I'm back there for three minutes, I'm going to be put to work?
7:44 Speaker 02 My dad will put you to work, definitely.
7:47 Speaker 01 Hakim is not kidding. Except when I finally get around the giant counter and Tarek sizes me up, he's like, ah, yeah, no.
7:55 Speaker 05 I wouldn't think you're going to last long.
7:58 Speaker 01 You don't think I would last long?
8:00 Speaker 05 I mean, it's really hard. You know, most of it is standard. Like, I do 12 hours, 13 hours sometime. I never sit.
8:07 Speaker 01 And it's not like there's nowhere to sit. There is a wood stool near the cash register. Tarek looks at it with disdain. You have a stool, but you don't sit on it?
8:16 Speaker 05 No, I don't use it.
8:18 Speaker 01 You don't use it?
8:18 Speaker 05 No. I mean, I don't like to sit. I like to keep moving. If not, you know, serving a customer, I'm doing something else.
8:25 Speaker 03 Tarek left Yemen in the mid 1990s. At the time, there was a civil war going on. The economy was collapsing.
8:32 Speaker 05 Back in the days, I was working for my father. My father forced me to leave, you know? He had to leave.
8:38 Speaker 01 He forced you to leave?
8:39 Speaker 05 Yeah. I mean, he was saying, like, a better future for us just to go.
8:44 Speaker 01 When you were leaving Yemen, did you know what kind of business you could run here?
8:48 Speaker 05 Um, yeah, I do. Because my brother was like two years ahead of me. He was here to, to already started doing the business. And I came and joined him.
8:56 Speaker 01 Before you even leave Yemen, someone's like, I think I have a way for you to work immediately when you get to the US.
9:02 Speaker 05 Ah, yes.
9:03 Speaker 03 And that's what was happening a lot back then. Yemeni fathers, fathers-in-law, cousins, all helping each other learn how to work in an American corner store.
9:12 Speaker 05 I wasn't speaking, wasn't speaking English at that time. So I had, you know, people come and ask me for things, and I don't know what they asked me for.
9:20 Speaker 01 So did you learn English on the job?
9:21 Speaker 05 It was most of it in the job.
9:23 Speaker 01 After a couple of years of also learning how to do the work, Tarek was ready to go out on his own. But he didn't have enough money to start his own store. And he didn't think he'd be able to get a loan from a bank.
9:36 Speaker 05 I don't have a credit history to go to the bank. I mean, as a new person in the country, you know? Even if you go to the bank, opening a, just checking account, they didn't take me at that time. It was hot.
9:47 Speaker 03 So Tarek did what a lot of people in his community did back then. He got informal loans from family and friends.
9:53 Speaker 05 I had a lot of help from them. You know, my father loaned my brother and other cousins that helped me to put our money down.
10:01 Speaker 01 And, he said, as Muslims, they followed a custom of interest-free loans, which was really helpful.
10:07 Speaker 03 According to the Yemeni American Merchants Association, today, people from Yemen run nearly half of all the bodegas in New York City, around 5,000 altogether.
10:16 Speaker 05 I see everywhere there's a Yemeni guy, all over the city.
10:20 Speaker 01 So if you're traveling around the city and you're like, I don't know-- You need to use a bathroom or you need a coffee or something like, will you go in and will you be like, hey, I'm also from Yemen?
10:29 Speaker 05 I didn't even introduce myself. They would know me.
10:32 Speaker 01 You don't even need to introduce yourself.
10:34 Speaker 05 While you start talking to them.
10:36 Speaker 03 And you can find Yemeni Americans running small grocery stores all across the US, in Detroit, in Buffalo, Fresno, Oakland, thousands of stores, even though, according to the last census, Yemenis make up just 1/40 of 1% of the US population.
10:53 Speaker 01 Now, if you've ever lived in a city, you might have noticed something just like this happening, a particular immigrant group specializing in one kind of business. But for years, economists and sociologists debated why some immigrant groups concentrate in one industry while others spread out and go work in all sorts of jobs.
11:11 Speaker 03 One economist who's looked into this is Bill Kerr.
11:14 Speaker 06 There was not a very clear reason as to why Vietnamese should be particularly skilled or concentrated in nail care salons. And yet, they were over a quarter of the US nail care salon industry.
11:26 Speaker 01 Or, Bill says, why Indian Americans from the state of Gujarat have focused so much on running motels and hotels.
11:33 Speaker 03 Bill teaches at Harvard Business School, where he researches and writes a lot about migration and labor. And he says sometimes immigrant groups end up in an industry for kind of arbitrary reasons.
11:44 Speaker 06 So in the Vietnamese nail care example, that began in 1975 with an amazing story about Tippi Hendren going to a Vietnamese refugee camp. She was an actress, well-known in that time.
11:57 Speaker 01 Tippi Hendren was most famous for starring in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. She was also a humanitarian who cared a lot about refugees. And back in the 1970s, when she was visiting a Vietnamese refugee camp in California, her nails were very well manicured. And apparently, some of the women there were quite impressed. So, Tippi Hendren, she brings her manicurist to the camp, and she teaches a group of women the art of the manicure. The start of this industry is kind of random.
12:26 Speaker 03 Now, while some immigrant groups do cluster around an industry like nail salons or motels, other immigrants arrive in the US and they don't. They spread out. So, along with the co-author, Bill decided to find out why that happens. They pulled nearly 40 years' worth of census data that tracks where people were born, what industries they work in, and he develops a methodology to rank 131 different groups.
12:50 Speaker 01 At the bottom of the list were people from Cuba, Canada, Germany, and Poland. They were the least likely to cluster around one type of industry. At the top of the list were people from Nepal, Senegal, Zimbabwe, and Yemen. People from those countries were most likely to cluster around an industry.
13:08 Speaker 03 So why is this happening with some groups and not others? Bill finds there are two main factors. First of all, you tend to see more clustering among immigrant groups with smaller populations. And second, there is more clustering among groups that tend to stick together more socially.
13:24 Speaker 06 The term we use is social isolation, but that doesn't need to be a negative term.
13:31 Speaker 01 Sounds so sad.
13:32 Speaker 06 Yeah, no connotation about that. One way of thinking is like, it's an inherent strength of the community to want to do things together.
13:40 Speaker 03 In the paper, Bill uses the rate at which immigrants marry within their community as kind of a proxy for this.
13:46 Speaker 01 And more broadly, they mean things like people speaking the same language, going to the same parties, maybe spending their weekends together.
13:54 Speaker 06 I'm married to a Fin. My wife is from Finland. And we, for many years, took our kids every Saturday morning to Sumikola, which was the local Finnish school, so that they would work on learning the language. And all the Finns from, you know, three or four states around New England, you know, came and met at one place.
14:14 Speaker 03 And while they are sitting there waiting for their kids, you could imagine that they might talk about, you know, work. So let's say two of them are entrepreneurs who run hair salons. Maybe they're discussing what products they like, which distributors are reliable, or how to deal with the city's rules and regulations.
14:32 Speaker 01 This is information you can't necessarily learn at school or even on the job. Those Saturday morning classes could be reinforcing entrepreneurial clustering, giving our imaginary hair salon owners a huge advantage. I am Canadian, and so we always used to joke that we would send our kids to like, Saturday morning Canadian classes. Doesn't exist.
14:56 Speaker 01 I take it back because it does exist. It's called like hockey practice, but that's a different story.
15:01 Speaker 06 Yeah, well, you're joking. But, you know, I think that's kind of a wonderful test of our theory. So when you look at things like the ethnic specialization of entrepreneurship, Canada was among the three lowest specialized communities in the United States. So it's very dispersed, very big, you know, very socially integrated on all aspects.
15:22 Speaker 01 What I'm interpreting this to mean is that basically, my fellow Canadians are not going to help me at all when I start my business. Is that, that's how I'm to interpret this?
15:30 Speaker 06 That's fair. It's pretty fair. Or not, let me frame it this, they're not going to help you any more than anyone else would help you.
15:35 Speaker 01 Got it.
15:36 Speaker 06 You know, you could get some help, but--
15:38 Speaker 01 The hell, Canadians.
15:39 Speaker 06 But, you know, there's so many Canadians that your likelihood of running into somebody who's doing the same thing as you is not very high. And likewise, since you only have hockey as the thing that's bonding you together, there's a lot of hockey. So the likelihood that you're going to the same hockey game is not very high.
15:57 Speaker 01 Ah, OK, right.
15:58 Speaker 03 OK, Amanda, enough about Canada. Going back to the groups where we really do see a lot of clustering around a particular industry, one interpretation of why that's happening is that these immigrants don't have really other great options. They can't find any other better job, or maybe they face discrimination. Bill found that also, according to the data, immigrants were able to make more money by working in these clustered industries.
16:26 Speaker 06 By being a part of your ethnicity's self-employment cluster, you are doing better financially, earning higher incomes and wages than if you had been self-employed in another space or if you'd been in the wage work.
16:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, it seems like there's an economic advantage to joining your community's industry, even if it involves a job with long hours, in an industry with thin margins, and maybe no time to sit down on a stool even, like, say, working at a grocery store or a bodega. Hi, it's my little lady.
17:00 Speaker 01 Hi, guys. Back at Yafa Deli in Brooklyn, Hakim and I watch as the original entrepreneur, his father, Tarek, makes his signature coffee. His father is putting on a show.
17:13 Speaker 01 You see his brisorg in action. Tarek pours some sugar into a cup. See the flick of the wrist. He adds the hot coffee so the sugar melts faster. Swirling the coffee with the sugar. Adds the ice, tops it off with milk, a lid, and then for good measure, he gives it this upside-down swirl to mix it together. Doesn't leak. Hand it with love and care to the customer. I mean, that was a technique, by the way. It's impressive, right? It was impressive.
17:41 Speaker 03 Hakim learned to love coffee at his father's deli. But even though his dad's technique is very impressive, Hakim is part of a newer generation, one that enjoys specialty coffee, fancy syrups, a variety of non-dairy milks, a generation that maybe doesn't want to work such a grueling job.
18:01 Speaker 01 Coming up after the break, the very particular problems Hakim faces in the fancy coffee business. Problems he never ran into while working at his dad's bodega.
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19:35 Speaker 03 Up until now, we've mostly been talking about first-generation immigrants who cluster in a particular industry. But what about their kids? In studies written about what second-generation immigrants do for work, there are a bunch of different stories. In the example of immigrants from Vietnam working in nail salons, most of the kids seem to go work in other, less punishing professions.
19:55 Speaker 01 You can see something similar with the Gujaratati Indian immigrants working in the motel industry. But there, you also see examples of many people building on their parents' work, expanding into hotel chains or moving into boutique hotels. But by and large, the second generation leaves their parents' business behind. Of course, the way everyone's individual story plays out, that is very different.
20:19 Speaker 03 When Hakim was a teenager, he worked after school at his father's bodega. And he continued to pick up shifts when he was in college.
20:25 Speaker 01 So did you think, when you were younger, like, oh, I guess I'll just take over the bodega from my dad?
20:30 Speaker 02 No, no. I was working in photography. So I thought photography was going to be sort of my out.
20:36 Speaker 03 Like a lot of kids of first-generation immigrants, Hakim did not want to work in the family business his whole life.
20:42 Speaker 01 So after college, he started working as a freelance photographer. And it's really freelancing that led him to the coffee business. Because every time he needed to do some photo editing, sit on his laptop, he just couldn't find a good place in his neighborhood to do it, somewhere where he could go work and, I guess, get some of those eight cups of coffee he drinks a day.
21:02 Speaker 03 And he's like, what if I opened that place? What if I opened that cool coffee shop in my neighborhood? So Hakim, along with his cousin, start meeting up after work to dream up some plans.
21:13 Speaker 02 We would sit on PlayStation. We'd play NBA 2K. And we'd just talk about Yemeni coffee. And I'm like, dude, I really want to do this. I really want to do this.
21:21 Speaker 01 The year before, a bestselling book called The Monk of Moka by Dave Eggers came out. And it's the story of a Yemeni-American guy who was obsessed with the history and tradition of coffee in Yemen, which goes back hundreds of years. He eventually figures out how to import this high-end coffee to the US.
21:38 Speaker 03 Hakim loves the idea of selling a product that's actually from Yemen. And he brings up this book repeatedly with his cousin.
21:45 Speaker 02 I read it, and then I gave it to him. I was like, OK, this is mandatory reading.
21:49 Speaker 01 They read it. They learn about coffee. They learn how to do a pour-over. This coffee shop idea starts to seem possible. They get serious and start looking for a place.
22:00 Speaker 03 Now, this whole time, Hakim, of course, is talking to his father about his business plan. But his father can't really picture it. A bodega has been the sure thing for their family. A new coffee shop? Eh. Tarek is not so convinced.
22:14 Speaker 02 My father was very skeptical about the business. He doesn't go to coffee shops. He doesn't see them around. He just hangs out with the baristas to know how busy they are.
22:23 Speaker 01 Like, why would anyone spend more than $2 on a cup of coffee? He does not think customers are going to buy that.
22:28 Speaker 03 But Hakim plowed ahead anyway. And after a few weeks of looking for spaces, he found a place he liked. And he was about to sign the lease when he got a call from his father. A local landlord had just walked into the deli with an offer. A Chinese takeout place nearby was closing. Was Hakim's father possibly interested in renting out the space? Tarek said he wasn't, but his son might be.
22:52 Speaker 02 And my dad called me the same day. And I was like, is he still there? And I was like, yeah. And I was like, shake his hand. Please, just tell him, like, yeah, it's a deal.
22:59 Speaker 01 The place was exactly what Hakim was looking for. The subway entrance was right there, lots of foot traffic. And it was just three stores down from his father's corner store.
23:09 Speaker 03 So Hakim finally found his spot and signed the lease. And in many ways, he was building, right, on his father's success at the deli. He was tapping into the same community, many of whom had watched him grow up working in the bodega. And, you know, he even got the lease by using his father's business connections with the local landlord.
23:27 Speaker 01 And when it was time to get coffee beans, his family back in Yemen was able to help out.
23:31 Speaker 02 I called a few of my cousins back home in Yemen. And we started to get this group going of people who would go out to all farms in the area. They would inspect the fields. They would speak with the owners. It was basically research and development of the locale.
23:50 Speaker 03 The skills he learned from his dad at the bodega didn't cover everything he ran into in his new business, like when he wanted to start getting all those coffee beans out of Yemen.
24:00 Speaker 02 In the beginning, we started shipping coffee in suitcases. So I believe our first shipment was my father. He went to go see his father. And he packed a 50-pound suitcase. And he brought it over. And it was gone within the first month.
24:16 Speaker 01 This wasn't sustainable. They couldn't keep shipping Hakim's father in a suitcase back and forth. They needed to find a way to regularly import more beans. But in 2019, Yemen was at war. The main airport and a bunch of ports were shut down.
24:31 Speaker 02 There was no way to kind of ship it out of Yemen at the time. So we had to hire somebody to kind of take the coffee all the way up to the northern border. And from there, there's smugglers who specialize in getting things into Saudi Arabia.
24:45 Speaker 03 There were also sanctions on Yemen at the time. And the banking system was kind of a mess, which made it really hard for Hakim to pay the coffee farmers.
24:54 Speaker 02 We tried to pay with PayPal one time. And that got shut down.
25:00 Speaker 03 In the end, they used Western Union.
25:02 Speaker 01 Now, Hakim has figured out how to make his coffee business profitable. And he's expanding. He has the two shops now. And he's adding a full kitchen and dinner menu to the original location. Of course, they are still serving fancy coffee, even to their once-most skeptical customer, Hakim's father, Tarek. Does he ever come and buy coffee at your store?
25:24 Speaker 02 Oh, every day. Pass it by for a cappuccino. Yeah. Sometimes we'll have someone go over. He'll give me a call, like, hey, can you run me a coffee to the corner? I'm like, I got you.
25:33 Speaker 01 Hakim says, for his dad, the coffee is always free.
25:48 Speaker 01 Want more big ideas in economics? You know what you will love? You will love our newsletter. We do all sorts of things. Greg, who writes the newsletter, he's amazing. He is very thoughtful. He's very smart. He puts a lot of effort into the newsletter. It's brilliant. Read it. Sign up. You can do that at npr.org/planetmoneynewsletter. You will not regret it. Smart thoughts in your inbox every week.
26:10 Speaker 03 Today's episode of Planet Money was produced by James Snead and edited by Keith Romer. It was fact-checked by Danya Suliman and engineered by Sina LaFredo and Travis Hagan. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.
26:23 Speaker 01 Thanks to Peter Salisbury and to Mokhtar Alkashali. The book, The Monk of Moka, is based on his story. And he was very helpful with the research for this show. I'm Amanda Oranick.
26:33 Speaker 03 I'm Jeff Wo. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
26:42 Speaker 03 Thanks also to that cute, adorable bodega cat. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Schwab. At Schwab, you can get everything from self-directed investing to full-service wealth management, all in one place. No matter your investing goal, life stage, amount to invest, or know-how, you can invest your way with Schwab. This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.
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