Erika Beras
Chef vs. Robot adds Beras as the Planet Money participant visiting Instafoods and encountering Robby Wokbot in Philadelphia Chinatown. Her role is source framing: the episode uses the visit to make Restaurant Automation concrete before moving into taste, staffing, and labor-economics analysis.
Erika Beras appears in Betty Boop, Excel Olympics, Penny-isms: Our 2026 Valentines as the Planet Money participant giving a Valentine to the U.S. penny. Her segment calls the penny “the one that got away” and treats it as an object of memory and language even as the source says new penny minting is ending.
The episode uses Beras to separate Coin Retirement Economics from cultural attachment. The penny may be costly to produce and less needed in a digital-payments economy, but it still survives in sayings, tactile memory, and everyday idioms.
Connections
- Planet Money and NPR - show and network context.
- Instafoods, Robby Wokbot, and Restaurant Automation - robot-chef visit added by the newer episode.
- [[UnitedStatesMint|U.S. Mint]] and [[USTreasury|U.S. Treasury]] - institutions tied to minting policy.
- Coin Retirement Economics - economics and cultural-afterlife concept.
- Kenny Malone - host connecting the penny segment to the broader episode.