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Don't confuse the below video as being about a potato chip factory. It is better to view it as a short history of manufacturing in America. The video is from Planet Money , and it provides an interesting lesson in how technology has changed business. We hear so much about manufacturing getting so much more efficient over the last half-century, it is helpful to have a clear example of how exactly that takes place for one company: Secrets From The Potato Chip Factory from Planet Money on Vimeo .

The latest Planet Money podcast focuses on stuff. The stuff we love, or think we love. And because we think we love it, we buy it. The Planet Money team has taken a closer look at three consumer items--E-books, Legos, and 3D printing--and tried to figure out why they cost what they cost, and how our consumption of them affects other products, or even the economy as a whole. Take a listen:

As Lam Thuy Vo points out, Planet Money has been researching and reporting a lot about household income and spending. And now Lam breaks it down by age, in a couple of interesting graphs. Here is one: Not really a surprise to see the shifts in household income over time, but it useful to have the detailed breakdown. Click here for more.

In his latest column for the New York Times Magazine , Planet Money 's Adam Davidson welcomes us all back from summer vacations with a reminder that the Euro Crisis has not been solved. And he provides quick primers on seven key questions that are lurking. We were struck most by #4: Is Europe a Lehman in waiting? About 20 percent of U.S. foreign trade is with the E.U. That’s significant, but if the European economy collapses, it’s quite likely that China, India, Brazil and several gulf states will pick up much of the slack. And a truly collapsed euro would mean discounts on everything from French wine to Italian shoes to Greek yogurt. More worrying is if a) the euro zone faces an abrupt financial panic, and b) it turns out that many American banks are overly invested in those suddenly defunct European banks. There is a general assumption that U.S. banks are prepared for the worst. But many in the financial world thought they were prepared for the collapse of Lehman Brothers too. Read The Euro Crisis Is Back From Vacation here .

As strange as it may seem, we decided to follow up reading about the latest retail sales numbers today by listening in to a conversation about things that are free. And yet it is somehow fitting. Because, as Chana Joffe-Walt and Alex Blumberg discuss in the latest Planet Money podcast, there is a cost to free . Especially if you start to charge for something after originally giving it away.

Here is another helpful graphic from Planet Money 's Graphing America series. Lam Thuy Vo helps us step away from the politics of immigration for a moment and look at where immigrants are actually working. Foreign-born workers make up 1/6 of the workforce. But where they come from seems to have some bearing on the fields they in which they are likely to work. For example, over a third of all workers born in Africa are in the education/health care/social services sector. What else stands out to you in the below graphic? See the full-size graphic, and read Lam Thuy Vuo's post on where immigrants work here .

For the latest installment in Planet Money's Graphing America series, Lam Thuy Vo breaks down some of the data for one of the most basic economic decisions American families make on a regular business: what to buy at the grocery store. The first big takeaway is that Americans are spending a significantly smaller portion of our overall spending on groceries--down from over 12% in 1982 to under 9% in 2012. This does not appear to be because we are eating less food, but rather that the cost of a lot of food products have some down. Lam Thuy Vo provides this telling graphic: Read What America Spends on Groceries here .