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From regular coffees to Friday night takeaway or a trip to the pub, some of the things many Australians have taken for granted now feel like luxuries.
If the businesses that make up our main streets are struggling, and the people who support them can no longer afford them, what do we stand to lose?
Recently a chicken parmigiana and a pint sat next to one another in a neighbourhood pub beer garden.
The parma, or parmi — a gleaming tide of molten cheese lapping at crispy, salty edges — was picture perfect.
The beer — a locally brewed, independent pale ale — was by no means the most expensive drink on offer.
Their combined cost: $47.
Across Australia, there is a creeping sense that, to borrow modern phraseology, the math isn't mathing.
What might once have fallen into the category of acceptable middle-class consumption now feels closer to luxury.
Two-thirds of the country approach this federal election with concerns about the cost of living, double that of 10 years ago, according to IPSOS monitoring.
Among the 254,376 respondents to the ABC's Vote Compass, the cost of living ranked as the most important issue.
At the same time, pubs, cafes and restaurants, facing the same inflationary pressures, grapple with how to pass rising costs onward to financially stressed customers.
It is a tension causing hospitality businesses to close at a record rate — 9.3 per cent, or one in 11 businesses shut up shop last year — according to a recent CreditorWatch report.
"The person who owns the pub can't afford to pay their basics because everything else has gone up," says Viva Hammer, from the Crawford School of Public Policy Australian National University.
"The customers are also pressed by the same inflation because their basics have gone up, to the extent that the non-essentials are off the table for most people.
"It's disequilibrium — things have gotten out of whack."
Can Australia still afford … the pub?
Last year, South Australia publican Simone Douglas went somewhat viral, though not on purpose.
"Pub is called out for charging an exorbitant price for its chicken parmigiana — but its owner has hit back with a compelling response," read a typically exuberant headline in the Daily Mail.
Her pub, The Duke of Brunswick in Adelaide, had received negative customer reviews for the $33 price of its chicken parmigiana and salad.
"When food is worth so much, society begins to crumble," read a one-star Google review.
"The staff, both in the kitchen and the business, were pretty demoralised," Douglas says.
She took to the pub's Facebook page to break down the $33 cost and explain just how profitable it was.
"It turns out, not very profitable," she says.
After factoring in the cost of ingredients and everything from rent, wages, payroll tax, and energy, to the serviette that accompanied the meal, Douglas had calculated the profit to be about $2 per plate.
The response to her post was mixed.
The local "mainstay community" praised the transparency. Others were less supportive.
"There were people who said I should go back to business school," Douglas says.
"There were people who may have run pubs in the heyday of the 1970s and 1980s when everyone was making a small fortune that said, 'you're insane.'
"The reality is, they weren't paying the energy prices, they weren't paying the gas prices, the labour costs."
Pubs by their very name and nature — public houses — are intended as places of regular congregation.
"If you can get repeat custom, that's one of the big goals," says Stephen Ferguson, president of the Australian Hotels Association.
The sentiment that the pub is no longer something people can regularly afford is filtering back to him, in more direct ways than he would like.
"My mates, every time they come back from the bar, they give me a gob-full," he laughs.
It is not hard to find hints of frustration or bewilderment at this new normal.
An Instagram reel showing the $22 cost of a pint at a Sydney venue received hundreds of thousands of views.
On Facebook, a widely-shared post from satirical news outlet Bell Tower Times read: "Local man blows yearly interest rate relief on a parmi & pint at the pub following RBA call."
"A couple years ago, if you went to the bar and pulled out $50 to shout you and three mates a beer, you'd be expecting some change," Ferguson says.
"It's $60 a shout now for four blokes."
If prices aren't working for patrons, they aren't working for publicans, either.
Ferguson is quick to point to any number of destabilising factors: beer excise ("significant"), insurance ("through the roof!"), energy ("people want to sit in air-conditioning").
The knock-on effect is not just higher prices, but pub closures.
In regional Australia, it has become a distressingly common phenomenon for small communities, one that can prompt uncomfortable questions about a town's very future.
"If you're in a remote area and you're just relying on the local farming community and you don't get much drive-by travel, you are probably the most vulnerable," Ferguson says.
One publican in regional Victoria last year went as far as to bemoan his shire's decades-long pokies ban, pleading that if he could install poker machines, he might just be able to turn a profit.
Publican Simone Douglas is wary about where it is all headed.
"You're still going to see that special occasion spend, but people just don't have the money that they used to have," she says.
"It will become a luxury item. Instead of catching up with your friends and having a debrief after a hard day at work, you're going to be at home in front of Netflix.
"I think our federal and state politicians need to be put on notice that they are failing the pub test and they are failing the wider Australian community because they are making the pub cost-prohibitive.
"If we're taking those things away, what kind of a society are we building at the end of the day?"
Can Australia still afford … our coffee addiction?
When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese took to early morning ABC radio to spruik the tax cuts contained within the government's election-eve budget, he was pressed by AM host Sabra Lane on just how valuable they would be for most Australians.
"It works out to be $5.14 a week," Lane challenged. "You would struggle to buy a cup of coffee in many parts of Australia."
It is a consistent, if not controversial economic marker.
Once every few months, news stories will emerge suggesting we are paying too little for our coffee.
Sitting awkwardly alongside articles about what people are giving up during the cost of living crisis, industry voices will insist that a $5 coffee should be $7, or even closer to $10.
At last month's Melbourne International Coffee Expo, the consensus was that something needed to change.
"Cafes are scared. Roasters are scared," said coffee importer Andre Selga during an earnest panel discussion.
"There are other avenues of caffeine," added coffee broker Luke Terrey, referencing the growing popularity of energy drinks and other canned beverages.
"Coffee could be second-guessed."
As rents, operational costs and the price of climate change-affected coffee beans have all risen, how much you pay in Australia for a barista-made speciality coffee has actually remained relatively consistent.
For those in the industry, it is a frustrating example of the concept of psychological price anchors.
"Everything's got really, really expensive and we're being stuck by people anchoring to a coffee price, which means we're doing it at a loss," says Andrew Low, CEO of Coffee Supreme, who supply roasted beans to over 600 cafes around Australia.
"We used to have $9 for eggs on toast and now you're paying $19 for eggs on toast, but your coffee is still $4.50. We've trained ourselves to believe that's what coffee's worth."
It might be what is required to tilt the industry back toward sustainability, but convincing customers to pay more in the current economic climate is no easy pitch.
Perhaps even more so than pubs, coffee-centred businesses thrive on repeat custom.
The number of cafes, carts and hole-in-the-wall coffee shops in Australia has mushroomed for the past two decades, predicated in no small part on the notion that our daily addiction for speciality coffee can be banked on.
With over 27,000 cafes and coffee shops in Australia, according to IBIS World, it is not unusual even in country towns to see multiple businesses competing on the same street.
"When I first got into coffee 15 years ago, there were probably about 5,000 speciality or independent cafes. While our love of coffee has increased over that time, it's not five times bigger," Low says.
"The average cafe used to do about 500 cups a day. Now it's doing 300 cups a day. At the same time, the costs have doubled, so the margins in cafes have shrunk on average."
Coffee might be famously considered recession-proof, but cafes and coffee shops are not.
Post-lockdown changes to office work patterns have threatened once-reliable business models (the increased accessibility of home coffee machines probably hasn't helped, either).
One coffee industry figure the ABC spoke to speculated whether the move away from a cash economy might have forced some cafe owners to realise they were operating unsustainably.
If shops can't afford to keep feeding our coffee addiction at current prices, will Australians be able to support the industry as it currently exists? Yes, and no, according to Andrew Low.
"Supply is outstripping demand, and that's making everyone lose a bit of money. We have too many cafes to support the needs," he says.
"If that cafe can't pass it on to a consumer sustainably, then coffee roasters also die. You'll end up with five big roasters and chain cafes and we'll become like America or the UK.
"I think we want better. I think we are unhappy to pay more, but we will be willing to pay more to keep our industry alive."
Can Australia still afford … Friday night takeaway?
It is easy to forget that not so long ago, unassuming local restaurants and takeaway shops could justify employing their own delivery drivers for the sole purpose of ferrying meals to their small community of customers.
Not all were lucrative, but many such businesses could reasonably depend on the family dollar.
Friday night takeaway, or a family meal out at a neighbourhood restaurant, has never been accessible to all — but Teresa Davis from the University of Sydney's School of Business says it occupies a warm place in the Australian middle-class imagination.
"Generally, family meals are prepared and consumed at home, so there is a daily routine around it," she says.
"When that is transformed into something that happens outside the home, it is both an affirmation of the ritual and a break away from the routine. It helps both to break the monotony but also to reinforce those structures."
She points to the tradition of regional Australian Chinese restaurants, a topic lovingly documented in Jennifer Wong's recent series, Chopsticks or Fork?
"It's such an evocative image, right? The Red Lanterns and the chop suey and the sweet and sour pork," Davis says.
"Even in a very routinised lifestyle in a smaller regional town, this is exotic. Spatially, you're sort of reaching out of home."
Countless destructive forces — rising costs and falling customer spending chief among them — have battered many hospitality businesses into a cold, grim corner.
"At the moment, 99 per cent of it is just horrifically sad news, people closing, people downsizing, people considering pulling the pin," one Canberra restaurateur told the ABC late last year.
As restaurants struggle with their own economic imbalance, the cost of even modest takeaway and neighbourhood restaurants might feel like it's stretching out of reach for many families.
Sam Tsiaplias, an associate professor from the Melbourne Institute, says families are not imagining things if they feel like such meals are becoming too expensive for them to afford.
"I've just opened up a spreadsheet. I've got a whole bunch of things that I historically look at," says Tsiaplias, helpfully.
He pulled up a series of three-year averages over the past two decades to compare the rise in the price of eating meals out relative to wage growth.
"In the past, wage growth was similar to or maybe a little bit bigger than eating out. But in the last three years we have seen a bit of a reversal in that," Tsiaplias says.
"So in terms of going out and grabbing a meal, the inflation related to that aspect is substantially higher than wage growth. It would feel more expensive relative to what was happening 10 and 20 years ago."
It is a compounding factor in what his colleague at the Applied Economics and Social Research arm of the Melbourne Institute, Dr Melek Cigdem-Bayram, refers to as the "shrinking middle".
"The middle class as we know it is changing," she says.
"The rich, relative to the middle, are getting richer, but when we compare those in the middle to the poor — the bottom 10 per cent of the wealth distribution — the gap between those two groups is narrowing."
The phrase 'cost of living crisis' may be permanently burned into our national lexicon, and the housing crisis remains an exhaustingly ever-present topic at barbecues and leaders debates, but Dr Cigdem-Bayram thinks another story is unfolding concurrently.
"The standard metrics that you see reported don't give you a complete picture at all," she says.
"We need to pay more attention to those in the middle —at a policy level as well. It is important not to overlook that group who are starting to merge with the lower end of the distribution.
"That's a really concerning trend that is emerging."
You only need to pass a packed inner-city pub on a late Saturday afternoon, dodging a precarious army of delivery drivers as you go, to disavow the notion that such businesses are at risk of disappearing from the Australian landscape altogether.
But in a world of $30+ parmigianas, $15+ pints, $7+ coffees, and $100+ family takeaways, Teresa Davis fears something bigger might be at risk.
The more unaffordable such items get, she says, the more people will be "cut off" from the sort of consumption-based social and cultural tentpoles that prop up our main streets.
A New York Times article this month titled Where Will We Eat When the Middle-Class Restaurant Is Gone? suggested that such businesses "might be the last remaining institution that brings together a cross-section of America".
Davis thinks such a concern can equally be applied to some of our pubs, cafes and restaurants, too.
"You might interact with a whole different group of people and different cultures that you don't normally interact with. This is where community meets," she says.
"Decisions are taken at a pub, you meet your life partner in a cafe, in a restaurant. These are things that happen outside of the home.
"The pub is a sacred space. So much of life happens there."
Credits
Reporting and production: Jeremy Story Carter
Design and illustrations: Emma Machan
Posted, updated
