This was only a coffee from a chain.
A morale-boosting one, acquired for comforting purposes on the slightly teary return after saying goodbye to our precious firstborn at higher education; but even so, merely a takeaway oat-milk latte from a bog-standard franchise outlet based in the county of Berkshire. The surprise was that it exceeded £5.
Growing Cost of Regular Treats
Coffee hasn’t actually been cheap for years, for complicated reasons – inflation after the pandemic, a war involving Russia pushing up fuel costs, a climate crisis having an effect on coffee bean growth, recent fiscal changes – that embody the harsh realities of the recent years in a mug. Not so much corporate greed, rather international challenges coming home to roost. But even so, north of a fiver, for a basic latte? It reminded me of the eight-year-old whose outraged reaction to costs from an ice cream truck – “NINE POUNDS FOR TWO ITEMS?” – spread widely this year on TikTok.
More Than Your Daily Brew: A Wider Sense of Economic Pressure
This is not intended as a piece about how the younger generation could all be buying houses if they cut back on specialty coffees, nor an invitation to play the world’s smallest violin the relatively comfortable middle-income groups when so many people are properly on the edge of hardship. Rather, it’s about the strangely dispiriting effect of small daily luxuries starting to seem unjustifiable, even for people who are not watching every penny; how that leaves life seeming more dull and monotonous, undermining any positive outlook about how the nation is performing more overall. For many gen Xers it feels oddly like returning towards the world of our youth, where restaurant meals was exclusively for the biggest events, your mother took a flask of instant coffee along on every trip, and normal people painted their own nails rather than going for a manicure on the shopping district. Were the consumer boom years of our twenties and thirties not in fact a permanent state of affluence to which we’ll finally miraculously return but, in retrospect, more of a blip?
Rising Costs Throughout the Market
This goes beyond coffee. This week a popular food outlet increased prices, attributing it to the latest hike in employer taxes – and if you don’t see why the price of a morning meal is politically salient, you have ignored that half a million people supported a campaign objecting to a previous government's snack tax in 2012 – while the chief executive of Tesco the executive observed that its customers seem to be maintaining austerity measures, such as eating in instead of going out. “Are you upset at finding too expensive of little luxuries?” raised a plaintive online discussion lately, in which members talked about abandoning the minor pleasures that used to brighten the day: a printed periodical to read in the bath, meeting a friend for a glass of vino, film admissions, blooms that aren’t a one-pound bouquet of cheap blooms. Minor items, but crucial exactly because they’re minor, which makes them the sort of things people in not flashy but secure permanent employment should be able to experience and own. Aspects that make the distinction between managing to survive financially, and enjoying life. It may or may not be totally unrelated that twenty-three percent of site visitors surveyed in last month said they weren’t sure how they would vote in an vote, giving “unsure” a lead over every other party.
The £100 Dinner: A New Norm
According to the experienced shopping expert a market commentator pointed out this week, dinner for a family of four at an typical dining chain – a popular pizza chain or a Bella Italia, somewhere you might take the young ones at school break – is now commonly through the emotionally charged £100 threshold without alcohol or puddings, while the £20 restaurant entrée is no longer limited to the city. Industry analysts a survey company say so-called “price surprise”, or eating at a restaurant that’s not particularly luxurious and reeling at the payment terminal, is measurably on the upswing: forty-three percent of customers surveyed across one hundred and sixty popular main street restaurants admitted to experiencing it, up from thirty percent in the year 2017. Bill shock is usually what happens when our innate feeling of what things “ought” to cost is unable to catch up to rising prices. Food-price inflation has now increased for five months in a row, and a hospitality industry obviously concerned about the next government budget maintains that the primary reason is recent increases in employer taxes and in the minimum wage being passed on to patrons.
Fiscal Policies and The Effect on Everyday Living
The chancellor had a entirely justifiable argument recently for hiking business taxes – it allowed her to secure the resources to resolve the medical professionals' dispute and establish more hospital appointments – and previous finance ministers have had, if anything, a morally stronger argument for a measure putting money into the hands of some of the people genuinely preparing £5 coffees and offering £20 pizzas. It could be said a lot of life’s little treats were in reality attainable merely because of low wages, and if the overall expense of providing adequate pay is that people frequently receiving just over the lowest pay cannot enjoy so many enjoyable luxuries – so, perhaps that’s what wealth distribution looks like in an age where chancellors are without straightforward choices. It might be contended, as the economic gurus of what’s known as abundance theory contend, that the truly happy indulgence in
