For many gen Xers, it feels like we’re sliding back towards the land of our childhoods: where eating out was for special occasions, and Thermoses were king
It was only a chain-store coffee.
A morale-boosting one, bought for consoling purposes on the faintly weepy way home from dropping our precious firstborn off at university; but still, just a takeaway oat-milk latte from a bog-standard roadside chain somewhere in Berkshire. The shock was that it was over £5.
Coffee hasn’t really been cheap for ages, for complex reasons – post-pandemic inflation, a Russian war pushing up energy prices, a climate crisis having an effect on coffee bean growth, last year’s budget tax hikes – that capture the bitter flavours of the last few years in a cup. Less predatory capitalism, more global problems coming home to roost. But still, north of a fiver, for caffeinated cereal juice? I felt like the eight-year-old whose outraged reaction to ice-cream van prices – “NINE POUND FOR TWO?” – went viral last summer on TikTok.
This isn’t going to be a column about how millennials could all be homeowners if they bought fewer flat whites, nor an invitation to play the world’s smallest violin for the not-that-squeezed middle classes when so many people are properly on the breadline. Rather, it’s about the strangely mood-dampening effect of little everyday treats beginning to feel unjustifiable, even for people who aren’t watching every penny; how that makes life feel more grey and drab, undermining any optimism about how the country is doing more broadly. For many gen Xers it feels oddly like sliding back towards the land of our childhoods, where eating out was strictly for the most special occasions, your mum took a Thermos of Nescafé along on every outing, and normal people painted their own nails rather than getting them done on the high street. Were the consumer boom years of our 20s and 30s not in fact a new bountiful norm to which we’ll eventually somehow return but, in retrospect, more of a blip?
