Huge and totally unexpected crowds that queued outside cafes around Australia this morning had social and behavioural scientists baffled – for a while at least.
Known for its world-class coffees, Melbourne led the surge with multiple cafes around the Victorian capital’s CBD reporting lines of up to a hundred or more customers begging for a table from around 7.30am.
“Even a Starbucks outlet down here had a few people at its doors early this morning and no-one in their right mind drinks that tasteless sludge,” Reggie Rissototini, the owner of the Bean There, Done That franchise of some 15 coffee shops and hole-in-the-walls in and around Melbourne said on the condition of anonymity.
Across in Sydney also on daylight saving time, the same unusual and unexpected surge in patronage took place at exactly the same time. Queensland followed suit an hour later. Customer surges across country and regional Australia also brought broad smiles to struggling cafe and restaurant owners, with their new elderly clientele not even complaining about the cost of smashed avo on sourdough bread.
It took a while for those social and behavioural experts to work out what had happened but snap interviews revealed almost all those queuing up were fairly old and regular ABC viewers who had heard on Weekend Breakfast that the Insiders panel at 9am would be made up of The Australian Financial Review’s national affairs columnist Jennifer Hewett, righter and foreign editor for The Australian, Greg Sheridan and ABC federal politics reporter Jane Norman.
Another Melbourne cafe owner who is often interviewed by right-wing media (subs, please check this as a possible tautology) to show how badly small business that relies on a discretionary spend is faring under the Albanese government’s woeful economic management added: “If only they had replaced Jane Norman with Gerard Henderson or Samantha Maiden, we might have been able to survive up to Christmas!”
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