LAY OFF THE AVOCADO TOAST.
Just another old man blaming millennials
They may have graduated during the Great Recession with poor job prospects and outrageous student loans, but that doesn’t matter. There’s one explanation why millennials have been slow to buy homes: avocado toast.
At least that’s what Australian millionaire and property mogul Tim Gurner told his country’s “60 Minutes,” in comments widely mocked online.
“When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” Gurner said.
Now, avocado toast has come to mean many things. For some people, the trendy-in-2014 brunch staple is ambrosia, the food of the gods. It inspires rhapsodic recipes, and slide shows of what avocado toast looks like around the world (Answer: Like avocado, on toast).
To other people, avocado toast is everything wrong with our Instagram-obsessed society, and according to one BuzzFeed writer, it “tastes like butt.” It usually costs less than $19, but considering it takes next-to-no skill to make, it could be considered an affordable luxury — like any other brunch item.
It’s true the price of avocados is rising quickly. But regardless which side of the great avocado toast divide you fall on, we should all be able to agree on one thing: Gurner’s hot take on food and finances is garbage.
It’s not the first time a trendy food has been invoked as a flawed financial strategy. In the early Aughts, as Starbucks was expanding at light speed, lattes were the reason Americans were penniless failures.
But avocado toast isn’t even original. An Australian columnist made the same parallel in an October 2016 column, writing: “I have seen young people order smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five-grain toasted bread at $22 a pop and more. I can afford to eat this for lunch because I am middle-aged and have raised my family. But how can young people afford to eat like this? Shouldn’t they be economizing by eating at home? How often are they eating out? Twenty-two dollars several times a week could go toward a deposit on a house.”
Man, they must really hate millennials and avocados in Australia.