‘Many years ago this was a thriving, happy planet – people, cities, shops, a normal world. Except that on the high streets of these cities there were slightly more shoe shops than one might have thought necessary. And slowly, insidiously, the numbers of these shoe shops were increasing. It’s a well known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to ewar, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result – collapse, ruin and famine. Most of the population died out. Those few who had the right kind of genetic instability mutated into birds – you’ve seen one of them – who cursed their feet, cursed the ground, and vowed that none should walk on it again. Unhappy lot. Come, I must now take you to the Vortex.’
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Trilogy in Four Parts. Pan Books: London. 1992 (first published individually in 1980), p200
Do you think Sydney (and possibly our entire world) is in danger of this happening – but with ... CAFÉS?
To illustrate – I was on Cockatoo Island on the weekend, where no-one lives, and only slightly more know of its existence, let alone that you can camp there overnight as we did. And there was not one, but two cafés there!
Is it just the allure of the legal drug caffeine, or do we really need so many cafés? Are they just replacing all the milk bars and sandwich shops which have all gone the way of platform sneakers? Or is this perhaps the true cause of the global economic collapse - way way way too many cafés!
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