Hospitality just landed at the very bottom of the state's business survey. I am not surprised. I am on the phone to these owners every week.
One of the odd privileges of supplying coffee to a lot of venues is that I get a read on the city most people never see. I am on the phone and on the floor with cafe owners every week, and right now the mood lines up with the report almost exactly.
Business NSW has accommodation and food services dead last for hiring confidence. Around a third of those businesses are planning to cut staff in the next three months, and almost nobody is planning to take anyone on. That is not a statistic to me. That is people I know by their first name, and by their coffee order.
Here is what I am actually hearing, under the polite version owners give their customers.
I am hearing the conversation nobody wants. Owners who started the year with a full team and a good feeling, now sitting down with staff they trained and rate and explaining that the hours are not there. The report carries a quote from a food business that began 2026 strong and is now paying out its last funds to let good people go. I have heard versions of that exact sentence, secondhand, more times this quarter than in the previous two years put together.
I am hearing the trade down, which is quieter and just as deadly. The second coffee of the day disappears first. The large becomes a regular. The daily flat white becomes a few-times-a-week treat. None of it is dramatic on its own. All of it shows up in the till by Friday, and it is happening in a thousand small decisions the customer barely notices making.
And I am hearing a lot of clever, unglamorous problem solving, which is the part that actually gives me hope. Menus trimmed to what genuinely sells. Hours pulled back to the trade that pays and away from the dead two-hour stretches owners kept open out of habit. A real lean into regulars and loyalty instead of chasing walk-in traffic that is not walking in. It will never make the news, but it is exactly how good operators get through a bad stretch, and most of them know how.
What I want to say to the cafe people reading this is short. You are not imagining it, and you are not failing. A statewide survey just confirmed your whole sector is wearing the worst of this. That does not fix your roster or your rent, but it should take the private shame out of a hard decision, because the shame is the part that makes owners sit on a problem too long. Everyone in the room is doing the same brutal maths. You are not the only one, you are just the one not posting about it.
The trade has been through grim stretches before and the good rooms came out the other side, usually because the person running them made the unpopular calls early instead of hoping. If that is you this quarter, you are in better company than the silence makes it feel.
We are all in the same weather. I would much rather get through it standing next to you than pretend I have found somewhere dry.
Stay caffeinated. I'm out.
Sources: Business NSW, NSW Business Conditions report, June 2026.
