Americans Are Spending Almost A Million Dollars Monthly On Avocado Toasts!

There are food trends and then there are trends that stick so hard that people start comparing them with full-fledged economies. Just like Australian real estate magnate Tim Gurner, who recently trashed millennial for their reckless expenditures and quoting avocado toast – among a few other things – as an example and reason behind Gen Y being unable to afford proper housing in USA.

Gurner said: “When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” which is kind of hard-hitting because is that how much the current generation is spending on something as small as an avocado toast. And is it true that if we skip our daily dose of toast with the green mash, we can claim a stake in real estate?

Giving some figures to the 35-year-old millionaire’s facts, tech company Square aggregated certain data from all the credit card payments that it has processed, to put together a bar graph that revealed just how much Americans spend on the apparent symbol of millennial expenditure – the avocado toast. According to Square, as of June 2017, Americans shell out a whopping USD 900k on the food item. This has significantly risen from USD 17k back in June 2014.

Image: Square 

That said, it might still be way less than what they spend on coffee, for example. However, these are numbers based on data collected by just one company, so it excludes purchases made at many other restaurants, kiosks, and food trucks that do not employ Square’s services.

But is it still USD 19 for a toast, as claimed by Gurner?

Breaking down the data further, it was observed that the average cost of this millennial food is USD 6.78, with the cheapest avocado toast going for $2 and the most expensive going for USD 18, which is approximately AUD 23. So the real estate expert is correct about the millennia’s avocado toast expenses (if he’s speaking in Australian dollars, which is highly probable).

But is that still the reason why they’re struggling on the housing front?

Jo Lennan, a lawyer, writer and Oxford scholar, argues otherwise. “There’s no point pointing the finger at those people and say(ing), ‘You haven’t worked hard enough’, or ‘You haven’t tried hard enough’.

“If you’re looking at $1.5 million for a house in an outer Sydney suburb – a pretty ordinary house – then something is seriously wrong with the housing market”, she said. And we agree. Surely, if we have to pick between our snack and a house, somewhere something is not right with the economy!

Furthermore, as Time notes, a person would have to save the equivalent of 475 of those mashes just to afford one month’s rent on the average San Francisco apartment.

Source: Time; 9News

Feature Image: Gimme Delicious