Fifteen Dollars for a Can: The Slow Death of the Social Drink

Fifteen dollars. For a can. At Rod Laver Arena.

The person who posted about it bought it anyway, which is the correct and honest thing to admit. We all do it. You’re already there, you’re thirsty, the thing is in front of you, and the social friction of saying no feels worse in the moment than the financial sting. Venues know this. It is, in fact, the entire business model.

But something is shifting. The comments on that post spiralled out in a direction I found genuinely interesting: the alcohol industry is apparently in meetings trying to figure out how to get younger people drinking again. Reading that, I felt two things simultaneously. First, mild relief that the harm-reduction logic seems to be doing something. Second, a kind of grim amusement at the idea of executives brainstorming fruit-flavoured beer while the actual answer sits right there on the table.

The actual answer, obviously, is price. But price is not something they can easily move. Alcohol excise in this country is eye-watering, indexed to inflation, and goes up automatically. Stack that on top of venue rent, licensing, insurance, staff costs, and the general disaster of commercial property in Melbourne, and you start to understand why a schooner costs what it does. I don’t love it, but the numbers are at least explainable.

What’s harder to explain, or excuse, is the venue gouging on top of all that. A former brewery owner in that thread noted that Rod Laver’s supplier would be paying well under four dollars a can. The margin between that and fifteen is not excise. That’s just extraction.

I remember when an hour’s wages bought you four or five beers at the pub. Someone in the comments said the same thing, and the maths checked out immediately. Now you’d be lucky to get one and a half. The pub used to be a genuinely democratic social space. Now it’s increasingly a place where only people with disposable income can afford to relax.

The downstream effects of this are weirder than a simple “people drink less” story. Some people are drinking at home instead, pre-loading before they go out, which is arguably worse from a harm-reduction standpoint than pacing yourself across a long evening at a bar. Others have switched to substances that are cheaper and, depending on who you ask, carry their own set of risks. And a lot of younger people just… aren’t going out at all. The social isolation angle in that thread felt understated to me. There’s something worth taking seriously in the idea that pricing people out of shared social spaces has costs that don’t show up neatly in a public health spreadsheet.

The smartwatch thing was new to me, though. Multiple people mentioned that seeing their HRV and sleep quality tank after a few drinks had genuinely changed their relationship with alcohol. I find that fascinating. Not a government campaign, not a health warning, just a graph on your wrist showing you the evidence in real time. That’s actually how you change behaviour: not punishment, but information.

The excise question is legitimately complicated. High taxes on alcohol do reduce consumption, and reduced consumption does reduce harm. The evidence on that is fairly solid. But there’s a version of this where you price out moderate, social drinkers, push the activity underground or into less safe contexts, and end up with outcomes nobody wanted. Victoria apparently has illegal alcohol making inroads now, which should make everyone nervous. The history of prohibition is not subtle on this point.

I don’t have a clean answer. I think the excise is probably too high, and I think venue rent is definitely too high, and I think the alcohol industry’s instinct to chase younger drinkers with gimmick products rather than fair pricing is both predictable and doomed. I also think some reduction in alcohol consumption is genuinely good for public health, and I can hold that at the same time as thinking fifteen dollars for a can of something at a sporting event is an insult.

The lobbyists who protect LNG export tax concessions while alcohol excise climbs automatically every six months are doing work that should attract more scrutiny than it does. That’s not a partisan point. It’s just a question of whose costs the system is designed to manage.

Anyway. Next time I’m at Rod Laver I’ll find the tap beer, drink one, and make it count.