We're hammered about our struggling underclass, the need for a "living wage", the financially pressed middle-class and the widening gap between the affluent and the impoverished. I don't argue any of that's untrue. But here's the puzzle. Wellington's CBD has literally hundreds of cafes, restaurants, coffee houses, sushi bars, sandwich shops etc, packed daily with moderate-income office workers, from 11.30am to 3pm. So, too, in Auckland and Dunedin but it doesn't stop there. For whether Feilding, Paeroa, Dannevirke, Cambridge, Nelson, Timaru, it matters not, our small towns are also filled with cafes and coffee houses, all awash with lunchtime customers. So it appears that large numbers of...
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