When did Friday afternoon drinks stop being a ritual and start becoming a memory? For hospitality operators in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane's city centres, the answer is uncomfortably recent, and the trend shows little sign of reversing.
The rise of working from home on Fridays has drained foot traffic from Australia's major CBDs at precisely the moment operators once relied on most. Pubs, cafes and restaurants that built their business models around the end-of-week surge are now reckoning with a structural shift in how Australians work, and where they choose to unwind.
One shopfront in North Sydney, a major commercial hub, recently told patrons it would be shutting its doors on Fridays outright, citing insufficient foot traffic to justify staying open. That is not a business in distress from bad management. That is a business responding rationally to a market that has moved on.
Joe, a restaurateur and cafe owner with multiple venues in Brisbane's CBD, told 9News that the iconic Friday afternoon drinks culture had effectively vanished. "Once upon a time, Friday afternoon drinks was a real iconic outing," he said. "That's now shifted to Thursday, but not in the same volume." He described Fridays as "well and truly over" by lunchtime, with some operators shortening hours or simply closing until Sunday. His coffee shops, too, are recording weaker Friday sales.
Wes Lambert, chief executive of the Australian Restaurant and Cafe Association, offered a frank assessment: it may already be too late for CBD businesses to recover pre-pandemic foot traffic levels. "Thursday is the new Friday when it comes to office workers and the CBD," he said. Lambert said he was "surprised and flabbergasted" to see the Victorian government pursue legislation that would enshrine a right to work from home, noting that Melbourne's office vacancy rate has already climbed to a 30-year high. If such laws pass, he warned, the trickle of workers returning to the city could slow further still.
The counter-argument deserves serious consideration. Remote work has delivered genuine benefits to millions of Australians, particularly those with caring responsibilities, long commutes, or disabilities that make office attendance physically demanding. The Fair Work Commission has been navigating competing claims around flexibility and employer needs for some time, and the evidence on productivity is genuinely mixed. Proponents of work-from-home legislation argue the old CBD-centric model was never as equitable as its defenders now claim.
There is also an economic redistribution argument worth taking seriously. The foot traffic that has left Sydney's CBD and Brisbane's city centre has not simply disappeared. It has migrated to local neighbourhoods, and some businesses there are thriving as a direct result.
Rebecca O'Shea and her sisters own Bar Nina in Sydney's Darlinghurst and wine bar Arms Length in Potts Point. Both venues sit outside the CBD, and both have experienced the opposite of what Joe and his colleagues are living through. O'Shea told 9News that her customers increasingly include people who work in the city but live locally and are knocking off early from home. "We've got a lot of customers who might work in the city, but they live in Darlinghurst," she said. Her team has adapted by opening from breakfast through to last drinks, extending the window for that diverted trade to flow through the door.
Lambert acknowledged this redistribution plainly: "Consumers are choosing to not be in the office on Fridays, and hence, they're more likely to go to their local pub or the restaurants and cafes around their home, rather than in a CBD."
The fundamental question is whether governments should tilt the playing field further, or allow the market to keep redistributing. Victoria's proposed right-to-work-from-home legislation is not, as its critics sometimes frame it, a fringe idea. Several European countries have moved in similar directions, and Australian workers have made clear through their behaviour that flexibility is now a baseline expectation, not a perk. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has documented the sustained shift in working patterns since 2020, and the data does not suggest a voluntary mass return to five-day office attendance is coming.
At the same time, the cost to CBD economies is real and measurable. Businesses that invested in city-centre locations made those decisions under a different set of assumptions, and many of them are now carrying leases, staff rosters and overheads that made sense in 2019 and make very little sense today. The Parliament of Australia has yet to grapple seriously with the downstream fiscal consequences of hollowed-out CBDs, including reduced council rates, GST implications from lower hospitality turnover, and the knock-on effects for commercial property values.
Strip away the talking points and what remains is a genuine tension between two legitimate goods: worker autonomy and the economic vitality of shared urban spaces. Neither side has the whole answer. The workers who prefer Fridays at home are not selfish, and the operators who cannot stay open without them are not incompetent. Both are responding logically to a set of incentives that shifted dramatically during the pandemic and have not shifted back.
The smarter policy conversation, one that is frustratingly absent from both the pro-WFH and the return-to-office camps, is how to redesign CBD spaces and business models for the world that actually exists now. That might mean zoning reform, mixed-use precincts, or targeted support for areas experiencing structural trade decline. Pretending Friday drinks will simply return on their own is wishful thinking. So is ignoring the genuine costs when they don't.