ABSTRACT
Melbourne is internationally renowned for its cafe and bar culture contributing to its global liveability standard, as well as its celebration of street laneways, graffiti, and possibly even its cycling culture, too. Hospitality is embedded in the culture of the city. Part of the intensity of competition in Melbourne's cafe and bar industry, and the saturated hospitality market, is the very rapid development of high-density living in Melbourne's inner northern suburbs, where gentrification has intensified and property is becoming increasingly commercialised and thus unaffordable. Hospitality is especially lived by way of its centrality to private and public sociality. The embeddedness of cafes and bars means Melburnians are expected to know the trade through being the daily patrons of a saturated and wants-based market. But the common sense required of cafe- and bar-goers in Melbourne was a spectrum of taken-for-granted knowledge, insofar as the range of people's understandings of industry standards spanned far and wide.
