The ‘Cereal Killer’ Hipsters are Tone Deaf to their ‘Privilege’, Sure. But It’s the Beards that Annoy Me

Marvellous scenes as bien-pensant Channel 4 News confronts the owners of a hipster cereal cafe, the oh-so-wittily named Cereal Killer, on camera about why they’re charging £3 for a bowl of breakfast cereal in an area of the country where half of all children live in poverty. 

It’s delicious not just for the overtones of Left-on-Left ultraviolence, but because the hipsters in question, owners Gary and Alan Keely, were so obviously, completely, totally unprepared to have their cosseted little world questioned. If, like me, you’re a connoisseur of excruciating television, it’s a must-watch. 

I don’t, personally, care about the cost of their cereal. If you’re stupid enough to go out of your way to spend £3 on a novelty cereal drenched in almond milk and sprinkled with artisanal hundreds and thousands surrounded by Shoreditch bozos sipping “flat whites” then frankly you deserve to be taken advantage of. 

I imagine most Tower Hamlets residents, like me, react to Cereal Killer with laughter rather than resentment or anger.

In fact, the only thing offensive about Cereal Killer is the odious, homogenous styling of its owners and clientele. What’s remarkable about hipster culture is how incredibly samey it is–more so than perhaps any other alternative aesthetic. Hipsters don’t just dress similarly, they dress exactly the same. They don’t just listen to similar bands, the listen to exactly the same bands. 

Every hipster coffee shop looks identical. Every restaurant has the same menu with the same ingredients and staff who look like clones of one another. And every one of them exhibits the same predictable lack of economic and racial awareness when they move into impoverished black and Asian areas because they think they’re “grimy” and cool”.

So they move in, like middle-class locusts, bringing their beards and their terrible taste in cocktails, and their inability to find real jobs, whinging when the noise they make about the area is finally noticed by developers and blocks of flats start going up.  

As alternative lifestyles go, surely we Brits, with our history of punk and God knows what other fabulously subversive subcultures, can do better? Cereal Killers was a fun story, but I think it’s time to relegate parasitic design agency hipsters, and their infantilised world of fixie bikes and all-day breakfast cereal, to Room 101.