The last days of froyo are way overdue

During the gruelling lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, my husband and I took meandering walks around our suburb. In one such walk, in a pocket of the inner north that we had never before come across, we found a long line curling beside a riverbank.

It was a glorious sight to behold in dark times and we assumed that some hot, new, takeaway-only cafe had opened. We joined the queue, admiring the moxie of opening a cafe mid-lockdown. It was only 15 minutes or so later that it occurred to us we should check what the deal was, and discovered we were, in fact, in a line for the only thing an entrepreneur should have been betting on in the early days of the pandemic: walk-through COVID testing.

There is nothing worth waiting in line for – especially not expensive, flavoured mud.Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

On the one hand, lining up filled in a bit of time in an otherwise empty day/week/month; on the other, it was a cautionary tale, a reminder of one of the only true rules in life: in a developed economy there is nothing worth waiting in line for. Ever.

So, with that in mind, let’s talk about the insanity of queuing for frozen yoghurt – which is a thing that happens both regularly and earnestly.

Froyo is one of those grotesqueries that has been around since Millennials were babies and Donald Trump was a joke on himself rather than the rest of humanity. The concept is inoffensive enough – the coldness, the sweetness, the treat-y-ness of ice cream but with the (alleged) healthiness of yoghurt.

There are definitely some good things about it. Froyo offers control over serving size and thus liberation from the 15-year-old employees at the ice-cream shops with their tiny teenager wrists who do not have the strength for adequate portions. And the shops are pretty much always self-serve, which means very limited and shame-free interactions with actual real people – just that one kid at the end who tells you how much it all is. (And soon, very soon, even that one kid will be obsolete.)

There is also something very gratifying about creating your own coils of multi-hued dairy slime and bedecking said monstrosity in colourful fruit, shards of chocolate, crumbed nuts and popcorn (none of which go together thematically). Further, the inclusion of fruit gives the impression of, if not health, then at least wellness. It is eating the rainbow if the rainbow had brownie in it.

However, for every concept that sounds charming in theory, there is of course the unforgiving reality. As with communism and music festivals, it only takes the general public to make something unworkable. Because while froyo takes portion control and puts it in the hands of the consumer (that’s good!), the consumer is a disgusting, germ-covered menace (that’s bad!).

The frozen-yoghurt experience inevitably involves using teeny-tiny tweezers and wee little scoops to apply brownie and pearls and fruit. This might sound OK but think about how many people have touched the little tweezers; and about how many people have breathed on the fruit; and how many kids have just dunked their hands into the chocolate buckets to look for the biggest bit. And then think about taking your multicoloured goo with sloppy breath-fruit and brownie and getting it weighed and finding out that your cup of germs and pomegranate seeds is going to cost you 25 bucks.

This isn’t just a me thing, either. People have been riffing on froyo for years. The Simpsons was making fun of it back when The Simpsons was good (remember that?), as was Daria (as an aside, is anyone else totally Team Quinn now that they are old? Daria must have been a freaking awful child to raise). In The Good Place the residents of secret hell were subjected to a frozen-yoghurt store because it was hell, and that underrated show died pre-COVID.

Bearing this in mind, I find it bizarre that frozen yoghurt continues to be line-worthy. It is particularly egregious because the popularity is most noticeable among Gen Zs and younger Millennials, who one would assume know better.

These kids are meant to make better choices than those that came before. They have their timely ADHD diagnoses and their Gen X parents who are nowhere near as traumatised by life as Boomer parents, and they don’t drink and they care about the environment. So why are they wasting their time on expensive, flavoured mud?

We have always run a good few decades behind America in the pop-culture space. Australians still thought The Simpsons was good long after its welcome was worn out in the US (in Australia’s defence, before subsidised out-of-school-hours care, a whole generation of kids was actually raised by The Simpsons). So it may be that froyo mockery has yet to penetrate local culture. But surely time is running out for froyo and its lines.

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