Melanie McDonagh promotes friction maxxing thrift

Energy shocks have a way of arriving twice: first as a headline, then as a household routine. In a column for the Evening Standard, Melanie McDonagh argues that the Gulf crisis will soon turn “friction maxxing” from a viral lifestyle choice into a forced budget strategy, with higher petrol, aviation fuel and eventually uncapped bills squeezing discretionary spending.

McDonagh’s target is not policy but culture: the new vocabulary that makes austerity sound like self-improvement. “Friction maxxing” is her shorthand for undoing a decade of convenience—Deliveroo, Uber, online grocery deliveries—by reintroducing effort and time. The joke is that many people are already living this way; the point is that more will have to. She frames thrift not as a virtue rediscovered by enlightened consumers but as an old constraint returning under new conditions.

The column’s list of prescriptions is deliberately mundane: make sandwiches instead of buying them, stop buying takeaway coffee, cook at home, eat cheaper cuts like offal, walk more. Each item is priced in weekly totals, turning small habits into line items that can be “reallocated” to unavoidable costs like heating. The implied mechanism is simple: when essentials rise, the household budget doesn’t expand; it reshuffles. Convenience services are among the first to be cut because they are paid in cash rather than embedded in fixed contracts.

What makes the argument travel is its moral packaging. The same behaviour—consuming less, doing more labour at home—can be sold as either deprivation or character-building. McDonagh leans into the second, invoking wartime Britain’s “make do and mend” culture, debt aversion, and the normalisation of repairing rather than replacing. The reader is invited to treat the loss of convenience as a return to competence.

The column does not dwell on why energy costs spike, why caps exist, or who pays for them when they do. But its framing hints at a familiar division of labour: geopolitics and energy policy are decided far from the kitchen, while the adjustment is performed inside it. When the price system sends the signal, households respond with substitutions—time for money, cooking for delivery, walking for rides—regardless of whether the underlying shock came from war risk, regulation, or fiscal choices.

McDonagh’s thrift manifesto ends up as a small field guide to how living standards fall in practice. The first cuts are rarely dramatic; they are the quiet disappearance of the £3.90 cappuccino and the £5.50 Pret sandwich.

In McDonagh’s version, the future arrives not with a recession statistic but with a thermos flask on the morning commute.