The $10 Sausage and the Theatre of Corporate Absurdity
There’s something delightfully ridiculous about a major Australian bank charging its own staff $10 for a sausage sizzle. When I first heard about ANZ’s “silly sausage” incident, I had to read it twice to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding. A sausage sizzle – that quintessential Aussie institution usually reserved for Bunnings fundraisers and school fetes – being monetized at $10 a pop for employees at a corporate event? It’s almost too perfect a metaphor for modern corporate culture.
The whole thing reads like satire, doesn’t it? One of the big four banks, posting billions in profits, deciding to charge their own employees ten bucks for what is traditionally a gesture of community and goodwill. The sausage sizzle is supposed to be the great Australian equalizer – cheap, cheerful, and accessible. But apparently, not in the world of corporate banking.
What really gets me about this whole situation is the sheer tone-deafness of it all. The online commentary has been predictably savage, and rightfully so. Someone joked about the Q3 earnings call having to report the discontinuation of the “$10 sausage revenue stream,” and honestly, that’s the level of absurdity we’re dealing with here. There’s also speculation about how much the branding and logo for this event must have cost – because heaven forbid we just fire up a barbecue without a comprehensive marketing strategy.
The responses I’ve been seeing online perfectly capture the frustration many of us feel about modern corporate life. When someone sarcastically posted “Will someone please think of the shareholders,” it struck a nerve. Because that’s always the answer, isn’t it? Everything – from wage stagnation to cost-cutting measures to charging employees for a bloody sausage – comes back to shareholder value.
One commenter pushed back on this, pointing out that through superannuation, most Australians are shareholders with hundreds of thousands tied up in the market. And yes, technically that’s true. I’ve got a super balance too, and it’s connected to these companies’ performance. But here’s the thing: we’ve been forced into this system. Our retirement security has been chained to corporate profits and market performance, creating this bizarre situation where we’re supposed to celebrate policies and decisions that might be actively making our working lives worse. It’s a neat trick, really – turn workers into shareholders so they can’t complain too loudly about exploitation without undermining their own retirement.
This is the contradiction at the heart of modern Australian capitalism. We’re all supposed to be stakeholders in the system, sharing in the prosperity of these massive companies. But when you’re being charged $10 for a sausage at a work event while the executives upstairs are collecting bonuses that could feed a small nation, it’s hard to feel like we’re all in this together.
The IT industry isn’t immune to this kind of corporate nonsense either. I’ve sat through enough “pizza parties” and “wellness initiatives” that were clearly meant to substitute for actual investment in employee wellbeing or fair compensation. The modern workplace has become expert at performative gestures while missing the fundamental point: people want to be valued, paid fairly, and treated with basic dignity. They don’t want to be nickel-and-dimed for a sausage sandwich.
What bothers me most is that somewhere in ANZ’s corporate structure, multiple people likely signed off on this. There were meetings. Possibly spreadsheets. Someone calculated the cost recovery for sausages. Someone else probably prepared talking points about “employee engagement initiatives.” The bureaucratic machinery of a massive corporation churned along, and at the end of it all, someone thought charging staff $10 for a snag was a good idea.
The incident has since been walked back after the inevitable backlash, but the damage to morale and public perception is done. And it raises questions about corporate culture more broadly. If this is how a bank treats its employees over something as trivial as a sausage sizzle, what does that say about how they view their staff in matters that actually count?
Look, I’m not suggesting we overthrow capitalism over a overpriced sausage. But these small moments of corporate absurdity are symptoms of a larger problem – the gradual erosion of the social contract between employers and employees, the prioritization of profit extraction over genuine community building, and the transformation of every human interaction into a potential revenue stream.
Maybe the real silly sausages are us for putting up with it. Or maybe, just maybe, incidents like this will continue to chip away at people’s patience until we collectively demand better. Until then, I’ll stick to my local Bunnings for my sausage sizzle needs – where they’re still a reasonable price and the profits actually go to community organizations. That’s the Australia I’d rather invest in.