Iran International
Rising living costs have forced many Iranians to give up cafes and restaurants, turning a once-routine form of leisure into an expense increasingly squeezed out by rent, food and healthcare, messages to Iran International say.
“Cafe and restaurant outings are a form of recreation and something people look forward to, but inflation and rising costs have deprived many people even of that,” one audience member wrote.
Responses to an Iran International question about monthly cafe spending ranged from zero to hundreds of millions of rials. For many respondents, however, “nothing” and “zero” were the recurring answers.
When essentials leave Iranians nothing for a coffee
Several people said they had not visited a cafe or restaurant for months or years because rent, utility bills, medical care, food and debt payments had taken priority.
“How much do we earn in this inflation for anything to be left for recreation? We work from morning until night and can only pay the rent,” one person wrote.
Another said even buying enough food had become difficult.
“We are trying to be able to provide two meals a day. Going to a cafe has become completely out of reach for us,” the respondent wrote.
Healthcare expenses featured repeatedly in the messages. One person said a root canal on August 10 cost 120 million rials ($65), leaving no money for leisure or cafe visits.
Many Iranian workers earn around 200 million to 250 million rials ($108-$134) a month. The rial trades at around 1.86 million to the dollar on the free market.
Another, a retired education worker, said even one restaurant or cafe visit a year was unaffordable.
“I pay for medicine and doctors in installments,” the retiree wrote.
Others described a gradual erosion of living standards rather than a sudden end to leisure spending. One said the family had gone to cafes or restaurants around three times a month until relatively recently but was now buying basic necessities on credit.
“Expenses such as cafes and restaurants, recreation and travel disappeared a long time ago, and only essential costs such as healthcare, food, rent and installments remain,” another person wrote.
Some said even those essentials were becoming increasingly difficult to afford.
“We have become dependent on money for our daily bread. Where would we find money for cafes or eating out? Buying fruit has become a dream for us,” one person wrote.
Another said the family had been unable to afford recreation or leisure activities for about one or two years and believed much of society was focused primarily on getting by.
A simple cafe order costs millions of rials
Prices listed by cafes on SnappFood application show how quickly even relatively simple orders can add up.
An Americano at cafes reviewed by Iran International started at about 1.1 million rials ($0.59) and reached roughly 3.8 million rials ($2.04) at some establishments. Espresso prices exceeded 3 million rials ($1.61) in some cases.
Breakfast dishes started at around 2 million rials ($1.08) at some cafes, while options including omelets or bread, cheese and herbs could cost more than 4 million rials ($2.15).
One said two drinks and a slice of cake for two people now cost about 12 million rials ($6.45).
Another calculated that buying only a morning espresso every day would cost 60 million to 70 million rials ($32-$38) a month.
Prices vary substantially by city, neighborhood and establishment, but several cafe visits each week can push monthly spending into tens of millions of rials.
Millions spent to preserve a social life
Not everyone has stopped going. Some said they deliberately continued setting aside money for cafes despite rising costs, describing the outings as one of their remaining opportunities for socializing and escaping daily pressures.
Monthly spending among this group commonly ranged from 50 million to 100 million rials ($27-$54), according to figures respondents provided, with some putting their spending at 150 million to 200 million rials ($81-$108) or as much as 300 million rials ($161).
“Every day I buy a shot of coffee and a small bottle of water from a cafe, and maybe a vitamin C drink. I calculated that it comes to around 50 million rials ($27) a month,” one person wrote.
Another said they visited cafes at least 20 times a month.
The spending does not necessarily reflect financial comfort, according to some of the messages. Citizens described paying for cafes as a way to preserve a fragment of ordinary social life despite the squeeze on household budgets.
One person estimated that under current prices, even a relatively frugal young person could face monthly expenses of 150 million to 300 million rials ($81-$161), rising to between 400 million and 700 million rials ($215-$376) with greater spending, whether on cafes or other necessities.
Cafe owners squeezed by debt and closures
Cafe owners and workers who contacted Iran International described the other side of the contraction in discretionary spending: fewer customers alongside rising operating costs and debt.
One respondent from Khuzestan said debt had forced them out of business.
“I have been unemployed for two months because of debt, I lost my cafe, my bank installments are overdue and there is nothing I can do,” the person wrote.
Businesses also face closures linked to enforcement of Iran's mandatory hijab rules. Another pointed to cafes being sealed in Qazvin over compliance with the dress code.
For many, cafe outings have therefore become another measure of shrinking household choices: eliminated altogether by some families and maintained at considerable cost by others seeking a few hours of social life outside the pressures of everyday expenses.
Germany's embassy in Tehran remains on emergency operations because of the security situation in Iran, with its visa section closed to regular visitors and no regular visa appointments being issued, the German Foreign Office told Iran International on Tuesday.
National visa applications from people who have already appeared at the embassy or its external service provider will continue to be processed within the embassy's available capacity, the ministry said. Visas that are ready to be issued will also be handed out at the embassy in Tehran where capacity allows.
"Due to the current security situation in Iran, the embassy and, in particular, the consular and visa section in Tehran continue to operate in emergency mode," the ministry told Iran International. "The visa section is closed to regular visitors until further notice; no regular visa appointments are being issued."
The ministry said the current crisis had worsened an already difficult situation, as the embassy's visa section had been operating with severe technical and staffing limits since events in Iran in June 2025.
It said it was continuing efforts to expand capacity for accepting visa applications from Iran.
Germany has also created separate arrangements for Iranian nationals living in Iran who are seeking visas for family reunification.
Applicants who previously registered on the German embassy's appointment waiting list and have not canceled their registration are being contacted to submit applications in Istanbul through the International Organization for Migration's Family Assistance Programme, the ministry told Iran International.
Priority is being given to applicants whose previously scheduled appointments at the German embassy in Tehran were canceled because of the military conflict in Iran. Appointments will then be offered in chronological order based on the original registrations.
Visa service provider TLScontact is also issuing new appointments to some applicants with preliminary approval under Germany's fast-track procedure for skilled workers.
This applies to eligible applicants who were on the service provider's waiting list as of Jan. 18 or whose appointments were canceled after the embassy closed from Jan. 16.
Since July 15, applicants in several national visa categories, including students and doctors, who were not previously on a waiting list have also been able to register on new waiting lists. It is not yet clear when appointments will be offered to those applicants.
Workers across Iran’s mining, industrial and municipal sectors say they have gone months without full pay, while some employers have also cut staff, deepening pressure on households already struggling with rising living costs.
Messages sent to Iran International describe wage arrears ranging from several weeks to eight months at mining operations in different parts of the country. Iran International could not independently verify the accounts.
The wife of an employee at the Sanghan iron ore mine in Khaf, northeastern Iran, said her husband, who has worked there for 24 years, had not received a salary for three months despite receiving his work statement through late June.
Workers at the Chah Firouzeh copper mine in Kerman province were still waiting for their June wages, according to another message.
At Gol Gohar in Sirjan, also in Kerman, workers had gone eight months without pay and some employees had been dismissed without receiving wages owed to them, another message said.
Similar complaints have emerged from major industrial companies.
Employees at MAPNA Locomotive in Karaj, west of Tehran, have gone four months without full wages, according to information received by Iran International.
One employee said workers received just 20% of their salary last month and that the payment problems began during the 40-day war and have continued since. Staff are reluctant to protest because they fear layoffs and are already under severe financial pressure, the employee said.
Contract employees at Iran Air have also reported reduced and delayed pay since the war. One employee said salaries had not returned to previous levels even after the company’s revenues recovered, adding that workers who complained risked losing their jobs.
In Sari, a northern city near the Caspian Sea, another source told Iran International that municipal employees and workers had gone three months without pay.
“We really don’t know where to turn,” the source said.
Household pressure
The wage problems come amid broader economic strains acknowledged by senior Iranian officials.
Central Bank Governor Abdolnasser Hemmati said Friday there was “no doubt that Iran’s economy faces serious problems,” adding that war and economic pressure had worsened inflation and unemployment. He rejected, however, suggestions that the economy faced an “imminent collapse.”
Even for workers receiving their wages, earnings increasingly fall short of basic living costs.
The semi-official ILNA news agency reported that many households exhaust their salaries before the middle of the month, forcing them to rely on installment plans and credit for routine expenses.
Majid Rahmati, a member of Tehran’s Coordination Council of Islamic Labor Councils, said in May that the minimum monthly household living basket had risen to around 70 million tomans, while married workers were receiving roughly 24 million tomans a month.
Iran’s statutory base minimum wage is around 16.6 million tomans a month before benefits, according to a Labor Ministry wage directive reported by the Tasnim news agency.
For those waiting months to be paid, the problem is compounded by what workers describe as a lack of effective recourse.
Some employees told Iran International they feared layoffs if they protested over unpaid wages, while others said complaints to labor authorities had failed to produce results.
Masoud Pezeshkian may have a claim to being Iran’s unluckiest president, with his two years in office dominated by wars that have battered an already ailing economy to the point that keeping households above subsistence would count as an achievement.
Pezeshkian inherited years of accumulated economic problems, many created or left unresolved by previous administrations, before war deepened those structural weaknesses.
Two recent assessments of his record suggest the result is something larger than the difficulties of one presidency: the ambitions of government itself are contracting from development toward survival.
“Pezeshkian thinks the nation should thank him only because there is no famine in Iran yet,” said Nasrallah Pejmanfar, an ultraconservative cleric and lawmaker from Shiraz.
Pejmanfar intended the remark as an attack. But it echoed a more substantive criticism offered by sociologist Hamzeh Nozari in the moderate daily Shargh: that merely preventing extreme deprivation is increasingly becoming a measure of government success.
From development to survival
Nozari focused on the government’s emphasis on protecting “people’s livelihood” through subsidies, electronic coupons and efforts to secure basic goods.
Such policies may prevent extreme poverty, he argued, but they also reveal how far the ambitions of government have narrowed.
“Providing a minimal living and securing a hand-to-mouth existence is the ruling paradigm of the government, while concepts like welfare, progress and development are sidelined,” Nozari wrote.
He contrasted the current approach with previous periods when Iranian governments, however successfully, pursued broader ambitions: economic expansion in the late 1980s, greater political openness in the 1990s and redistribution in the following decade.
The question, he argued, is whether this “livelihood paradigm” is a temporary response to war and economic emergency or a more permanent retreat from development.
The economics of scarcity
Economist Teymour Rahmani, writing in Donya-ye Eghtesad, approached the same crisis from a different direction.
For Rahmani, the central problem is inflation, driven above all by a severe fiscal imbalance as government revenues decline while large and inefficient expenditures continue.
He rejected the common explanation that the falling rial is itself responsible for accelerating inflation. Currency depreciation and rising prices, he argued, are symptoms of the same underlying fiscal problem.
“The fact that inflationary force manifests first through the exchange-rate channel and that exchange-rate increases precede inflation spikes does not mean currency depreciation is the root cause,” he wrote.
The consequences are increasingly visible across the country. Rahmani pointed to point-to-point inflation of 112.4 percent in the western province of Ilam, with other poorer provinces including Lorestan, Kurdistan and Hormozgan also experiencing triple-digit inflation.
He argued that Iran has entered an inflationary environment unlike any in its modern history, while crediting experienced civil servants and residual public confidence in the monetary system with helping prevent a slide into full hyperinflation.
“We must understand that inflation is the primary issue of the Iranian economy,” Rahmani wrote, warning that the underlying fiscal imbalance must be addressed.
Administering scarcity
The two analyses approach Pezeshkian’s predicament from different directions but arrive at closely related conclusions.
Nozari describes the consequence: a government whose conception of success increasingly revolves around maintaining minimum living standards. Rahmani describes the economic machinery pushing it there: fiscal imbalance, declining revenues and inflation severe enough to overwhelm household purchasing power.
Neither problem began with Pezeshkian. He inherited years of accumulated economic weakness, while war and sanctions have sharply worsened the conditions under which his government operates.
But two years into his presidency, the distinction between emergency measures and a longer-term transformation is becoming harder to make.
A government occupied with keeping food affordable, financing subsidies and preventing inflation from becoming still more destructive has increasingly little room to pursue the growth, welfare and development promised in its economic plans.
Soaring food prices are reshaping what Iranian families eat, with new figures showing a steep decline in dairy consumption alongside a longer retreat from red meat as household purchasing power erodes.
Annual dairy consumption has fallen from around 130 kilograms per person in 2010 to just 40 kilograms today, according to Ali Ehsan Zafari, head of Iran's Dairy Cooperatives Union.
According to the latest figures from the Statistical Center of Iran, dairy products in July cost around 147 percent more than a year earlier.
The fall in consumption leaves Iran well below both international and regional levels. Global dairy consumption averages roughly 117–119 kilograms per person annually, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), while neighboring Turkey consumes more than 250 kilograms per capita.
At 40 kilograms, Iran's consumption is now roughly one-third of the global average.
Meat disappears
The retreat from dairy follows a longer change in Iranian diets as years of inflation and declining purchasing power have pushed households away from more expensive sources of animal protein.
FAO data show Iran's red meat supply fell to approximately 623,000 metric tons last year, around 20 percent lower than in 2024 and nearly 39 percent below its 2010 level.
Over much of that period, poultry offered families a cheaper alternative. Per capita poultry consumption has risen by roughly 40 percent since 2010, suggesting households have increasingly substituted chicken for more expensive beef and lamb.
The comparison with Turkey illustrates how differently consumption has developed across the two neighboring countries.
Poultry consumption in Turkey also rose by about 40 percent over the same period, but red meat consumption increased by 146 percent. FAO estimates put per capita red meat consumption in Turkey at roughly 3.9 times the Iranian level.
The figures do not by themselves explain the reasons for the divergence, but Iran's shift toward cheaper poultry has taken place during a prolonged erosion of household purchasing power and repeated surges in food prices.
Fewer alternatives
That substitution is becoming harder as inflation spreads across virtually every source of animal protein.
Prices of beef, lamb and chicken were all around 149 percent higher in July than a year earlier, according to the Statistical Center of Iran. Dairy prices rose by a similar 147 percent.
The latest increases follow the recent war, which added to existing inflationary pressures and accelerated price rises across basic goods.
For years, households unable to afford beef and lamb could turn to chicken. The sharp increase in poultry prices now threatens that fallback, while the collapse in dairy consumption suggests even relatively basic sources of animal protein are becoming harder for many families to afford.
The consequences are potentially significant, particularly for lower-income households and children whose diets depend on affordable sources of protein and calcium.
But the figures also point to a broader change in Iranian living standards: families are not simply paying more for the same food. They are changing what they eat, and increasingly giving up foods that were once ordinary parts of the household diet.
After years of substituting cheaper foods for more expensive ones, the narrowing range of affordable alternatives raises a more immediate question: what is left to substitute?
Mohsen Rezaei was appointed as Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s representative on Iran’s Supreme National Security Council on Sunday, before being named secretary of the powerful security body.
“In view of your valuable experience, I hereby appoint you ... as my representative on the Supreme National Security Council,” Khamenei said in a decree, describing Rezaei as a veteran of the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War.
Rezaei commanded the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from 1981 to 1997, including through much of the war. He also serves as a senior military adviser to Khamenei and is a member of the Expediency Council.
Khamenei’s decree also thanked Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, who had been SNSC secretary and one of the Supreme Leader’s representatives on the council, for his “tireless efforts day and night.” The decree did not say he was stepping down as SNSC secretary.
Shortly after the announcement, IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News reported, citing the president’s office, that President Masoud Pezeshkian had appointed Rezaei as SNSC secretary.
“Following Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr’s resignation as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and his acceptance of a new responsibility, Mohsen Rezaei has been appointed secretary of the Supreme National Security Council by decree of President Masoud Pezeshkian,” said Tabatabaei, deputy for communications and information at the president’s office.
The SNSC is Iran’s top national security body, coordinating security and foreign policy and bringing together senior political, military and intelligence officials. The president chairs the council, while the Supreme Leader appoints two representatives to it.
Zolghadr, a former senior IRGC commander, took over as SNSC secretary in March, a week after Ali Larijani was killed in US-Israeli strikes. Larijani had returned to the post in August 2025 after previously serving as secretary from 2005 to 2007 and as parliament speaker from 2008 to 2020.
Zolghadr’s resignation
The appointments followed days of reports about Zolghadr’s position.
Earlier on Sunday, Tasnim removed a report announcing Rezaei’s appointment as Khamenei’s representative on the council. The outlet did not explain the deletion. The report had said Rezaei and Saeed Jalili would serve as the Supreme Leader’s two representatives on the SNSC.
Reformist newspaper Sazandegi reported on Friday that Zolghadr had offered his resignation but Pezeshkian had asked him to remain.
A day later, Pezeshkian did not deny that Zolghadr had offered to resign, saying there were “some differences that we are trying to resolve.”
Senior cleric and Khamenei relative Mohammad Bagher Kharrazi had also said on Monday that Rezaei was set to replace Zolghadr.
