Three Australian retail brands closed in a single week and the pattern is bigger than cost-of-living pressure

Glue Store, Barbeques Galore and Lincraft. A streetwear chain, a barbecue specialist and a craft store, three brands with nothing obviously in common, all shut within the same week in June.

Everyone's first instinct is to blame the cost of living. Fair enough, it's real and it's brutal. But an RMIT researcher reckons that's only half the story.

Associate Professor Carol Tan from RMIT's School of Fashion and Textiles calls it the "vanishing middle". These weren't businesses that lost relevance overnight or got blindsided by one bad year. They were stuck in the undifferentiated middle of retail, too ordinary to be worth a special trip and too expensive to compete on price.

Glue Store had been dressing Australian teenagers in Nike, Stussy and Carhartt for 28 years before it wound up this month. Its owner, Accent Group, hasn't left physical retail at all. It still runs Platypus, Hoka and a stack of other speciality sneaker and streetwear brands just fine. It simply walked away from the bit that wasn't working anymore.

Barbeques Galore fell into administration back in February and finally began winding up in June, closing 62 stores after 50 years in business. Lincraft shut its doors after 88 years, moving to an online only model and putting around 300 jobs at risk.

Consumer expert Trent Rigby puts it bluntly: both got caught in what he calls the "single-category speciality trap". Why drive somewhere for a barbecue when Bunnings has one and you're already there for the snags. Why pay Lincraft prices for craft supplies when Kmart, Temu or Shein will sell you something good enough for less.

That's the real pattern here. It's not that Australians have stopped shopping in person. Speciality stores with a genuine reason to exist and bargain retailers with genuine prices are both doing fine. It's the shops sitting vaguely in between, offering nothing distinctive, that are getting squeezed out.

So next time a mid-tier chain runs a "last trading day" sale, don't just sigh about the economy. Ask what that brand actually stood for. If you can't answer in one sentence, neither could its customers, and that's usually the real reason the lights go off.