Gen Z doesn’t know how to act in bars
One of America’s favorite pastimes, right up there with baseball and gimmick food, is generational disdain. Gen Z is experiencing the same hot scrutiny that millennials, Gen X, and even baby boomers were subject to. Every little facet of their lives becomes a perplexing anthropological study, an affirmation to older people that youth is wasted […]
One of America’s favorite pastimes, right up there with baseball and gimmick food, is generational disdain. Gen Z is experiencing the same hot scrutiny that millennials, Gen X, and even baby boomers were subject to. Every little facet of their lives becomes a perplexing anthropological study, an affirmation to older people that youth is wasted on the young.
They’re having less sex and are praying more. They look old but are, taxonomically, young. They love TikTok and social media, but are antisocial and the loneliest young people have ever been.
Now that they’re adults, however, they (and our collective judgment) have entered a new arena: the bar. Gen Z, it seems, has no idea how to act at their local watering hole. The main points of contention are around payment mores and gathering expectations, and bartenders report that the generational shift in behavior is an actual pain for service workers. It brings up questions about how unspoken social customs are actually communicated and how important they are.
Obviously, it’s incredibly satisfying to point out how a person — or, even better, a whole group of people — does something wrong. It’s even more fulfilling to be able to signal a divide, a marker that, for objective scientific reasons, you could never be implicated in this type of chaotic discordance. Look at this worse person — who is nothing like me — move through the universe, incorrectly!
As enjoyable as it is pointing out another generation’s faults, it might be worth examining how real the problem is — and why there’s so much glee in this discovery.
Gen Z’s primary happy hour sin: closing tabs between rounds
The main bar-based observation of youth in the wild is simple: Gen Z supposedly closes out round after round, paying for each drink individually and making the bartender return to the till again and again.
