Quartz
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As service jobs offer less security, recognition and progression, some young workers are questioning why they should be warm to customers when the workplace gives little back.
The ‘Gen Z stare’ and service work in today’s economy
Author: Catherine Baab
Justin Cale was still in high school when family problems pushed him out of his mother’s home and into a government-run group home for boys. A job at McDonald’s helped him cover the expenses of semi-independent living, and even allowed him to contribute small household necessities — “the fine china,” he joked, recalling what the boys called plastic utensils.
At McDonald’s, Cale learned the choreography of fast food: taking orders through a headset, making drinks, cooking fries, handing food through the window, all while a screen tracked the restaurant’s performance against every other McDonald’s location in the area. He liked his first store, in part because he had a manager he respected — someone who treated his staff with respect, too, praising employees for good work and offering support through tough shifts. Cale felt he was “building connections and experience, developing yourself.”
“The work itself is kind of sh—ty,” he said in an interview. “But good people can make it better.”
But once Cale moved to another McDonald’s location, things changed. He had started at $11 an hour. After a year of what he considered especially hard work, he got a mere 25-cent raise. Then the company raised the general wage floor, flattening the distinction between his pay and that of coworkers he felt had put in less effort. The restaurant could measure drive-thru times down to the minute, but it had no comparable system for rewarding the people who made those numbers possible.
“What am I working for here?” Cale remembered thinking.
Cale, now 20 and a Texas-based entrepreneur, is not who most people picture when they complain about what’s become known as the “Gen Z stare.” His business, which makes custom leather armor and accessories for Renaissance-faire and fantasy-culture customers, depends on the social skills younger workers are often accused of lacking: listening to strangers, asking probing questions, and translating what they want into finished pieces of art. In conversation, he ranges happily from fantasy fiction to contemporary American politics and obscure ancient history. But he does think the latest Gen Z stereotype contains at least a little truth.
The stare
The “Gen Z stare” is the internet’s name for a familiar encounter in which a customer asks a young cashier a question and gets a pause, a blank look, and not much of the eye contact or default friendliness older customers expect. It’s easy to find irritating: You’re paying $8 for a coffee and asked to add a tip, too, whether or not the person handing it over can quite bring themselves to even say hello. Mocking videos abound across Instagram and TikTok.
Cale thinks his generation’s digital upbringing is part of the story. Young people like him grew up in social worlds mediated by phones, platforms, memes, and fandoms — an observation supported by Pew Research Center data showing that almost half of U.S. teens now say they are online almost constantly. Cale puts the imbalance more sharply, saying his generation has been “protected in real life” but not online. This constant online connection can be deceptive in its own way, he said, never really satisfying the desire it runs on.
That doesn’t mean Gen Z can’t socialize in real life. Cale’s own social life runs through the Renaissance-fair and fantasy communities, deeply social spaces where his business grows directly out of conversation. But that language is dense with references opaque to outsiders, and to someone outside these fan communities, its allusive nature could read as superficial, even if insiders experience it as intimate and personal.
At the same time, he’s wary of calling any of it proof of a uniquely defective generation. After all, grumbling about young people has been around since Socrates. Before older generations dismiss the stare as rudeness or reflecting a lack of social experience, they might consider the stare as a lucid, meaningful response. Failing to perform pleasantness while working service jobs with no security, poor compensation, and indifferent management may simply be a rational response to today’s conditions, Cale said.
In this, he echoes the Canadian professor Nitin Deckha’s recent argument that Gen Z’s “shocking” levels of burnout may be tied to the “intensification of economic disruption, widening inequality, increasing costs of housing and living and the rise of precarious employment.”
The customer is not always right
For decades, American service work has required more than competence. It has required performance: smile, greet, sound delighted to help, stay pleasant even when the customer is impatient or mean. This is emotional labor — managing your own feelings to produce a particular feeling in someone else. And in service work, the employee’s personality becomes part of the product.
Cale sees some of Gen Z’s flatness as a rejection of that demand. The customer-is-always-right rule, he said, has always concealed a more complicated reality. Customers can be wrong and rude, and still expect a young person on near-minimum wage to absorb their frustration with a smile. “You guys are often treating us like garbage,” he said, describing the sentiment he sees among people his age. Previous generations may have felt they had to put up with it. “But we don’t necessarily have to.”
Not every blank stare is an act of resistance. Plenty can be explained as run-of-the-mill anxiety and ordinary social awkwardness. But some of it may indeed be a conscious withholding of emotional labor, reflecting a decision not to perform gratitude just because someone wants a latte. Recent research out of Purdue University, which looked at the effect of this kind of “surface acting” on restaurant employees, discovered links between performing emotions one doesn’t feel and lower job satisfaction, as well as a greater intention to leave the job. Similarly, a Virginia Tech study looking at restaurant workers’ stress levels during the pandemic found that their stress increased the more that emotional labor was required, especially when tied to compensation through tipping.
Viewed in this light, forgoing such emotional labor might be seen as an act of economically oriented self-preservation, as less a rejection of a job duty than an attempt to preserve one’s ability to do the job at all.
The skimped-out service economy
The timing of all this matters, because service itself is changing. As Scott Wolla of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has argued, restaurants, hotels, airlines, and retailers have now spent years cutting staff, automating routine tasks, adding fees, and shifting work onto customers — QR-code ordering, self-checkout, less frequent hotel housekeeping. Because labor is expensive, the business case for skimping on service is obvious.
Many of the changes grew out of pandemic-era inflation shocks, and yet the result can still feel like a poorly communicated change. If you’ve paid $13 for an ice cream cone lately, and been defaulted to a screen that suggests you add a 25% tip to order that cone from an iPad, then you already know how customers are paying more for small items, while customer service has been cut to the bone. Fewer workers cover more tasks, with fewer colleagues, with The Economist suggesting these conditions have helped inspire many workers to flee the sector in recent years.
Cale remembers the visual pressure of that drive-thru screen, ranking his store against every other location in real time — a standard, a sequence, a score, but no comparable system for making workers feel like their effort mattered much. Companies can demand a spirit of hospitality, but in real time, hospitality requires enough people on shift, decent managers, wages that reward experience, protection from abusive customers, and some credible reason to think competence leads somewhere. Strip those away and keep insisting on the smile, and the smile starts to look less like professionalism than a sort of blank-check-style withdrawal from the employee’s own emotional reserves.
What am I working for?
Cale’s disappointment with that 25-cent raise points to something companies often miss: Employees respond not just to what they earn today, but to whether the workplace offers a clear path forward. He had worked hard because he believed effort would be recognized; instead there was no real mechanism separating diligence from just going through the motions. Employers have detailed systems for measuring output and no equally convincing answer to a worker’s basic question: If I do this exceptionally well, what changes for me?
It’s a subtle shift that turns service work from a first step into a holding pattern. Cale described coworkers who had graduated college and were still behind the counter, sending out applications, having followed the prescribed sequence exactly. “We’re going through all the steps that you’re supposed to go through,” he said, “and getting none of the rewards that you’re supposed to get.” That produces cynicism, which can look as much like burnout as anger. Sometimes it looks like someone who can’t summon the energy to pretend that this job is where they want to be at that particular moment, much less in general.
Nikita Khandheria, the 24-year-old founder and chief executive of ERIA, a Northern California events and hospitality company, argues that the Gen Z work-ethic stereotype is mostly a mistake of visibility. “Just because we’re seeing more of them doesn’t mean that by quantity it’s more,” she said of the young people who seem disengaged or unmotivated. “I don’t think that we’re any less hardworking.”
Khandheria, 24, runs a deliberately demanding workplace. She tells applicants that they will not last at ERIA if they do not want to become “the best” at what they do, then uses a two-week trial period before making a formal offer. In return, she said, she gives young employees responsibility and room to advance. One employee began as an HR intern and is now ERIA’s director of business development; another started as a busser and became regional director of operations.
Not that every young worker arrives ready-made for hospitality, she said. But warmth, communication, and professional ambition can be cultivated when the job offers standards, training, responsibility, and a believable path upward.
The end of institutional faith
Still, the larger social and economic backdrop matters. Cale’s read on his generation begins with a relative absence of institutional faith — not trust that eroded over time, as with older generations, but faith that, more or less, never solidified to begin. Gen Z came of age amid political deadlocks, the global pandemic, and a labor market where credentials don’t reliably yield stability. He points out, too, that his generation was raised on dystopian fiction like The Hunger Games and Divergent, worlds where institutions aren’t so much fallible as actively rigged. Meanwhile, his impression is supported by research from the Harvard Kennedy School showing younger Americans have little faith in government and Gallup research showing similar distrust of major societal institutions considered more broadly, such as tech companies, “the news,” and the justice system. (In fact, science itself was the only institution to enjoy the trust of a majority of Gen Z respondents.)
The effect, Cale said, is a preference for smaller systems where the line between effort and reward is visible.
But this preference for work environments where effort has a visible payoff reflects a much older, in fact longstanding finding in workplace research, rather than any uniquely Gen Z one. Researchers have found, again and again, across tens of thousands of people and multiple decades, that jobs tend to be more satisfying when workers have some autonomy, can build and use skills, receive meaningful feedback, see the significance of what they do, and believe effort can lead to growth. In the classic language of work-design research, autonomy and social support are among the strongest predictors of job satisfaction.
Cale’s own answer was entrepreneurship: leatherworking learned from his father, a business built around custom armor and accessories, physical and skill-based, tied to a community that cares about the objects themselves. His business still calls for service work — he has to listen, try to understand what a stranger wants, and make them feel heard — but his craft is visible, his labor isn’t anonymous, and if he does the job well, he has a direct stake in that outcome.
The cliché may be that Gen Z is disengaged. His story suggests something more specific: young people increasingly finding that service work expectations are out of line with rewards, disengaging from systems that offer them little in return, and instead investing in smaller, more personal ones where skill and relationships produce a return they can see, enjoy, and bank on.
A changing definition of service
Maybe the real question isn’t whether Gen Z is bad at service work, but whether the kind of service being demanded still makes economic and moral sense. Customers are entitled to competence — the order should be correct, the room should be clean, a basic question should get an answer. But warmth is different from competence. It takes time, training, security, and a willingness to perform for strangers you’ll never see again, and employers have always known it has value. The question is whether they’re willing to pay for it, staff for it, and protect the people expected to provide it.
If not, customers will keep running into the blankness of the Gen Z stare and reading it as contempt. Sometimes it may be. But it may also be simpler: Young workers are being asked to deliver the social rituals of an older economy without receiving its promises in return.
Credits: TCA, LLC.