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.
“It is soul-crushing,” says Izzy Tulloch, a bartender with more than 12 years of experience based in New York City. For Tulloch and most bartenders, the busiest moments of their worknights happen in waves, spread across the shift. In those flashes, Tulloch is shaking, stirring, pouring, and making as many drinks as possible in the shortest amount of time.
When she’s “in the weeds” as the saying goes — basically doing everything a bartender does at once — what she doesn’t want to be doing is closing tabs. And it’s all the worse when you add in another quirk of zoomers: asking for separate checks.
“Closing a tab, holding it out, and asking people for the tip — that can take up to two minutes,” Tulloch details the tab-closing time crunch. “But think about two minutes for eight people. That’s 16 minutes and there are maybe 30 other people waiting to be served. If I could just open a tab, which is one motion, and then take care of all the other guests, I could come back when that moment of being in the weeds is over.”
The advantage of having an open tab — and paying on one tab — is that it streamlines everyone’s experience. Bartending is basically project management with alcohol. Time spent closing tabs and ringing everyone up creates a line, a backlog. The theoretical minutes Tulloch and her colleagues save on closing tabs is more time could instead be spent paying attention to guests, and more guests getting their drinks and orders.
“You’re just taking away time, and you’re breaking the flow of the bartender,” Jelani Johnson, the head bartender at Le Coucou and the Campari Academy. Like Tulloch, Johnson has been tending bar for 12 years and he’s noticed the tab closing uptick too. (The bartenders I spoke to are speaking about bar culture in the US. In some other countries, patrons pay round-by-round — a process also made easier and faster where gratuity isn’t expected.)
“It really breaks up the action. To have to give out the round, ring up the check, and then close out with them?” Johnson says. “It’s this whole back and forth that, just like, really breaks up the flow of the action.”
Not knowing the intricate timing and rhythm of a bar and throttling it could happen to someone of any age. As Johnson admits, closing out a tab could be tempting if you want to beat the rush and ostensibly not want to wait for the bartender to come back around again. Or it could be a learned response from mistakenly leaving a card somewhere overnight and having to come back for it the next day. Being annoying is timeless. But Johnson, Tulloch, and other bartenders I spoke to said that the main perpetrators of close-out culture tend to be younger, mainly people in their early 20s.
“They’ll come in in a group. It’s usually like, you know, four or five of them or bigger, and they’ll order, like, a couple drinks for the whole group, and then they’ll close out the tab,” Johnson explains.
What Johnson describes is actually a one-two punch that combines two of the biggest bartender pet peeves: the aforementioned closing out and the problem of taking up room at the bar while purchasing very little. That space could go to paying patrons.
Gen Z aren’t just just closing out tabs; they’re space vampires.
“Then they’ll hang out there for a good while, and then you’ll start giving them looks like, Hey, are you guys looking to buy anything?” Johnson tells me. “And then they’ll come back up and put their two empty drinks on the bar, take another round of those two drinks, and then, like, close it out again.”
This awkward dance is something that Johnson experiences at Le Coucou, the Michelin-starred restaurant where he works, but it’s also something that he sees happening all over.
These vibes can sour other people’s experience at the bar, especially if you’re one of the unlucky patrons who wants to have a seat but has to settle for watching a group of friends nurse two beers. Ultimately though, it’s bartenders who have to deal with the energy and financial drain. Bartenders make their pay on tips, and there isn’t much to be made on a group of five posting up for hours when only a couple of them are drinking or ordering food.
“I hate that I’m sounding like such an old man,” Johnson says.
How this small but annoying quirk came to be — and how to fix it
There might be several reasons why bar culture has tipped in a way that makes a bartender feel like an old grump yelling at children to get off his lawn.
The payment question is somewhat simple: digital payment, like ApplePay, has generally been on the rise, and that includes bars. Bartenders explained to me that more and more bars are equipped for tap-to-pay and quicker transactions. That may explain why people, especially younger ones, are encouraged to close out their tabs time after time.
What discourages Johnson and his cohort is that though there are advantages to going digital (e.g., bartenders don’t have to manually input tips at the end of the night) it makes the bar experience more and more impersonal. Bartenders like Johnson become more like the attachment to the computer that you’re using to pay for a drink.
“They don’t care about where they are or what’s on the menu,” Johnson tells me. “They’re not sitting there and like getting to know who I am, or seeing how I make a martini, or asking questions about what makes the place special.”
The worry is that the more and more impersonal bars become, the less people see them as a social experience that everyone contributes to. What’s happening in bars doesn’t seem far off from the way people act at movie theaters or concerts recently, treating them like watching TV from your couch or social media content.
The less people see an event or space as a social setting, the more selfish and unaware they act.
“I think, when it comes to younger people, I feel like they have sort of lost this idea of appropriate social currencies and social transactions,” Tulloch tells me.
Yet she doesn’t blame them at all.
The pandemic lockdowns, she explains, altered our social habits. Studies have shown that compared to older generations, Gen Z drinks less. This would explain those bigger groups that show up to bars and nurse one or two drinks.
Tulloch says she doesn’t expect Gen Z, especially the ones who turned 21 or so during the pandemic and weren’t able to go out, to fully understand what might be blazingly obvious for people who have been going to bars before 2020. There was no going out with friends or even sneaking into a place with a fake ID. There was no way to learn the unspoken rules of bar patronage when, at the time, the places to “learn” were shut down.
At the same time, few people want to really teach younger people how to behave at the bar — and not everyone has the tact and patience. Education isn’t really top of mind when anyone is going out.
“If you’re going to bars, you have to spend money at bars. That’s the social currency — that’s it,” she tells me. “That is what you have to do.”
The solution seems quite simple. If the problem post-pandemic is that everyone sees public spaces like bars as me-first territories, then it may just be a matter of taking a step back and thinking about how we all fit into this ecosystem. We need to recognize the people — especially service people like bartenders — around us. And we just need to be aware of the space and time we’re all taking up.
You don’t have to be Gen Z to think about the next time you go out. Your bartender may appreciate that, especially if you keep your tab open.
