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One of America's favorite entertainment with baseball and gimmick food is the generational sloppy. Gen Z has gone through the same heated scrutiny among millennials, Gen X and even baby boomers. Every small aspect of their lives becomes a bewildering anthropological study. This asserts that young people will be wasted by young people.
They are reducing sex and praying more. They look old, but taxonomically young. They love Tiktok and social media, but are anti-social and the loneliest young man to date.
But because they are adults, they (and our collective judgment) have entered a new arena, the bar. General Z doesn't seem to know how to act in the local watering hole. The main points of competition are about the collection of payment practices and expectations, with bartenders reporting that generational changes in behavior are a real distress for service workers. It brings questions about how implicit social habits are actually communicated and how important they are.
Obviously, it's very satisfying to point out how someone is doing something wrong, or how a group of even better people is wrong. It is even more fulfilling that it can signal division, a marker that can never be associated with this type of confusing discrepancy, for objective scientific reasons. Look at this bad guy who isn't like me – move through the universe by mistake!
It's just as fun as pointing out the shortcomings of another generation, but it might be worth looking into how realistic the problem is.
Gen Z's Major Happy Hour Sin: Inter-Round Closure Tab
The main bar-based observations of wild youth are simple. It is expected that GenZ will close the round after the round. Pay individually for each drink and return the bartender over and over again.
“It's about shattering the soul,” says Izzy Tullock, a New York City-based bartender with over 12 years of experience. For Tulloch and most bartenders, the busiest moments of their work nights take place in the waves and spread throughout the shift. With these flashes, the turlock shakes, stirs, pours, and makes as many drinks as possible in the shortest time.
When she's in “in the weeds,” essentially when she's doing everything the bartender does at once, the thing she doesn't want to do is close the tab. And if you add another quirk of Zoomer, and ask for another check, that's even worse.
“You close the tab, hold it out and ask people for tips. It can take up to two minutes,” Tulloch explains in detail about the tab closing time crunch. “But think about two minutes for eight people. That's 16 minutes and you might be waiting for 30 people to be served. If you can open one move, a tab and then take care of all the other guests, you can come back when the weed moment is over.”
The advantage of having an open tab and paying on one tab is that it streamlines the experience for everyone. Bartenders are basically project management using alcohol. The time spent closing the tab and ringing everyone will create a line, backlog. Tulloch and her colleagues are theoretical minutes of saving the closure tab, and instead pay attention to guests, allowing more guests to spend time receiving their drinks and orders.
“You're just taking time away and breaking the flow of bartenders,” says Jelani Johnson, head bartender at Le Kukou and Camparia Academy. Like Tulloch, Johnson has been handling the bar for 12 years and has also noticed that the tabs close the ascent. (The bartender I spoke about US bar culture. In other countries, patrons pay rounds. This process has become easier and faster, even in places where rewards are not expected.)
“It really breaks up the action. Should I give out rounds, ring the checks, then close with them?” Johnson says. “It's this whole thing that really breaks the flow of action like this.”
It can happen to someone of all ages without knowing the complicated timing and rhythm of the bar. As Johnson admits, if you want to beat the rush, closing the tabs is appealing and, on the surface, you wouldn't want to wait for the bartender to come back again. Or maybe it's a reaction learned from accidentally leaving the card anywhere overnight and having to come back the next day. Being annoyed is timeless. But Johnson, Tallock, and other bartenders I spoke to, said that the main perpetrators of the close-out culture tend to be younger, mostly people in their early 20s.
“They'll come in the group. It's usually like four or five or more of them, as you know, and they order a few drinks of the whole group, then they close the tab,” explains Johnson.
What Johnson explains is actually a one-on-two punch that combines two of the biggest bartender Pet Peeves. The aforementioned closure and the issue of occupying a room with a bar while mostly buying. That space can go to pay for customers.
Gen Z doesn't just close tabs. They are space vampires.
“Then they'll hang out there for a while, and you'll start making them look like that, Hey, are you guys trying to buy anything?? ” Johnson tells me. “And they'll come back and put two empty drinks in the bar, take another round of these two drinks, then close again.”
This nasty dance is something Johnson experiences at Le Kukou, the Michelin-starred restaurant where he works, and it's also something he sees happening everywhere.
These atmospheres can sourly sour the experience of others at the bar, especially if you're one of the unlucky patrons who want to have a seat but have to settle down to see a group of friends nurse two beers. Ultimately, it is the bartender who must deal with energy and financial drainage. Bartenders pay for tips and should not be made much for groups of five who post for hours and drink or order food.
“I hate to sound like that old man,” Johnson says.
How did this small, annoying habit turn out and how to fix it
There may be a number of reasons why bar culture tilted it in a way that made the bartenders feel like an old gross screaming to get off the grass.
Payment questions are a bit simpler. Like ApplePay, digital payments are generally on the rise, and that includes a bar. Bartenders explained to me that more and more bars are equipped for tap-to-pay and faster transactions. That may explain why people, especially young people, are encouraged to close the tab.
What discourages Johnson and his cohort is that while it has advantages to being digital (for example, you don't have to manually enter tips at the end of the night), it makes the bar more and more impersonal. Bartenders like Johnson become like an attachment to the computer they use to pay for their drinks.
“They don't care where they are or what's on the menu,” Johnson says. “They don't sit there so I like to know who I am or see how I make a martini and ask questions about whether they're making the place special.”
The worry is that the more impersonal bars there are, the fewer people will see as a social experience that everyone contributes. What's going on in the bar doesn't seem to be far from the way people act in movie theaters and concerts these days.
The fewer people view events and spaces as a social environment, the less they know what they will do.
“When you become younger people, I think they've lost this idea of proper social currency and social trading,” Tullock told me.
But she doesn't blame them at all.
The pandemic lockdown has changed our social habits, she explains. Research shows that Generation Z drink less than older generations. This would explain a large group showing up at the bar and nursing a drink or two.
Tulloch says he doesn't expect Gen Z, especially Gen Z, who was unable to go out at age 21 during the pandemic. You can fully understand what's silly for anyone who has been to the bar before 2020. At the time, when the “learning” place was closed, there was no way to learn the tacit rules of bar patronage.
At the same time, few people really want to teach young people how to act in a bar. Not everyone has tact and patience. When everyone is out, education is not really an attitude of the heart.
“If you're going to a bar, you have to spend money at the bar. That's the social currency – that's it,” she tells me. “That's what you have to do.”
The solution seems very simple. If the post-pandemic problem is that everyone sees public spaces like bars as my first territory, then it could just be a step back and think about how we all fit into this ecosystem. We need to recognize the people around us, especially those in the service, such as bartenders. And we all need to be aware of the space and time that we all work on.
You don't have to be a Gen Z to think about the next time you go out. The bartender may appreciate it, especially if you leave the tab open.
