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The 'Gen Z stare' is telling us something important about today's economy

Young workers are being asked to deliver the social rituals of an older economy without receiving its promises in return

Getty Images/ Jacob Lund

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 “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........

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