Justin Cale was still in high school when family circumstances 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 costs 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. It is a detail that carries more weight than it might first appear: a teenager, already navigating a precarious world without a safety net, performing emotional labor for strangers in exchange for wages that could barely keep him housed.
At McDonald’s, Cale learned the full choreography of fast food — taking orders through a headset, making drinks, cooking fries, handing food through the drive-thru window, all while a screen tracked his restaurant’s performance against every other location in the area in real time. He liked his first store, in part because the manager treated staff with genuine respect, praising good work and offering support through grueling shifts. Cale felt he was “building connections and experience, developing yourself.” He believed the system was, at least partially, fair.
Then he transferred locations, and the illusion dissolved.
He had started at $11 an hour. After a year of what he considered especially hard work, he received a 25-cent raise. Then the company raised its general wage floor, collapsing the distinction between his pay and that of coworkers he felt had put in far less effort. The restaurant could measure drive-thru times down to the minute, but it had built no comparable system for recognizing the people who made those numbers possible. “What am I working for here?” Cale remembered thinking — and it is a question that, once asked, does not easily go away.
Cale, now 20 and a Texas-based entrepreneur who makes custom leather armor and accessories for Renaissance-faire and fantasy-culture communities, is not who most people picture when they complain about what has become known as the “Gen Z stare.” The stare, as internet culture has named it, describes the moment a customer asks a young cashier a question and receives in return a pause, a blank look, and none of the eye contact or reflexive friendliness that older customers expect. Mocking videos proliferate across Instagram and TikTok. Op-eds lament a generation apparently incapable of basic social warmth. The discourse is familiar, comfortable, and almost entirely wrong about what it is actually observing.
Cale’s own business depends on precisely the social skills younger workers are accused of lacking — listening carefully to strangers, asking probing questions, translating desire into finished craft. In conversation, he moves easily from fantasy fiction to contemporary American politics to obscure ancient history. He is not disengaged. He is, if anything, the argument against the stereotype made flesh. And yet he grants that the stereotype contains at least a sliver of truth — not because his generation is uniquely deficient, but because the conditions producing the stare are real, structural, and hiding in plain sight.
Part of the story is generational in a genuine, if more nuanced, sense. Young people like Cale grew up in social worlds mediated by phones, platforms, memes, and fandoms — a reality supported by Pew Research Center data showing that nearly half of U.S. teens now report being online almost constantly. Cale describes his generation as having been “protected in real life” while simultaneously exposed to every cruelty the internet could offer. That asymmetry shapes how young people move through the world: fluent in the intimate shorthand of fan communities and digital subcultures, sometimes less practiced in the ambient pleasantries of a transaction with a stranger. But this is a description of a formation, not a character flaw — and it explains far less about the stare than the economic conditions in which that formation has unfolded.
For decades, American service work has demanded more than competence. It has demanded performance: smile, greet, sound delighted to help, remain pleasant even when the customer is impatient or openly contemptuous. Sociologists call this emotional labor — the management of one’s own feelings in order to produce a particular feeling in someone else. In service work, the employee’s personality is not incidental to the product; it is the product. And employers have long understood this, even when they have refused to compensate for it accordingly.
Cale sees some of what gets read as Gen Z flatness as a refusal of that uncompensated demand. The customer-is-always-right doctrine, he observes, has always concealed a more complicated reality: customers can be wrong, and rude, and still expect a young person earning near-minimum wage to absorb their frustration with a grateful smile. Previous generations may have felt they had no choice but to comply. His generation, he suggests, has concluded otherwise — and the research tends to support the rationality of that conclusion. A Purdue University study found meaningful links between “surface acting,” or performing emotions one does not feel, and lower job satisfaction as well as higher turnover intention. A Virginia Tech study of restaurant workers during the pandemic found that stress levels rose in direct proportion to how much emotional labor was required, particularly when compensation depended on tips. Refusing to perform warmth on demand, viewed through this lens, looks less like rudeness and more like a form of economically rational self-preservation.
The timing matters, because service itself is being systematically degraded at the very moment workers are being asked to maintain its human face. As Scott Wolla of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has documented, restaurants, hotels, airlines, and retailers have spent years cutting staff, automating routine tasks, adding fees, and shifting work onto customers — QR-code ordering, self-checkout, reduced hotel housekeeping. The business logic is transparent: labor is expensive, and the cost of skimping on service can be externalized onto the customer who has already paid. If you have recently handed $13 for an ice cream cone to an iPad that then prompted you to select a tip before a human being had done anything at all, you have experienced this dynamic directly. Fewer workers cover more tasks, with less support, serving customers who are paying more and receiving less — conditions that, as The Economist has noted, have driven significant numbers of workers to flee the sector entirely.
What remains, then, is a kind of structural absurdity: companies stripping away the conditions that make genuine hospitality possible — adequate staffing, decent management, wages that reward experience, protection from abusive customers, a credible path forward — while continuing to insist on the smile. Strip those conditions away and the smile stops looking like professionalism. It starts to look like a blank-check withdrawal from the employee’s own emotional reserves, made on behalf of an employer who has already decided the worker’s wellbeing is not worth investing in.
Cale’s disappointment with that 25-cent raise points to something employers consistently underestimate: workers respond not only to what they earn today, but to whether the workplace offers a believable future. He had worked hard because he believed effort would be recognized; instead he found no real mechanism separating diligence from indifference. Employers have built elaborate systems for measuring output and almost none for answering a worker’s most basic question: if I do this exceptionally well, what actually changes for me? The absence of a convincing answer transforms service work from a first step into a holding pattern. Cale described coworkers who had completed college degrees 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 something that looks like burnout and functions like cynicism — and it is not, it bears emphasizing, a uniquely Gen Z phenomenon. The Canadian professor Nitin Deckha has argued that his generation’s elevated burnout rates are tied directly to the intensification of economic disruption, widening inequality, rising housing costs, and the proliferation of precarious employment. Harvard Kennedy School research shows that younger Americans have little faith in government; Gallup data shows similar distrust of major institutions more broadly. Gen Z did not watch institutional trust erode over time, as older generations did. They came of age after the erosion was already complete — after the financial crisis, through a global pandemic, into a labor market where credentials do not reliably yield stability. The dystopian fiction that shaped their cultural imagination — The Hunger Games, Divergent — did not merely reflect anxiety about institutions; it depicted institutions as actively rigged. That is not an aesthetic preference. It is a reasonable inference from available evidence.
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 largely a distortion of visibility. “Just because we’re seeing more of them doesn’t mean that by quantity it’s more,” she said of young workers who appear disengaged. “I don’t think that we’re any less hardworking.” Khandheria runs a deliberately demanding workplace — applicants are told plainly that they will not last if they do not want to become the best at what they do — but she pairs those standards with genuine investment in her staff. One employee began as an HR intern and is now director of business development; another started as a busser and became regional director of operations. Warmth and professional ambition, she argues, can be cultivated when the job offers standards, training, responsibility, and a believable path upward. The key word is believable.
This is not, as it turns out, a particularly novel finding. Decades of workplace research, conducted across tens of thousands of workers and multiple generations, have consistently found that jobs are more satisfying when workers have some autonomy, can build and use real skills, receive meaningful feedback, understand the significance of their work, and believe that effort can lead somewhere. What gets framed as a Gen Z preference for environments where effort has a visible payoff is, in fact, a universal human preference — one that the modern service economy has simply decided it cannot afford to honor.
Cale’s own answer was to leave. He took leatherworking skills learned from his father and built a business around custom armor and accessories — physical, skill-based work, embedded in a community that cares deeply about the objects themselves. His work still requires service: he has to listen carefully, try to understand what a stranger wants, and make them feel genuinely heard. But his craft is visible, his labor is not anonymous, and if he does the job well, he has a direct stake in that outcome. The effort-to-reward line is short and clear. He can see it.
The cliché insists that Gen Z is disengaged. His story suggests something more precise and more damning: that young workers are increasingly finding service-work expectations grotesquely misaligned with service-work rewards, are withdrawing from systems that offer them little in return, and are investing instead in smaller, more personal arrangements where skill and relationship produce a return they can actually see. That is not apathy. That is a rational response to a broken bargain — and the appropriate target of frustration is not the young person behind the counter who cannot quite summon a smile, but the economic architecture that decided her warmth was owed without being earned.
Customers are entitled to competence. The order should be correct, the room should be clean, a basic question should receive an answer. But warmth is categorically different from competence. It requires time, training, security, and a willingness to perform for strangers you will never see again — and employers have always known it carries value. The only question that remains is whether they are willing to pay for it, staff for it, and protect the people they expect to provide it. Until they are, customers will keep encountering the blankness of the Gen Z stare and misreading it as contempt. Sometimes, perhaps, it is. But more often it is something simpler and more indicting: young workers being asked to deliver the social rituals of an older economy without receiving any of its promises in return.