Getting the ‘Gen Z Stare’ and Wondering Why? Maybe You’re the Problem!

Let’s say you’re at your favorite coffee shop. You order a customized drink — the same one you’ve ordered hundreds of times. The 20-something barista says it’s not available today.

Exasperated, you explain that you’ve ordered it many times in the past.

You’re met with a blank stare.

You repeat yourself, anxious to fill the dead silence, but the barista isn’t budging — and neither is her face.

Let’s face it. You just got the “Gen Z stare.” But, consider this: Maybe you deserved it! And maybe the Gen Z barista is onto something.

First things first: Is the “Gen Z stare” even real? I’m not entirely sure; I’ve never noticed it myself (but I’m also a socially capable and polite person who doesn’t act like a jerk in customer service situations).

Still, judging from the number of TikToks I’ve seen on the topic — even Gen Zers themselves admit this is real. I’ve watched dozens of videos where a young person acts out a situation they experienced working in a retail or service job: In these reenactments, an older person comes in and asks for something unreasonable, leaving the zoomer agog and agape, speechless and staring.

Anyone who has worked any kind of customer service or retail job will tell you that these kinds of baffling and frustrating experiences happen regularly. People can be rude, entitled, and ask for completely unreasonable things.

I have some experience with this, although I’m an elder millennial, so I’m dating myself with this reference: I was behind the customer service desk at a movie theater when three college-age people came up and asked for a refund for their tickets to “Me, Myself & Irene” because they found the content too racy. (To be fair, there is at least one really funny visual joke involving bodily fluids.) The idea that you would ask for a refund for a movie simply because you didn’t like it was shocking to me. (They did, indeed, get their refunds.) Who does that?! Who expects that the world works like that?!

But I worked in customer service for a long time, and I became seasoned at it. After a while, nothing shocks you about the unreasonable ways that some customers behave — and you build a skill set of how to handle demanding people.

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One thing I learned is that sometimes silence is the best way to handle a situation. In other words, you might say: Give ’em the “Gen Z stare.” If someone keeps pushing, eventually you have to leave some silence hanging in the air — no more room for them to negotiate.

As a journalist, I know the value of staying silent. Allowing for an awkward silence is one of the few tricks reporters have up their unfashionable sleeves. It makes the other person want to keep talking to fill the silence, which is exactly what you want them to do.

“Silence is very powerful,” René Rodriguez, a communication and negotiation coach and author of “Amplify Your Influence,” told Business Insider. Still, it’s a pretty bold communication choice — and Rodriguez used a golf analogy.

“The caution I’d give is that a driver is a very good tool — but it’s not a good tool if you’re on a putting green.”

Rodriguez warned that deploying silence can win a negotiation, but hurt a relationship, and should be used sparingly. “If you had a disrespectful, highly dysregulated customer who made threats, that’s what works — the gray rock, as people call it,” he said.

So if you find yourself on the receiving end of the “Gen Z stare,” think a little bit about how you got yourself there. Like Ava Max (technically a young millennial) says, maybe you’re the problem.