Has Gen Z (and Our Reliance on Tech) Killed Hospitality Service?

We walked into a highly-regarded restaurant just outside of Baltimore last week. Everybody told us to try this place. We walked inside, got a quick smile, and a “We’ll be right with you.” 

And then… nada.

Five minutes of silence while the host and maître d’ stood, heads buried in an iPad and an iPhone, trying to sort out some reservation mess. No eye contact or follow-up. Just us, standing in front of the host desk while the energy in the room quietly died.

When they finally looked up, the service was great. But that opening moment stuck. Not because they were rude — they weren’t — but because those five minutes weren’t hospitality. They were limbo. Two front-of-house pros doing their job, just not to us. Their attention was somewhere else.

It’s a feeling we’ve had over and over lately —in New York, Charleston, San Francisco. Places whose praises are constantly sung as the hospitality capitals of the States. But somewhere along the line, presence got replaced with process, screens replaced eye contact, and tasks replaced connection.

Contrary to what many will say, this didn’t start with the pandemic, the pandemic exacerbated the problem. The beginning was the late 2000s, when smartphones got smarter and social media connected the world. The dopamine death scroll crept into every aspect of our lives. Home, train, car, dining out, and, eventually, on the floor.

We put iPads at host stands, POS systems in everyone’s hands, tablets behind bars, and told ourselves it would make service “more efficient.” Instead, we got an army of staff with heads down while guests hung in the dead space between “hello” and “hospitality.”

And that’s not even bringing in personal phones. Group chats, texts, the quick scroll between tables. Phones tucked behind the host stand, lighting up on the bar mat, balanced on the speed rack. It’s not malicious. It’s muscle memory. Everyone does it, because it’s how we live now.

But in hospitality, that micro-moment matters. The glance down at a text? That’s a guest waiting for eye contact. That’s a drink dying in the window. That’s a “we’ll be right with you” that turns into silence.

What’s even more fucked up, if nobody touches the phone, it still costs something. A 2017 study from the University of Texas published in the University of Chicago Press, found that just having your phone nearby — upside down, silent, not moving — is enough to drain your brain’s working memory and attention. Your brain spends energy ignoring it. Now put that same mental drag behind a host stand on a Saturday night, and tell us service doesn’t feel different.

Phones aren’t evil. But let’s not pretend they’re neutral.

Let's be clear, we aren’t blaming Gen Z. They were born into this world, trained on 30 second loops and Reels. We handed them the phone or iPad and let the algorithm capture their attention spans.

Gen Z grew up with a device in their hand before they learned how to make eye contact. Their first instinct under pressure isn’t to scan the room, it’s to look down. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s because we hard-wired them as a culture. But, hospitality, at its core, runs on  exactly the opposite: eyes up, clock ticking, and reading the room.

There is a tension, between a generation raised on constant digital stimulus and an industry built on human interaction, and the tension shows through in service standards.  

It’s not that the talent pool lacks skill or heart. It’s a quiet battle between a generation and an industry's standards. To be truly hospitable one needs to have a sense of urgency and awareness. Gen Z was raised in an environment of constant stimulation. So when service starts to go to shit and tables get ignored, “I’ll be right with you” turns into a server looking at their phone in the server station. It’s not because the new generation is lazy. It’s because we’re asking them to perform in a manner their brains were never trained for.

As for the operators, we think a phone policy will do the job. No real systems. No real training or change. Just vague rules and growing frustration on both sides that the other is out of touch with reality.

What no one wants to say out loud is we built this mess.

We’ve watched the ground shift and mentalities change, and we hoped it would work itself out. We eagerly accepted new tech without rewriting how things should work and change with it. We gave everyone devices, but never retrained the muscle memory. We expected the urgency and standards years ago to magically pass on to the next generation, without giving the tools to implement it.

We told ourselves tablets and mobile POS would make service more efficient. What they actually did was take our staff out of the moment. We trimmed down training programs. We thinned out management. We focused on “lean staffing” as a strategy. 

And when the shit started to hit the fan, we blamed the 21-year-old server with a phone in their pocket, the host who’s half-looking at Resy and half-looking at their phone. But we’ve accepted it and even encouraged it.

We designed restaurants around devices and new tech, then acted shocked when employees buried their heads in that tech. Pre-shifts were shortened, standards softened, we cut floor managers, and now we stand around wondering why the energy in the room feels soulless.

This isn’t a “kids these days” problem. This is a leadership problem.

If we want to train a new generation, we can’t keep teaching like it’s 2005. Gen Z doesn’t learn the way we did, and let’s be honest there has been a lot of advancement in our understanding of learning that can help all generations.

Multiple studies have found that Gen Z prefers short, visual, interactive learning modules over long, passive training. A 2025 study on microlearning found that short, focused content improves retention and engagement for Gen Z learners. Another study on Gen Z learning styles found that they respond better to immediate feedback and short reps than to static manuals or long lectures.

It doesn’t mean they can’t learn, it means we have to teach differently. We can’t hand someone a 40-page training packet and expect them to memorize the whole thing in a couple of days. This is a generation raised on scrollable content, not massive training booklets. If we don’t adjust, the gap between what the floor needs and what staff can deliver will keep widening.

Fixing service is not going to happen with “no phones on the floor” signs. We have to re-engineer the way we work and teach, and not pretend the world hasn’t changed.

1. Phones need rules, not wishful thinking.
“Put your phone away” doesn’t work. Everybody knows it. Create structure: pocket lockers, designated device areas. Remember, even a phone upside down on a host stand sucks cognitive energy. So take the temptation away.

2. Use low-touch to fund high-touch.
Tech should buy you time, not replace the human experience. If a QR code saves a server three minutes, that three minutes better turn into something that will make that guests experience better. Don’t use “efficiency” as an excuse to run skeleton crews and wonder why the service sucks.

3. Script the human moments.
Hospitality used to run on instinct. It doesn’t anymore, so bake it into the system. We need guaranteed guest contact: greet within 60 seconds, touch in after two sips or two bites. These are basic steps of service, we all have them. Tech may save us time and efficiency in some aspects, but nothing replaces presence and awareness.

4. Retrain for reality.
Gen Z doesn’t learn from 40-page manuals or god awful VHS training videos. They learn through short reps, micro-feedback, and seeing what is proper in real time. It’s not 2005, don't train like it's 2005. 

5. Measure what actually matters.
If tech “saved labor,” prove it. Track greet times, ticket times, guest recovery, upsells. If the minutes we “saved” aren’t showing up in the guest experience, OR THE BOTTOM LINE, then we didn’t save anything.

Gen Z didn’t kill the hospitality service. Smartphones didn’t kill hospitality service. We did, by stapling antiquated service standards onto a digital world without actually rethinking the structure underneath it.

It’s all fixable. But it’s not going to be solved with nostalgia, or speeches about “kids these days,“ which is what Gen X said about Millennials, and Boomers said about Gen X. It’s going to be solved with systems, accountability, and HUMAN leadership that understands the floor as it exists now — not as it existed a decade ago.