‘Terrible’ Gen Z trend leaves bartenders with shrinking tips

Fewer young Americans are tipping at restaurants and bars these days.

A Bankrate survey released this summer revealed that members of Generation Z – those born in the late 1990s and early 2000s – are the least frequent tippers.

That includes Gen Z drinkers at the bar – and bartenders are taking notice.

“Even five years ago, young people would still be kind of generous,” Brit Wolfe Wilson, a bartender in California, told the San Francisco Standard. “Now they’re definitely skimping on tips.”

Derek Brown, co-founder of Drink Company, a hospitality consulting agency in Washington, D.C., told Fox News Digital that tips for bartenders should be 20%, just as with servers at a restaurant.

“That’s how much a tip should be,” Brown said. “Now I do understand that if you get poor service, maybe you knock it down to 18%. I get that.”

But some bartenders claim they’re consistently receiving less than that.

“I’m impressed with people when they tip more than 15%,” Elliott Rightmire, a California bartender and fellow Gen-Zer, told the San Francisco Standard.

Still, not all people in this age range are saying no to tips.

Fox News Digital spoke to two recent college graduates who said they’re mindful when it comes to tipping their bartenders.

“I always leave a tip,” Katie Fites said. “Unless you are really, really mean to me, I’m going to leave you a tip, even if it’s just a dollar.”

Fites, who graduated from Florida State University (FSU) in the spring, used to be a bartender, so the 22-year-old Jacksonville resident said she’s been on the wrong side of poor tipping before.

So has Kaitlyn Walsh, another recent FSU graduate who said she will “always try to tip” 20% when she’s having drinks at a bar or restaurant.

Walsh, 24, said most of her friends do the same, but sometimes when she’s out, “you could look over and someone’s filling out the receipt, and they’re just putting zero or slashing it.”

Although she’s never bartended before, she did work as a restaurant server in high school, she said.

“I know how that feels to not get tipped – and I have a lot of friends [who] work in food and are bartenders too,” Walsh told Fox News Digital. “So I know what they feel when they don’t get tips.”

She said a friend of hers “went out to dinner with this guy she was going on dates with, and he didn’t tip,” Walsh said. “She immediately told me, ‘I’m no longer going to go out with this person because they didn’t leave a tip.’”

That’s refreshing news for bartenders like Brown, who acknowledged that “these people are working incredibly hard.”

“You’re spending eight to 10 hours on your feet, you’re making hundreds and hundreds of drinks for people, and then to have somebody stiff you on a tip is just terrible,” Brown said. “So tip your bartender 20% across the board, always.”