Last month I watched my dad stand at a bakery counter, stare at a screen asking whether he’d like to tip 18, 22 or 25 percent on a single croissant, and say “No, thank you” out loud to the machine. The twenty-something behind the counter looked at me like I’d brought a wild animal inside.
He wasn’t being rude. He was answering a question he thought deserved an answer.
That moment stuck with me, because the people I know who were raised in the 60s, 70s and 80s do this constantly. They decline things. They ask to speak to someone. They put the product back.
Younger people tend to read this as stubbornness, or a failure to adapt, but it isn’t that. It’s a running inventory of what used to be normal, and a refusal to pretend the new version is better just because it’s newer.
These are the same people who have mostly run out of patience for things younger people call a crisis, so they are not easily rattled. What rattles them is being asked to accept, quietly and without complaint, a worse deal than the one they grew up with. On a handful of specific points, they simply won’t.
1. Paying every month for something they used to buy once
They bought the record. They bought the software in a box. They bought the car, and the heated seats came with it, because they were already in the car. The idea that you pay once and the thing is yours was so basic nobody ever said it out loud.
Younger people never really lived in that world. Music, movies, word processors, cloud storage, fitness programs, and now features inside the car itself all arrive as a monthly charge that quietly renews until somebody notices.
Plenty of people don’t notice. A 2025 CNET survey of U.S. adults, conducted with YouGov, found subscribers spend about $205 a year on subscriptions they don’t use, out of roughly $90 a month in total subscription spending.
Someone raised in the 70s treats that number as a personal insult. They will go through the bank statement line by line, cancel the thing they forgot about, and then ask, with real confusion, why a program they paid for in 2009 now wants $12 a month to keep working.
2. A tip prompt for a transaction nobody served
Tipping used to have edges. You tipped the waiter, the bartender, the cab driver, the person who carried your bags. You did not tip the person who turned around, grabbed a bottle of water from the cooler, and handed it to you.
Those edges are gone. The screen flips around at the juice bar, the hardware store, the self-serve frozen yogurt place, and the default options start high. Younger customers mostly tap something and move on, because the screen is there and the line is behind them.
Older customers tap “no tip” without flinching, and the data says this is a generational split rather than a personality quirk.
A 2023 Pew Research Center survey of nearly 12,000 adults found that nearly half of people 65 and older oppose pre-entered tip suggestions, while adults under 30 split almost evenly between favoring them, opposing them, and not caring either way.
The people who grew up tipping in cash don’t object to tipping. They object to being asked to subsidize wages for a job that, as far as they can tell, didn’t happen.
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3. Scanning and bagging their own groceries with no discount for the labor
The self-checkout lane is pitched as convenience. For a lot of people raised in the 60s and 70s, it reads as a job they didn’t apply for.
They remember a cashier, a bagger, and a kid who’d wheel the cart to the car if you asked. Now they’re expected to find the barcode, weigh the produce, type in a four-digit code, argue with a machine about an unexpected item in the bagging area, and wait for an employee to come clear the error. Then they pay full price.
Christopher Andrews, a sociologist at Drew University who wrote a book on the subject, says the original deal of the modern supermarket was that shoppers did more of the work in exchange for lower prices. That deal is gone. Self-checkout, he told 3AW, “just invites you to do work for free for the supermarket.”
Younger shoppers have mostly made peace with it, or prefer it, because it means not talking to anyone. The older ones will stand in the one staffed lane with a full cart and wait, and they’ll feel fine about it.
4. Talking to a chatbot when something has already gone wrong
By the time someone calls customer service, the thing is broken, the charge is wrong, or the package is gone. They’re not in a mood to be greeted by a cheerful bot that asks them to describe their issue in a few words and then offers three links that don’t apply.
Younger customers grew up with this. They know the trick is to type “agent” four times or say “representative” until the system gives up. They treat the maze as a normal part of the process.
People raised before phone trees existed treat it as an obstacle someone built on purpose, which, to be fair, it is. And they are not alone in hating it.
A Gartner survey of more than 5,700 customers found 64 percent would prefer companies didn’t use AI for customer service at all, and the top concern was simple: it makes it harder to reach a human being.
The older generations just act on that preference more loudly. They call the main number. They ask for a supervisor. They write a letter, on paper, and they get a response.
5. Being ghosted instead of told no
Younger people have absorbed a strange rule: silence is a complete answer. The date who stops replying, the recruiter who vanishes after the third interview, the friend who leaves a text on read for a month. It stings, but it’s expected, so nobody calls it out.
People raised in the 70s and 80s find this almost unbelievable. In their world, you got a phone call, a letter, or at minimum an awkward conversation in person. Ending something without saying so wasn’t gentle. It was cowardly, and everyone said so.
Researchers have found that the vanishing act often comes from not knowing what to say, rather than not caring.
Gili Freedman, a psychologist at St. Mary’s College of Maryland who studies ghosting, told Nautilus that people can usually imagine the lines for a rejection, “but you would never use them,” because every available script sounds like a cliché.
Someone who grew up before texting would say that’s exactly why you use the cliché. “This isn’t going to work out” is a tired sentence. It’s also a complete one, and the person on the other end gets to stop waiting.
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6. Answering work messages after the workday is over
There was a time when leaving the office meant leaving the office. The phone on your desk could ring all it wanted. You were at dinner.
Younger workers never had that boundary, and most of them don’t expect it. The Slack notification at 9 p.m. gets answered because everyone else answers theirs, and because not answering feels like a risk.
Psychologist Larissa Barber has a name for that pull: telepressure, the urge to respond to work messages immediately no matter when they land. Her research linked it to worse sleep, higher burnout, and more sick days.
She also pointed out why younger workers are so susceptible. “It’s so new to us, this idea of boundary-less work, that we’re just not sure how to manage it yet,” she told Time.
People raised in the 60s and 70s managed it by not participating. Many of them still don’t. They turn the phone face down at 6 p.m., they answer in the morning, and when a younger colleague asks how they get away with it, the answer is usually that nobody ever told them they couldn’t.
7. Replacing things that should have been repairable
The toaster from 1978 is still in somebody’s kitchen. The sewing machine from 1965 works. The lawnmower had a part that wore out, and the part got replaced, by the owner, on a Saturday.
Compare that to a phone with a glued-in battery, a printer that refuses third-party ink, or a washing machine that needs a proprietary diagnostic tool to tell you what’s wrong. Younger buyers shrug and replace it, partly because that’s what the product was designed to make them do.
The cost of that shrug is real. U.S. PIRG estimated that if American households repaired electronics instead of replacing them, each would save about $330 a year, roughly $40 billion nationwide.
The older generation doesn’t need the estimate. They were raised by people who fixed things because that was the only option, and they still feel a small flash of outrage when a two-year-old appliance is declared dead by the company that sold it.
8. Downloading an app to do something that used to take a quarter
Parking used to require a coin. Ordering a burger required a mouth. Reading a menu required a menu. Now each of those routinely requires a phone, an app, an account, a password, and permission to send you marketing emails for the rest of your life.
Younger people barely register this. The phone is already in their hand, the app store is one tap away, and they’ve long since stopped reading the permissions screen.
Older people register every step of it, and they’ll often refuse the whole chain. They’ll feed the one remaining coin meter on the block. They’ll ask the host for a paper menu, and if there isn’t one, they’ll ask the server to just tell them what’s good. They’ll pay at the counter with a card and let the kiosk sit there blinking.
From the outside it looks like technophobia. Up close it’s a cost-benefit analysis that keeps coming out the same way.
They’re being asked to do more work, hand over more information, and accept more friction in exchange for a convenience the business gets and they don’t.
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They aren’t being difficult, they remember when it worked differently
None of these refusals come from being out of touch. If anything, they come from being too in touch, with a version of daily life that most people under 40 never saw.
Younger generations are not weaker for tolerating all this. They came in after the terms had already changed, so they’re negotiating from a different starting point. Tapping through a tip screen or answering a late email is just what the world looks like when you’ve never seen the alternative.
The people raised in the 60s, 70s and 80s saw the alternative. That’s the difference.
They aren’t refusing because they can’t adapt. They’re refusing because they know exactly what they’d be giving up, and nobody has yet made a convincing case for why they should.
