0 comments
‘I’m bad at maths, let’s just split it three ways!’
After a delayed train you rock up later than your pals to the bar, and see everyone is already tucking into posh burgers with added Canadian bacon. Having had a hearty breakfast, you opt for a handful of mozzarella sticks and a simple pint.
Before wrapping up, you return to the table after a quick trip to the urinal and see the bill has already arrived and everyone else has settled on splitting it evenly. A subtle glance at the receipt shows your paltry pint buried amongst mojitos, lemon spritzes, and one of everything from the lunchtime menu.
Against your better judgement, you hope someone will point out the obvious: that you haven’t racked up even close to a quarter of the bill.
They don’t, and why would they?
A grinning waiter comes over with the card machine, and you submissively beep your phone, forge a nonchalant smile, and await the dreaded Monzo notification confirming your £75 contribution before it’s even 8:00pm. We’ve all done it.
I once had a hangover orange juice in Prague cost me around £60, because the rest of the stag do decided pancakes and absinth were a better breakfast option. Again, silence prevailed, because bringing up finances could be so much more costly.
At least, that’s the old socially acceptable view. Relying on wilful ignorance and loose reciprocation: I’ll get this Uber, grab us a bevvy at the venue, has long been viewed as the sweet spot between financial damage control and nonchalant generosity.
Gen Z isn’t quite so concerned with some mild embarrassment, though, if it means they aren’t taking unjustified hits to the wallet.
A recent Business Insider article argues that Gen Z friendships have entered their ‘nickel-and-diming’ phase, where close tabs are kept on who owes what, and loans or bills are mostly repaid in full. Meanwhile, the minimum amount deemed socially acceptable to request back from a friend is apparently getting smaller.
Is this another reason to bash young people? Or is it another case of them adapting to situations more intuitively than their predecessors?
Back in 2021, a study from LendingTree revealed that Gen Z were more likely than any other generation to be owed money after lending, and a Zelle survey from June found that 76% of Gen Zers said they weren’t repaid in full after fronting money for a group trip.
Bill splitting apps like Venmo, Zelle, and to an extent Monzo have made it easier for people to repay eachother – whether through a lengthy plan or a quick reimbursement for a train ticket – but the etiquette around group spending hasn’t necessarily become any less factious.
If anything, having the means to settle every tiny imbalance is opening a can of worms in friendships that may not have existed in previous eras. Splitting utility bills or rent is a precise science, sure, but Reddit is full of stories where roommates snidely request pennies be returned for half an avocado eaten from the shared fridge.
A common theme in these arguments is wage disparity. If a broker friend on £90,000 a year is chasing you up while you’re grinding through a poorly paid undergraduate job, there’s more likely to be some indignance, obviously. This is arguably a downside of Gen Z’s openness and honesty about wages and spending.
The thought of money confrontation is enough to make a lot of us squirm, but when Gen Z are getting the shitty end of the stick, it makes total sense. Not only are the cohort less likely to be rapid in full, experts also say it all feels less tangible because everything is digital.
Myka Menier, an etiquette coach on group spending, concurs that money now feels more abstract than ever. When there’s no cash changing hands, you don’t physically see anything diminishing and there’s zero emotional cost to the transaction. Basically, if that same bill from earlier was paid in four £20 notes, everyone at the table would no doubt sit up instead of gleefully waving their orange cards around.
This innate need to begin being more clued up and precise with group spending feels more in line with Gen Z’s other financial habits. They’ll soft save each month to ensure trips or novel experiences can be had, they’ll willingly unlock credit to get a taste of luxury living, and to do that, they’ve realised a more deliberate tack on budgeting and group spending is necessary.
When you’re finding dates too pricey to justify and trading nights out for indoor socialising, or even birdwatching, attempting to reach something closer to financial parity than your parents’ friendship groups did feels like a natural progression. Cost of living, low wages, and all that economic doomscroll faff we won’t retread basically demand this shift.
Make no mistake, we all know people who are insufferably stingy, and generosity isn’t dead either. The ‘nickel-and-diming’ rhetoric boils down to Gen Z becoming more deliberate and awake with spending, and less antsy about being vocal when they don’t want to pay for everyone else’s indulgence.
See also:
- Studying the social media spectacle of a solar eclipse
- Why is Gen Z fixated on… frozen yoghurt?
- TikTok finally admits it has an ‘AI slop’ problem
