Late one Saturday night at Bar Lubitsch, a West Hollywood cocktail bar known for its kitschy, Soviet-era décor and frosty vodka drinks, Scott Korinke and Nolan Marks wriggled themselves from the sweat-drenched dance floor and made their way to the bar counter.
Mr. Korinke, 26, ordered a martini for himself and a vodka Red Bull for his friend Mr. Marks, 25. As he fished a Visa credit card out of his green leather wallet, the bartender yelled out a question over the music: “Do you want to start a tab?” Mr. Korinke shook his head no and swiftly closed out.
The pair might order more drinks later on, but the prospect of opening a tab was verboten. “Why leave a credit card with the bar? I don’t know if I’m going to be here that long, so I don’t want to leave a tab open,” Mr. Korinke said, joking that he had “commitment issues.”
His ethos reflects a growing phenomenon among Gen Z bargoers: an aversion to opening bar tabs. Much to the dismay of bartenders, many 20-somethings prefer to close out and pay after every drink, no matter how many beverages they end up ordering.
The reasons for this are myriad. For a generation that consumes less alcohol than older drinkers, opening tabs can seem exorbitant. They have become accustomed to one-and-done transactions — usually with a simple tap of their phones — and consider purchasing drinks at a bar to be no different from, say, buying a coffee at a cafe. They can feel anxious about losing track of their spending by leaving their credit cards behind the bar.
“It doesn’t save me anything if I keep a tab open,” said Nareg Haladjian, 27, who lives in California’s San Fernando Valley. “I’ll swipe my card again. It’s an extra 10 seconds.”
“It increases anxiety in me when I leave a tab open,” said Cameron Haluska, a 26-year-old beer sales representative from Walla Walla, Wash. “If we want to move somewhere else, it’s a lot harder to close out and then leave.”
Less Drinking, More Budget-Conscious
Studies suggest that Gen Z is drinking less than older generations. A 2023 Gallup poll found that the number of adults ages 18 to 34 who said they had “occasion to use alcoholic beverages” had fallen 10 percentage points over the last 20 years.
Jewel Chavez, who uses she/they pronouns, observed that their parents’ generation tended to drink excessively. It prompted Mx. Chavez, 23, to reconsider their own drinking habits.
“Closing on the tab does a lot mentally to stop you from indulging, because you don’t have easy access to it,” they said.
Taylor Price, a 24-year-old New York-based financial podcaster and adviser, said her generation was more deliberate with money because young adults had seen so much economic uncertainty. “Many of us will say, ‘I’m only spending $40 tonight,’ and monitor it in real time,” she said.
Michael McMillan, a former portfolio manager and securities analyst who teaches personal finance at the University of Maryland, said the accessibility of online financial literacy tools had shaped his undergraduate students’ hyper-cautious money habits.
“By opening up a tab and saying, ‘Yep, I’m buying a round of drinks and closing it after that,’ you know how much you’re spending,” Dr. McMillan said. “It’s not going to be some great surprise at the end of the evening.”
“There’s that moment of pause where they have to put my card in the reader,” said James Byrnes, a 22-year-old who lives in Seattle. Closing out each time he buys a drink, he said, helps him manage his spending.
Annoyed Bartenders
It’s unclear when younger drinkers started souring on bar tabs, but there’s a through line between the Covid-19 pandemic and shifting bar habits.
“During and after the pandemic, more people started using cards,” said Doug Kantor, an executive committee member of the Merchants Payments Coalition, a retailers group. Coupled with Gen Z’s distaste for carrying around cash (or a physical wallet, for that matter), the ubiquity of mobile payment options, such as Apple Pay, has contributed to the decline of bar tabs among 20-somethings.
“It does definitely seem like a theme, and especially with younger people,” said Brianna Boeke, who has worked in hospitality and bartended in Indianapolis, New Zealand and now New Orleans. “You’ll have people come up four or five times, get drinks and close their tab every time.”
Bartenders aren’t thrilled with this pay-as-you-go mind-set, especially if customers ask for elaborate drinks. “We’re trying to be superefficient, because we know that these cocktails take, like, 10 to 15 steps to make,” said David Perez, a bartender who has worked in Houston-area restaurants and tiki bars. “We’re trying to shave off as many seconds as we can.”
When bars are slammed with throngs of people waiting to order drinks, constantly opening and closing tabs slows down service for everyone, bartenders said.
“For each moment that one of my guys is standing there fumbling with your cellphone trying to unlock the code, that’s time that is missed out on serving the next person when you’re three deep on a Friday night,” said Al Barber, who manages the bar at the Prince, a near-century-old bar in Los Angeles’s Koreatown that has appeared in “Mad Men” and “New Girl.” “So there’s an opportunity cost.”
“These kids never learned the proper way to be a barfly,” he added.
Constantly closing out can hurt a bar’s bottom line in other ways. Every time a bartender swipes a customer’s credit card, the bar pays a fixed fee plus a percentage for that transaction. Single transactions done repeatedly can cost the bar more than a total bill that is paid all at once. If someone spends $100 in one transaction, for instance, the percentage fee might be $4, or 4 percent, plus a fixed fee of roughly 30 cents. (Merchant fees vary, ranging between 2 and 4 percent on average.) But if a customer spends that same $100 through 10 transactions, the bar is charged that same 4 percent per swipe plus the fixed fee of 30 cents multiplied by 10. In that instance, the fees now total $7.
That piles up when cards are swiped hundreds of times per night. Credit card fees, which soared 80 percent from 2020 to 2024, according to Mr. Kantor of the Merchants Payments Coalition, are one of the highest operating costs for bars and restaurants besides labor and rent.
Derek Captain, a wine and spirits sales consultant in Tallahassee, Fla., said card transactions at his former bar and restaurant amounted to “quite a bit” for the business, which sometimes brought in $15,000 a day. The restaurant eventually started to pass the cost on to consumers, Mr. Captain said. Other bars subsidize those credit card fees by taking about 3 percent out of bartenders’ tips every week.
Lessons in Bar Etiquette
Mr. Byrnes said that he had opened bar tabs before, but that a negative experience once gave him pause. One night, he was trying to get the bartender’s attention so he could close his tab at a busy pub. He waited so long that he missed his bus back home. But Mr. Byrnes believes that shyness also prevented him from speaking up and grabbing his tab quickly.
“Some people in older generations feel more confident trying to flag someone down and make a little bit of a stir to get themselves out of there,” he said. “I’ve worked in service, and I’m self-conscious sometimes. So I didn’t want to force anyone’s hand to do anything.”
Sensing that some Gen Z barflies might be bashful or perhaps less experienced with traditional bar etiquette, bartenders have tried gently nudging them to consider opening tabs. If he anticipates an impending rush at the bar, Mr. Perez will sometimes tell bargoers, “Hey, guys, let’s just start tabs right now.”
Others opt for something more overt. “For better or for worse, I’m pretty well known for chirping back at people,” Mr. Barber said. “I’ll be like, that statement makes no sense: ‘What do you mean you’ll close it for now?’ And then they laugh embarrassedly, and they’re just like, ‘Oh, my bad.’”
If a group of friends closes out separate tabs multiple times at Seattle’s Central Saloon, Tiarra Horn will call them out from behind the bar: “‘You guys all know each other? You guys not friends? You can’t get this round?’”
“They haven’t even thought about it,” Ms. Horn said. “Someone has to bully these people. Respectfully.”
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