Walk into an American store these days and there is every chance that the first thing you hear will be: “Welcome in.” This phrase has become a coast-to-coast mainstay; there is a whole yearslong trail of news articles and internet posts chronicling its spread. Some businesses specifically instruct employees to say it. (When the academic Victor H. Mair noticed it, at a Wyoming truck stop in 2024, workers happily confirmed that it was standard policy.) Some employees pick it up on their own. (It’s also common among video streamers greeting new viewers.) Some customers do not notice it at all, until the day they suddenly do and begin hearing it everywhere.
It’s not a new phrase — you can find “welcome in” in 19th-century texts (“The porter said, ‘Welcome, welcome in,’ and opened the gate”) or infer it from punny old business names (the Welcome Inn) — but something clearly happened, this century, to send it surging through American commerce.
There are people who dislike this for business reasons. Bob Phibbs, a retail strategist, has written that “welcome in” makes sense in hospitality — say, while guiding a guest to a restaurant table — but is “retail’s equivalent of a shrug,” ending conversations instead of starting to make a sale. Another retail specialist, Kit Campoy, wrote on LinkedIn that she trained employees not to use it, giving them a much taller order: “In my store, we taught our team to use natural greetings. Like a human. Like a friend. Greet someone like you know them.”
Then there are those who dislike “welcome in” for linguistic reasons: It strikes them as odd and stilted, bizarre store jargon. The “in” does feel naggingly superfluous; what is it contributing that “welcome” does not already cover? My suspicion, at first, was that a stand-alone “welcome” struck people as quaint, fusty or formal, a weird curtsy of a word, so they were tweaking its mouthfeel to echo more everyday phrases: welcome back, welcome home, welcome aboard. Then I saw a commenter on the excellent Language Log blog expressing his amazement that the addition of “in” somehow made “welcome” more formal. It turns out people have radically different readings of “welcome in” — to some it’s warm and folksy, to others prim or bland or (as one sommelier told The Wall Street Journal) “just kind of extra.”
It’s fun to tease out these varying impressions, and possibly less fun to think about why we hear the same words in different stores. Sometimes the answer is “aggressive training.” Each business aims to set a particular tone, often one that’s inviting, accommodating, friendly. Each business also understands that its human employees are not reliably brimming with warmth, enthusiasm and a tireless commitment to customer satisfaction, nor are they getting paid enough to put much effort into faking it. But there are some things you can script, letting the company speak directly to customers through the mouths of its hirelings.
There’s a whole fascinating wealth of academic literature on this process; it’s the source of the much-abused term “emotional labor,” which originally referred to the actorly performance of service roles. Ritz-Carlton hotels, the inspiration for the word “ritzy,” have embraced unusually formal language: no “I’m sorry” or “you’re welcome,” only “please accept my apology” and “my pleasure.” A 2002 Harvard Business Review article captured new hires’ being asked to repeat the word “no” before being told: “That is the last time you should use that word in this hotel.” There was a similar rejection of negativity in an Apple Store training workbook leaked to Gizmodo in 2012. Computers couldn’t “crash” or have “bugs” or become “hot” (only “stop responding” or experience “issues” or grow “warm”), and workers were never to apologize for the technology: The correct response to a catastrophic drive failure was something like “I’m sorry you’re feeling frustrated,” which you’d think would have cost Apple dearly in compensation for on-the-job punchings. Collect all this language in one place and it looks hilariously manipulative, like the notebook of a budding sociopath.
The performance of warmth is more popular. S. Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, stayed at a Ritz-Carlton and was so taken with “my pleasure” that he made it a staple at his chain. Employees can easily come to resent such choices; one former Chick-fil-A employee has written that it was very much not her pleasure, “so don’t ask me if I have to say it because yes I did and I hated it.” But many also come to appreciate the way that rote language saves them from having to invest in every passing interaction — they can rattle off corporate’s preferred lines while their real selves detach. Which might explain what a different Chick-fil-A team member told a journalist about things being her pleasure: “I say it at home too. It drives my husband absolutely crazy.”
As for customers, we get to be fickle. We usually say we appreciate a human touch, and “welcome in” seems to provide exactly that — at least, until you’ve heard it enough times that it starts to sound mechanical and perfunctory. Then again, we clearly enjoy a certain inhuman quality too. The Ritz-Carlton’s formality is not appealing to our love of high-flown English. It is assuring us that workers are committed to playing a specific, familiar role, catering to our whims without complaint.
So much of this commercial language consists of what linguists call phatic expressions — verbal tokens traded to establish social relationships, not communicate literal meaning. A.I. can speak a company’s preferred tongue as tirelessly and obsequiously as you could ever want, but we tend to find that maddening; the words are only meaningful insofar as they suggest human-to-human social obligations. Customers want something rare and unreasonable — the worker who is genuinely, irrationally devoted to helping them, for peanuts. They walk into stores with finely calibrated preferences about what language suggests workers are ready to simulate that experience. But their preferences have almost nothing to do with the meanings of words themselves, or how superfluous a given “in” might be.
Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.
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