Gen-X And Gen-Z May Disagree On Everything — Except This One Thing
audiznam260921 | ShutterstockWalking into a hardware store for me feels like an alien leaving her mother ship. I’m not a do-it-yourself gal. Even though I own a level and a ruler, measuring is not for me. But when I switched insurance companies, I suddenly realized I needed to pass a virtual inspection.
This meant addressing a list of deferred maintenance I had been comfortably ignoring for years. So I found myself at Menards, trying to buy fascia wrap and a sheet of plywood, with no real plan for how any of it was going to fit in my RAV4.
And if you’re wondering if all the single guys are hanging out at the hardware store on a Friday night, I regret to inform you they are not. I asked a Gen-Z employee if they could cut the 12-foot fascia wrap. They don’t cut materials, he told me. What about the plywood? Same answer.
He then offered that I could cut it if I wanted, after I purchased it. I said I didn’t realize I needed to bring my own cutting supplies. He assured me I could return it if it didn’t work. He even handed me shears and told me to bring them back when I was finished. Except it wasn’t that simple.
The pre-cut plywood pieces were stacked directly beside the larger sheets. He never once pointed them out. Never asked a co-worker. Never used that little walkie-talkie clippy thing to ask for an exception on the cutting policy. The Baby Boomer employee stood within earshot, watching the entire exchange without ever saying a word. Not my customer. Not my circus, I guess.
Gen-X and Gen-Z may disagree on everything, except this one thing
Dimas Rizki Pratama / Unsplash
Gen-Z retail experience #1: Common sense defeats the bureaucracy
The assistant manager had been on break. He came back, heard what happened, and literally chased me down near the checkout. Also Gen-Z.
He looked at what I was carrying and started over. They can cut materials, he explained. The default answer is no because when the store gets busy, the cutting station creates a backlog. That’s why the rule exists.
He looked around on a quiet Friday night. He looked at my straightforward request. Then he made a decision and cut it.
He also walked me back to show me the pre-cut plywood that was $15 more than the full sheet. I paid it without hesitation because it completely solved my problem.
Two Gen-Z employees during the same shift, with the same policy and the same variable (me), but very different outcomes. And the Boomer who had been standing there the entire time contributed exactly nothing.
Gen-Z retail experience #2: Agility and apathy
A few days later, at Target, I needed to return dental floss that was past the return window. The company had changed the formula but packaged it to look identical to the old one, which I think is a different conversation entirely. But the point is, I hadn’t noticed until I was already three weeks past the return window.
The Gen-Z employee at the return desk ran it through. The register blocked it, but he didn’t shrug or point at the screen to tell me the system wouldn’t allow it. He paused and said, hold on, let me try this another way. Asked for my license, rerouted it through store credit, and done in under a minute.
Then I went to checkout. The cashier, a Baby Boomer, couldn’t be bothered to help me figure out how to apply my rewards in-store. His troubleshooting strategy was to tell me to look at my app. When I couldn’t find what he meant, he was finished. If it’s not there, I don’t know. You can go up to the front desk.
At customer service, the employee who untangled it said without hesitating that he should have known better. Then went on to throw him under the bus some more by stating he should have put the order on hold and sent me up in the first place. Instead, he’d rung the whole thing out wrong, which meant she had to cancel the transaction and re-ring a full cart of groceries.
It ended up being way more work for her, an extra thirty minutes for me, and completely avoidable. But she was an absolute pro and handled it efficiently without any attitude.
Gen-X and Gen-Z are more alike than anyone wants to admit
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I keep hearing that Gen-Z doesn’t want to work. They lack initiative and need everything spelled out for them. They can’t handle nuance when it comes to complicated policies where judgment is needed.
As a Gen-Xer, I’ve heard it enough that I should probably be seeing it everywhere. I’m just not.
What I am seeing is young people in their twenties dealing with rigid structures, finding workarounds, and taking ownership, all while some of the older employees around them shrug and pass the problem down the line. The stereotype says Gen-Z hides behind their screens all day long, but the only people I watched doing that lately weren’t the ones in their twenties.
And here’s another little truth bomb nugget: in my opinion, Gen-X and Gen-Z are more alike than anyone wants to admit.
Gen-X was the first generation raised to be skeptical of authority. We grew up knowing the organization wasn’t going to take care of us, so we learned to work around it without ever making a big deal about it.
Gen-Z watched those same institutions fail in real time (2008 financial crisis, COVID, student debt). They arrived at the same conclusion we did, just faster and with more self-awareness to advocate for their well-being at work.
The one thing Gen-X and Gen-Z absolutely agree on: Flexibility trumps strict rules
Both generations learned early that the rules exist for everyone else’s benefit and that no one was coming to save you. You'd better learn to understand the framework well enough to know when to follow it and when to detour around it.
That’s exactly what the assistant manager did. He knew the policy and why it existed, but he looked at the situation and made a judgment call. That’s not a generational failure. That’s critical thinking in motion, and it’s also what it looks like when someone isn’t waiting to be told what to do.
Maybe the people complaining the most about Gen-Z should take a look in the mirror, because a lot of them are the same ones who built or defended systems that no longer work for the rest of us. It’s easier to call a 22-year-old lazy than to admit that the machinery we’ve been clinging to is outdated, inefficient, and sometimes flat-out broken.
This Gen-Xer recognizes that play because I’ve been dealing with it my entire career. If I were a hiring manager, those are exactly the people I’d want: The ones who think past the first answer, understand the playbook and the objective behind it, and find the workaround without turning it into a production.
That’s higher-level thinking and someone who won’t stall out the minute the script breaks. Maybe HR should spend less time scanning résumés and more time standing in a lumber aisle or observing a customer service desk.
Bette Ludwig, PhD, is a writer and thought leader with 20 years of experience in education. She runs The Psychology of Workplace on Medium and publishes weekly on Substack, where she explores leadership, workplace culture, and the evolving role of technology in education.
