South Carolinian complains that Gen Z grocery store employee is not friendly enough for him: 'Are you from up North? Down here, we're friendly."

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Emmy Pratt • Writer and Editor
Apr 28, 2026 5:00 PM EDT

Are Southerners more friendly than Northerners? 

Everyone has big, grand ideas about the area where they're from. Midwesterners think that they're the bastions of kindness, even though a lot of them are nice in a passive-aggressive way. New Yorkers claim to be "kind, but not nice," but some are so obsessed with keeping people out of their city that they think their New York nativism makes them special. Southerners think they're hospitable, but a great deal of Southerners are totally uncomfortable with letting anyone new into their lives that are different from theirs. 

If we want to be nuanced, we can say that there are kind and friendly people everywhere in the United States, and anyone making sweeping generalizations about any region of the country is wrong, but who wants to be nuanced? It's much more fun to stereotype Ohioans as culture vultures who ruin New York City with their horrible taste. It's so easy to cast New Yorkers as aggressive and unfriendly. It's not totally untrue to assume that Southerners act politely, but they're not actually being genuinely nice. The worst kinds of people in every region of the country are the people who claim to be so nice, but obviously aren't.

The man in this story claims that Northerners are less friendly than Southerners. He assumed that a grocery store employee was from the North because he wasn't smiling while he was mopping the floor for the second time that day. If I were a betting man, I'd say that he was just tired, and his expression had nothing to do with where he was from. 

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  • Elderly man wearing a cap and jacket in a store
    via Port Morien Digital Archive

    Old man in grocery store criticizing employee for the dirty bathrooms

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • I think Southerners need to chill out.

    This is a rant. I'm a 25 year old guy living with chronic depres on who works at a grocery store in South Carolina. I was having a rough day cleaning the toilets.
    via u/Ayxlfdik
  • Manager tells me someone walked all over the floors I just mopped so I have to do it again when we close. Closing time rolls around, I push my mop bucket to the bathrooms and start mopping again. Immediately, some guy walks out of the bathroom, walks all over the freshly mopped
    via u/Ayxlfdik
  • floors, and instead of just moving past me, he made a comment about the state of the toilet and without giving me a chance to respond, he asked if I was from up north, because "down here, we're friendly". I guess my Gen Z
    via u/Ayxlfdik
  • stare was too harsh for him. Seriously, I don't give a f about the man making my job harder. S k your own Dixie and let me do my fi can get paid and go home. job so I
    via u/Ayxlfdik
  • littletimmysquiggins Met a lot of friendly people over the years. Not a single one ever had to tell me they were friendly.
    via u/littletimmysquiggins
  • HereToDoThingz And NO ONE likes to say they are friendlier more than people from the south.
    via u/HereToDoThingz
  • kylez_bad_caverns People in the south were fake as f. Half of em wouldn't on you to put a fire out
    via u/kylez_bad_caverns
  • WriteBrainedJR So he expects you to be friendly to him while he complains about how you're doing your job AND makes your job harder at the same time. Just another person who thinks retail workers are less human than that guy he is. F
    via u/WriteBrainedJR
  • SlightWhite I once heard two Southern Baptists in a discount warehouse store loudly gossiping about how they cut elderly friend when they discovered off their grown she wasn't baptized. This was an old lady. That they had known their entire lives. Lol
    via u/SlightWhite
  • Two older women standing next to each other
    via Nathan Anderson (Unsplash+)

    Old Southern ladies gossiping about their friend, vowing to never speak to her again because she's never been baptized. 

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • HelpmeObi1K Bless their hearts. And I mean that in the most southern way possible.
    via u/HelpmeObi1K
  • itsforathing Southern hospitality is a joke, it's literally the opposite of friendly while putting on a farce. Midwest is the only genuinely polite place left and even that's shaky at best
    via u/itsforathing
  • TheCrimson Dagger Polite is actually the correct term for southern hospitality. Politeness is about following rules, it's ultimately driven by fear of the consequences for going against social norms while kindness is driven by compassion and empathy. They can look the same on the surface but one is about what is said and the other is about why it's said. Something can be r de and kind at the same time or it could be polite and mean at the same time. It's about intent vs delivery.
    via u/TheCrimsonDagger
  • myssi24 Funny, it has been more than 20 years, but I used to work in a call center taking orders for an office supply company. I lived in Iowa. I still thought that Midwesterners were the rudest most likely to be impatient customers. Ironically, New Yorkers some of the most polite. So I think a lot depends on the situation. I think one of the differences is Midwest folks (in my experience) are less fake. They just don't bother. Face to face interactions with strangers, polite is easier and gets
    via u/myssi24
  • Emmiey My experience living in the south (SC specifically)- they are NOT friendly. They pretend they are and they ABSOLUTELY HATE you if you're from the north. This man is a liar, and just wanted to instigate because he, like other southerners (not everyone of course), THRIVE on making young people and northerners miserable.
    via u/Emmiey
  • Cars parked beside brown concrete building during daytime
    via Leo Heisenberg

    A street in Charleston, South Carolina, a city that has either really friendly or really unfriendly people, depending on who you ask.

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • Some_Number_8516 Grew up in the south, and some southerners are truly the nicest people you'll ever meet, while many are not but claim to be. It's just like how some New Yorkers are abrupt but actually super kind and helpful, while some are just flat out r_de. Any southerner that tells you they're kind is usually a red flag though lol
    via u/Some_Number_8516

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cleaning northern mopping employee south carolina friendly the south grocery store complaining gen z
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