The Ryan Vet Show

Gen Z Is Ungrounded and Going Back to the Mall - The Generational Pendulum Swings Back to In-Person

• Ryan Vet • Episode 25

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The most digital generation is going back to the mall. Generational futurist Ryan Vet explains why Gen Z's IRL revival is a leadership signal.

Ryan Vet, generational futurist, expert in generations, and AI keynote speaker, unpacks the resurgence of physical retail, the Generational Pendulum, and what Gen Z's return to malls, bookstores, and coffee shops reveals about how this generation was formed. A generation that was tracked, supervised, and over-scheduled is now hunting for the unstructured, in-person moments older generations took for granted. The workplace is next.

Key Takeaways

  • Gen Z's foot traffic at malls is up 57% year-over-year, and 82.2% of Gen Z mall-goers say they are there to socialize, not to shop (Placer.ai, 2026).
  • The Generational Pendulum is swinging back: 83% of 18-to-24-year-olds say social retail environments improve their sense of connection (Lightspeed, 2026).
  • Gen X was rarely watched. Gen Z has been over-watched. That difference is formative, not cosmetic.
  • The mall was practice. It taught budgeting, trade-offs, self-control, and watching peers make bad decisions in real time. A generation that skipped that practice arrives at work without those reps.
  • Gallup (2025) reports Gen Z is the loneliest generation at work, nearly twice as likely as Gen X to say they experienced loneliness a lot of the previous day.
  • Leaders cannot replace lived experience with a Slack onboarding checklist. Workplaces need more unstructured time, multi-age interaction, and real apprenticeship.
  • The recalibration has already started. Gen Alpha (currently 1-13) may be the generation whose parents intentionally design a more analog childhood.

Research and Sources Cited

  • Lightspeed. (2026). Gen Z wants more than products: 83% of 18-24-year-olds say hangout stores boost connection.
  • Placer.ai. (2026). How malls can win in 2026.
  • Pew Research Center. (2014). Generation X: America's neglected middle child.
  • Pew Research Center. (2025). Americans' trust in one another.
  • Gallup. (2023). Gen Z voices lackluster trust in major U.S. institutions.
  • Gallup. (2025). State of the global workplace: 2025 report.
  • Starbucks. (2025). Starbucks coffeehouse designs enter a new era.
  • City of St. Charles, Illinois. (n.d.). Charlestowne Mall redevelopment.
  • Business Insider. (2025). Starbucks plans to phase out its mobile-only stores for a future with more warmth and human connection.

Connect with Ryan Vet

About Ryan Vet
Ryan Vet is a generational futurist, USA TODAY bestselling author, international keynote speaker, and host of The Ryan Vet Show. As an expert in generations and an AI keynote speaker, he helps leaders, parents, and organizations make sense of how Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and Gen Beta are reshaping work, family, and culture. Collide is his weekly research-backed newsletter on generational leadership, read by 21,000+ leaders.

#GenerationalFuturist #GenZ #GenX #GenAlpha #Loneliness #ThirdPlaces #Mentorship #Leadership #ExpertInGenerations #RyanVet #CollidePodcast #AIKeynoteSpeaker #FutureOfWork

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About Ryan Vet

Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold.

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Ryan Vet

On this episode of the Ryan Vet Show. USA Today recently covered Gen Z's role in the mall resurgence, pointing to young shoppers who are not simply buying in person, but gathering in person. The story drew on light speed research showing that 83% of 18 to 24 year olds say social retail environments improve their sense of connection. 68% say they would spend more money as a result. And 75% say that third spaces like cafes, lounges, or social areas inside stores matter when deciding where to shop. That is not just a retail trend, that is a trend towards returning to in-person community. And now, a reading from Ryan Vet's newsletter, Collide. Gen Z is ungrounded and going back to the mall. Positive trends are emerging, pointing to Gen Z's desire to be back in person and IRL. I can easily recall walking through Charlestowne Mall as if it was yesterday. Walden Books, FYE, American Eagle, Abercrombie, Hollister, KB Toys, The Disney Store, Auntie Anne's, above those pretzels, Mrs. Fields, Von Maur, Spencer's and Hot Topic were there too, but they were strictly forbidden territory. We could ride our bikes there or walk, and I honestly don't know how much we did either of those, but we could have, and that fact mattered. While I am a millennial and not Gen X, I did catch the tail end of the benefits of being born in that time, in that place with the lingering 80s tendencies still bleeding into the 90s and early 2000s. There was still trust. I remember one time my dad bringing me and my friends to the movies and dropping us off. I want to say we were in middle school. As we loaded out of my dad's 1999 Nissan Maxima, he gave instructions and told us when and where to meet him in just a few hours, and then he left. There was a small act of trust, not dramatic trust, not reckless trust, just ordinary trust. The kind of trust that used to be built into growing up. You had a few hours, you had some money, you had your friends, and you had to figure some things out. The IRL comeback. If you have been here for any length of time, you know one of my core frameworks is the generational pendulum. We see a generation experience something, often challenge it, then overcorrect and rebel and eventually recalibrate to a new normal. Part of the theory analyzes how certain trends may skip a generation or two, then resurface in a new form. We saw that with the idea of the me generation first attached to boomers, then resurfacing in a different form with millennials through filters, feeds, and carefully curated lives online. Now we're seeing another swing and almost a reflection between Gen X and Gen Z. A year ago, one of my earliest Collide essays looked at Barnes & Noble and the surprising return of physical bookstores. At the time it felt like a curious cultural signal. A generation with every digital convenience available was choosing paper, shelves, browsing, cafes, and the slow pleasure of discovery. Now it feels like part of a larger pattern. USA Today recently covered Gen Z's role in the mall resurgence, pointing to young shoppers who are not simply buying in person, but gathering in person. The story drew on light speed research showing that 83% of 18 to 24 year olds say social, retail environments improve their sense of connection. 68% say they would spend more money as a result, and 75% say that third spaces like cafes, lounges, or social areas inside stores matter when deciding where to shop. That is not just a retail trend, that is a trend towards returning to in-person community. Placer AI's 2026 mall report found that indoor malls and open air centers have seen consistent year-over-year visit growth over the past two years. Indoor malls in particular are functioning more like experiential third places, with 37.6% of indoor mall visits in 2025 lasting more than 75 minutes. Starbucks seems to be reading the same cultural signal. After years of mobile ordering, pickup shelves, drive-thru lanes, and transactional conveniences, the company is trying to restore the coffee houses as a gathering place. Starbucks says more than 1,000 coffee houses will be uplifted by the end of 2026 with warmer, more comfortable design, more seating, and familiar comforts meant to make stores feel like places to linger. The old story was that everything physical was dying. Bookstores were dying, malls were dying, cafes were becoming pickup counters. Winning at the retail game was no longer about window displays and clever merchandising and loss prevention. It was all about shipping logistics, cost cutting, and delivery speed. What Gen X had, Gen Z is looking for. Gen X, born in 1965 to 1980, came of age with a kind of independence that feels foreign to many parents today. They were the latchkey kids, the MTV kids, the mall kids, the kids of divorce, recession, institutional disappointment, and figure it out. Pew once called Gen X America's neglected middle child, which is both a demographic observation and a fairly accurate cultural mood. I often refer to them as the same or call them the barbell generation. Gen Z, born in 1997 to 2012, also grew up skeptical, but the source of skepticism was different. Gen X was rarely watched. Gen Z has been overwatched. Gen X came home to empty houses. Gen Z had their movements tracked even in their houses. Gen X disappeared into malls. Gen Z was location shared into structured activities. Gen X learned social rules by bumping into them. Gen Z learned social risks by watching them get recorded, posted, mocked, screenshotted, and stored forever. That is not a small difference. It is a formative one. Americans trust each other less than they did a few decades ago. Pew Research Center reported that the share of adults saying most people can be trusted declined from 46% in 1972 to 34% in 2018, according to the General Social Survey. Pew's own 2023 to 2024 polling found the same share, 34% saying most people can be trusted. Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation also found that Gen Z has low confidence in major institutions, with Congress, the news, the presidency, and large technology companies drawing especially low trust. So yes, Gen Z is skeptical, but their skepticism is not simply Gen X skepticism in a hoodie. Gen X looked at institutions and said, I do not trust you, so I will take care of myself. Gen Z looks at institutions, platforms, employers, schools, brands, and sometimes even peers and says, I do not trust you, but I also don't know where else to go. That is the difference. When Gen Z had distrust, they switched from one social media influencer to the next, but never anchored anything to real life. Gen X, on the flip side, had their best friends, their community, their neighborhood, a real physical grouping of people they could connect with. Gen Z has been grounded. Boomers and Gen Xers remember being put on restriction, or as the term aged, grounded. Many millennials, myself included, do too. Being grounded meant that you could not go anywhere. You could not do anything. You were remanded to the confines of your room. You could not go to the mall, you could not ride your bike to a friend's house, you could not go outside on a nice day, you were stuck at home, and that was the punishment. For much of Gen Z, that restriction has often felt less like a punishment, more like their baseline. I do not want this to become an essay blaming parents. Parents were responding to real fears, real headlines, real risks in a world that felt less predictable. The technology also changed the equation. If you can know where your child is at every moment, many parents feel irresponsible not using that tool. But safety has consequences too. There is no sneaking out under the bleachers with your significant other because there are cameras there, and you are being tracked on a phone. There's no walking down to the mall and having that girl grab your hand for the first time in quite the same way that if your parents were two steps behind you or the relationship that has already been arranged indoors, monitored, or vetoed through layers of adult awareness. Of course, some of this sounds better, safer, cleaner, more responsible, but growing up has never been clean. Kids need some awkward. Teens need some uncertainty. Young adults need some spaces where they can try on identity without an adult or media and algorithms narrowing the whole thing. Gen Z is not becoming Gen X. History doesn't repeat itself that neatly. Plus, Gen Z is almost too old. Gen Z is currently between ages 14 and 29. Only the last few Gen Zers born might be able to enjoy this new experience, but that gives us great hope for Gen Alpha, who turned 13 this year. The mall was practice. One year our school took a field trip from the Chicago suburbs down to an amusement park, Cedar Point in Ohio. Okay, it wasn't a field trip. The truth of the matter was I was a band nerd and it was a band competition. Anyway, we stopped and unloaded our buses at a mall and we were told to go grab food at the food court for lunch. I was at the mall with my friends, and from a distance, we happened to see two other kids we knew but never hung out with clear on the other side of the mall. One of them lived on my street, but he was never someone I hung out with. The commotion caught our attention because these two kids were being chased down an escalator by a mall cop. The mall cop was hollering something at them as he was holding up his pants and clumsily clamoring behind them down the escalator. While I do not know the full story, the school rumor mill said that they got caught shoplifting. I do know they got in trouble and were sent home. No parent was standing next to us to interpret that moment. I am sure I never went home and told my parents what we saw. My parents who both read this newsletter will likely respond saying that they never heard that story, and I'll report back to you. In fact, at the time of this recording, my parents have already read this newsletter, and they let me know that they had not heard that story before. I digress. But we learned something interesting. That is what the mall was. It was not just shopping, it was practice. You practice spending money, you practice making plans, you practice not being late, you practice deciding whether to follow your friends or not. You practice watching someone else make a bad decision and quietly deciding you did not want to be next. Even something as simple as whether I had to earn the money or my parents gave me 20 bucks for the weekend trip, it mattered. Maybe it was 40. Whatever the amount, it was finite. You had to choose. Were you going to forego eating to buy the jumbo stuffed animal and hope to survive off free water fountains? Or were you going to eat your friends' leftovers? Were you going to blow your money early and spend the rest of the afternoon pretending you weren't actually hungry? Were you going to buy the movie ticket and skip the snack altogether? We did not have mom and dad's credit card loaded into a phone that we could meaninglessly tap on anything. We had cold, hard cash. We had to keep up with that cash. We had to budget that cash. That kind of constraint teaches us something. It teaches us trade-offs. It teaches us regret. It teaches generosity when a friend shares their fries. It teaches self-control when you have to decide whether the milkshake you want now is worth losing the thing you may want later. I always said yes to the milkshake, and I still do. Constraints form people. Sharing experiences and seeing others succeed or fail shapes us. Charlestowne Mall itself is not part of the story. The city of St. Charles notes the mall's interior permanently closed in 2017 after years of tenant loss, with only Von Maur and the classic cinemas still open to the exterior access only. That closure was the symptom of a bigger shift. A whole generation did not return to the mall the same way. Now, maybe that is changing. The workplace is next. Here is the leadership takeaway. If you rob a generation of certain childhood experiences, they're going to come to the workplace less prepared. That sentence may feel blunt, but I think it's true. It's not meant to be an insult, it's meant to make leaders pause and think. If a young employee did not have as many unstructured social reps, why are we shocked when they struggle in unstructured social environments? If they were not given as much practice navigating awkward moments in person, why are we surprised when awkwardness shows up at work? If they were not trusted to test small boundaries in relatively safe environments, why do we assume they will arrive fully formed and professional ones? Whether it is the Gen Z stare or just the so-called awkwardness, we have to realize something. If you do not have lived experience, you absolutely cannot expect someone to act the same way as someone who did. No amount of TikTok videos or YouTube gurus can tell you how to be a full functioning human adult, complete with all the wisdom that comes from lived moments if you've not lived the experience yourself. That does not mean that Gen Z gets a pass on maturity. It means leaders need to understand where maturity comes from, and it comes from practice. Leaders need to build real community, mentorship, and informal gathering into work. Not forced fund, not another mandatory team bonding event with cold pizza and a trust fall. Real community, real apprenticeship, real multi-age interaction, real moments where younger employees can watch older employees navigate tension, disagreement, humor, ambiguity, responsibility, and repair. And guess what? It's going to be messy, and it's going to be awkward. It's going to be uncomfortable just like middle school. But sadly, for many of this younger generation, those experiences were skipped altogether. We talk about unstructured play and multi-age group play as essential for children because it builds confidence and teaches kids how to interact. Then those kids grow up. They arrive in the workplace, and we pretend a Slack onboarding checklist will do the same thing. It will not. Workplaces need more room for unstructured interactions, more lunches without an agenda, more shadowing, more hallway conversations, more leaders who are willing to explain not only what decision was made, but how they made it. More patience with awkwardness and without lowering the standard. The recalibration. They're going back because the pendulum is swinging. After years of digital first convenience, transactional retail, supervised childhood, pandemic interruption, and connection once removed, the physical world feels newly valuable. Not because it is efficient, because it is inefficient in all the ways humans need. You bump into people, you smell things, you waste time, you get bored, you make decisions, you watch someone else make a bad one, and then you laugh about it years later. That is what digital life struggles to replicate, no matter how incredible the technology gets. Even if we wear glasses that capture everything from our point of view, even if immersive reality becomes more convincing, even if screen wraps all the way around us, the countless little details of shared experiences are still hard to manufacture. The smell of Mrs. Fields, sampling music by putting on headphones at FYE, the cologne cloud at Hollister making you feel like you had been swept away to the California beaches, finding that coin on the ground and tossing it into the fountain. And yes, even watching the Mol cop on the escalator. I do have hope that Gen Alpha, who's currently 1 to 13 years old today, will be a generation whose parents intentionally designed a more analog childhood because they saw what constant can activity did. Maybe not everywhere, and maybe not perfectly, but I think the recalibration has already started. Gen Z may be showing us the first visible signs. The most digital generation is reminding us that the physical world still matters. And maybe the mall was never really about shopping. Maybe it was about getting just enough freedom to become a more well rounded person. Thanks for listening to this reading of Collide. Until next time, I'm Ryan.

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