Gen Z Doesn’t Like Phone Calls. Apparently, They Do Like Calling Bars

Leaning over his desk, iPhone held in the palm of his hand on speaker, 25-year-old Gavin Fernand speaks in the jargon of a stereotypical cold caller.

“Hey, how are you? I’m reaching out to see if your team has the bandwidth to support a large-scale alcohol consumption activation this afternoon?”

The unseen man on the other end of the call is a bit confused.

“Sorry, say that again?”

“We’re looking to deploy approximately 4 to 6 individuals in your establishment for a beverage-focused engagement,” adds Fernand.

Finally clueing in on the joke, the bar manager laughs and says he can accommodate them before admitting:

“That’s the best call we’ve gotten all day.”

Fernand is part of a growing wave of young people dialing up bars on camera — some to prank, some to “check the vibe,” most just to see what happens. For a generation that supposedly neither drinks nor speaks on the phone, it’s an unlikely viral trend.

Going in Cold

Posting under the handle Corporate Dudes, Fernand runs a consulting company that makes skits, funny videos, and memes paid for by alcohol brands like Guinness, Surfside, and Shock Top as well as non-drinks companies like Adobe and Ramp. But he also creates his own funny drinks content for his social media business which counts 2 million followers across 7 accounts.

Fernand found early success this year with a series called Lunch Beer, in which he stops a stranger on the street in the middle of the work day and brings them out to a bar to have a drink and chew the fat. Calling bars to try and get permission to film there, he came up with his next big idea.

One day, a co-worker was taking his “sweet-ass time” to wrap for the day and so Fernand thought it would be funny to call their local bar to tell them they were going to be “a little late” for their usual happy hour perch. That video went semi-viral, with around 14,000 likes and 5,000 shares on TikTok; Fernand was inspired to do more. He was already skilled at cold-calling random people (and its jargony argot) thanks to a former gig as an SDR (sales development representative) which saw him cold calling sometimes 200 people a day.

“There had been trends of people like cold-calling their girlfriend or something like that, so I thought I could take that and spin it into this different niche,” says Fernand.

It worked, and his bar cold-call video has over 200,000 likes so far.

Pranking the Bar

Prank calls to bars are of course nothing new — see: Bart Simpson’s calls to Moe’s Tavern which was based on the cult-famous Tube Bar tapes from the 1970s — but, in many ways, this trend comes on the heels of a similar trend that started in late 2024, when social media users began calling bars to simply “check the vibe.”

One of the earliest TikToks of a Zoomer cold-calling the bar doesn’t even post the actual phone call. Instead, musician Fia James recounts a story of her and a friend calling a bar to check the vibes — “Are there any cuties?” they ask — stunning a bartender who’d apparently never considered that this was something people could do. Honestly, even though James is pretty charming, the video is not all that entertaining; nevertheless, it racked up nearly three-quarters of a million views and soon had copycats.

By March 2025, TikToker Bethany Kelly had gone viral for calling a Cincinnati bar on St. Patrick’s day to see what the vibes are and whether people are wearing green and it’s “giving St. Patrick’s Day.” The bartender earnestly responds to all her queries and the video eventually received 5 million views.

“With these videos, we’re trying to highlight the benefits of social interaction, getting out there and meeting people, making friends with strangers even just for a night, and why that is, like, so important.”

A week later, pre-hangover pear drink brand Gush went viral with a video in which a woman calls a bar “to see what the vibes are.” “Uh…what?!” responded the bartender before he claimed (falsely it sure sounds like) that the bar was packed with a solid male/female ratio. It received nearly 6 million views on TikTok.

This would soon spread across the world, with cold-calling vibe checkers in Ireland (“Is there any good craic in the pub?”) and other countries. This trend has continued to the present day and now TikTok has an entire page dedicated to “Normalize Calling The Bar to Check The Vibe.”

Last Call

Generation Z famously does not make phone calls and we’ve long been told they don’t drink alcohol either — though new data suggests the latter is more stereotype than fact.

Yet, Fernand does both and so now do plenty of other Zoomers. Calling bars (and hopefully then drinking at them) is just something you do if you’re a young person with a social media account and a desire for virality. For Fernand, it’s not just a laugh, but a little life lesson.

“Comfortability is like the edge for me, myself, and people I know in sales,” says Fernand. “I think being able to call someone and just speak normally and be humble enough to admit that you don’t know the answer if they ask something — it’s a good skill to have, you know.”

Perhaps that’s why calling bars has caught on so quickly. There are people calling bars to let them know they are now hungover (“I came into your establishment yesterday and had a few beers…”). There are people calling to see if the bar knows what happened last night (“I was there for my 21st birthday last night and I’m really not feeling good…”). Others are calling the bar to wish them goodnight. It’s even extended to college buddies cold-calling each other to try to tempt them into going out drinking for the night (“Sounds tempting…”).

Of course, likes and shares aren’t bar traffic, but, ultimately, through his videos and this trend, Fernand believes he is showing that his generation is being incorrectly perceived as lame and boring.

“That’s a stigma we’re trying to beat,” he says. “With these videos, we’re trying to highlight the benefits of social interaction, getting out there and meeting people, making friends with strangers even just for a night, and why that is, like, so important.”

Just last week, while on vacation, Fernand called his local Murray Hill dive Buddy’s to let them know he’s “OK” and will be back in town (and at their bar) soon. The bar manager’s response:

“I appreciate the call and I’ll let the staff know you’re in good hands.”

The article Gen Z Doesn’t Like Phone Calls. Apparently, They Do Like Calling Bars appeared first on VinePair.