A Gen Z cashier making $13 an hour says she 'acts her wage' to protect her mental health: 'This is not the sum total of your entire life. This is literally just a job.'

• Claire, a 22-year-old cashier, does the job she was hired to do — nothing more, nothing less.
• More people are embracing "acting their wage" by not doing work outside their job description.

Claire, 22, is used to dealing with understaffing.

The grocery-store cashier said that for her store to be fully staffed, it would probably need around 40 cashiers. When she joined last October, there were about 12 of them.

"I was working six, seven days a week for months on end, because nobody seemed to be able to stick around," Claire, whose last name is known to Insider but withheld for fear of professional repercussions, told Insider. "I stuck around because I figured work is work and that's always been my mentality."

But Claire is adamant about "acting her wage." She's watched cycle after cycle of the store being fully staffed, where workers feel "they can have a life outside this job," and then something happens to upset the balance, whether it's management changing workers' hours or a particularly demanding customer — and coworker after coworker walks out.

"If the job is something I can do and it's not taking from my life more than it gives — i.e., the money — then I can withstand fussy customers and strange management. I can brush all that off," she said. "I do understand there are times when a job is just not worth it."

For Claire, who makes about $13 an hour in Texas, the job is still worth it. But that's because she acts her wage: She does what she's expected to do but doesn't take on more or stretch herself more than she needs to. It's another side of quiet quitting, and it's a practice that she thinks is especially important for Gen Z.

"I have control over when I show up and when I leave," she said. "While I'm there, I'm going to try at least to do as I'm told, but I'm not going to do a 9 to 9."

How Claire acts her wage

For Claire, acting her wage is all about keeping her identity separate from work and not feeling the need to go above and beyond.

"In my head, at least, no matter what your job, the job should not be all there is to you," Claire said. "This is not the sum total of your entire life. This is literally just a job."

Especially with inflation rising — and getting paid so little that she hovers below the poverty line — Claire doesn't see any incentive to do more than is required to keep her job, something she also sees as intrinsic to acting her wage.

"I'm not interested in being the fan favorite. I'm not interested in 'going above and beyond.' Because when have I ever gone above and beyond at that store specifically, and it meant something to me at the end of the day?" she said.

If she does extend herself, she'd like to have some type of reward for it.

"When you don't get it time after time, why would I even try?" Claire said. "It's not giving up, it's not not doing the work. It's just understanding that this is the work I was hired to do."

At the end of the day, Claire said, you need to think about how important you are to the business.

"You're not important to that business," she said, adding: "It's important insofar as the work gets done, but it doesn't really, in my experience, seem to matter to the employer who does that work just as long as it gets done."

Why Gen Z is more inclined to act their wage

As a Gen Zer, Claire thinks that her generation approaches work differently than past generations. Her grandfather, for instance, had the mentality of giving your all — no matter what's going on with your personal life or in your own head.

She said that created the idea of an "über-employee." With this mindset, she said, "it doesn't matter how you are doing — mental health, physical or medical health, problems at home, problems with friends, drama in life with other people. When you go to work, you put in 115% every day."

But Gen Z is dealing with soaring inflation, an uncertain political environment, and things like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Claire said.

"You put all of that together and you've got a young adult today who's like, 'I am a human being. I'm going to have days where my mental health takes priority, where my grandma, my other job, my whatever takes priority over this job,'" Claire said.

People from other generations may feel the same way, but Gen Zers have shown they're more willing to push back. Quiet quitting and acting your wage isn't new, but the pushback and uproar over the term shows that employers are rattled by an increasingly emboldened workforce.

"It's, in my experience, a greater separation from the employee to the employer than in years and years," Claire said. "Because we're, as a generation but also as a country, getting all of this information about how much we matter and all the different ways in which we can be healthy or not healthy."