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."

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.