I'll be there for you... sometimes: The one where inflation hits hanging out for young Koreans

You can't put a price on friendship, but you sure can on socializing, and young Koreans are cutting back as nearly two-thirds of Gen Z now go a full week without meeting up with friends, according to a recent survey.

High inflation has eaten into real wages while hiring has stayed slow, and the cost of keeping up a friendship has risen with everything else, with a survey by the job platform Albacheonguk finding that nine in 10 young people say the cost of catching up has become a burden, according to the results released on July 20.

Job seekers and people early in their careers are feeling it first, and it is raising a question about whether friendship itself is starting to divide along income lines.

"Some of them have landed jobs, so once we get together it runs past 30,000 won [$20] even if we only eat and get coffee," said a 29-year-old job seeker surnamed Kim, who has cut back on gatherings with close friends. "I keep the friendships going by turning up once every three meetups."

A 35-year-old surnamed Jin, who has an office job, switched off the birthday alert on KakaoTalk and other social apps last year.

"When someone I'm not even close to sends a mobile coffee voucher, it plays on my mind that I should be marking their occasions, too," Jin said. "It ends up as superfluous spending, so not giving and not receiving is the easiest way."

Of Millennials, 90.1 percent said they had at some point felt burdened by the cost of meeting friends, as did 93 percent of Gen Z, according to Albacheonguk, which surveyed 601 people born between 1995 and 2010 and 544 born between 1980 and 1994 in June.

Among Gen Z, 71.2 percent said they had cut spending when it came to seeing friends over the past year, and 64.6 percent were not meeting friends even once a week.

The cap most respondents set for a single outing was 50,000 won, with a third saying they start to feel the strain above that. A typical meetup ran between 30,000 and 50,000 won, with food the biggest burden on budgets for 78.4 percent of Gen Z respondents, followed by coffee and dessert at 40.1 percent, alcohol at 29.7 percent and birthdays and anniversaries at 25.8 percent.

Making the problem worse is the steady upward march of food prices. In the second quarter, gimbap (seaweed rice rolls) cost 4.1 percent more than a year earlier and tteokbokki (spicy rice cakes) 4 percent more, the Ministry of Data and Statistics said. Jajangmyeon (Korean Chinese black bean noodles) and jjamppong (Korean Chinese spicy seafood noodle soup) rose by close to 4 percent over the same period, well above the 3 percent rise in overall consumer prices. Recreation and culture cost 4.6 percent more and transportation 10.8 percent more, and food and lodging prices were up 2.7 percent.

Cutting this kind of spending is harder than it sounds. Recreation and cultural activities have taken a steadily larger share of household consumption, rising from 3.6 percent in the first quarter of 2021 to 6.2 percent in the first quarter of this year, the ministry's household income and expenditure survey shows.

Households spent an average of 3.11 million won a month in the first quarter, with 191,000 won going toward recreation and cultural experiences, a 12 percent jump from last year that far outpaced the increase in total spending at 5.3 percent. The share of spending for food and lodging rose from 12.1 percent to 14.8 percent over the same stretch.

Korea is not alone. Prices have been reshaping friendships in the United States and Japan since the Covid-19 pandemic. Figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put the cumulative rise in the cost of eating out since the pandemic at 20 to 30 percent as of last year.

In a 2025 survey by the U.S. financial platform Self Financial, 80 percent of respondents said they experienced financial anxiety around friends, and 43 percent said they found it difficult to keep up friendships with people considerably better off than themselves.

Young Japanese are cutting back on socializing as well, under the same price pressure and worry about life after retirement.

Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication ssimilarly show that single-person working households headed by someone aged 34 or under spent 1.3 percent of income on socializing in 2025, down from 2.2 percent in 2019.

"For people in their 20s and 30s, building social relationships matters enormously for marriage and for finding work, and once a relationship is broken off for financial reasons it can be hard to pick up again," You Hye-mi, a professor of economics and finance at Hanyang University, said. 

"Support has to go beyond helping people look for jobs or offering counseling services, and extend to helping them build social relationships."

BY KIM KYUNG-HEE [cho.yongjun1@joongang.co.kr]