Is it customary in the US not to say "bye" after a phone call? [closed]

Question

I am French and we end our phone conversations with the equivalent of a "bye".

I noticed however that in most of the US movies or TV series (especially the police/action ones), the callers just hang up after the last "meaningful" exchange.

A few examples here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APUQeQalRsU

The movie conversations I have in mind are of the typical kind (not "help me!") - for instance the team is synching up on what to do next, or who does what. In such "work-oriented" situations, I would still end a call with a "bye", in normal life.

Is it really customary in the US to end phone calls without saying goodbye?

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EDIT: Following some advice from @Tinkeringbell, I will repeat here my last comment about why my question deals with movies:

I live in France and despite having profusely travelled to the US (about 50 times, mostly Illinois, Arizona and California) I think I never saw anyone hang up a phone. So my gateway to such human interactions in the US mostly comes from movies (with the understanding that they are movies, of course). This is similar to someone in Japan who would see on TV French people continuously kissing to say hello and would wonder whether this is the norm (it is). There are not many real documentaries here about people using phones in the US :)

Answer 1

I wouldn't put a lot of stock into movies for how things work. The important thing in a movie is to keep the story moving, not to show a realistic portrayal of events.

In movies, for instance:

• There's always a parking place in the city right in front of the building you want to enter. Yeah... good luck with that.
• People dying always have a final thing to say, at which point they quickly die. Death doesn't work that way.
• Cars explode when shot. Mythbusters proved that to be wrong.
• Cars explode after a collision, when they go off a cliff, or they are on fire. If cars exploded that easily, the government would crack down on car manufacturers - hard.
• People always have the right thing to say. I, myself, find myself thinking of a witty response hours after the interaction ends.
• People rarely interrupt one another.

Don't get me going on how firearms work in movies or TV...

At the end of a phone call, we do say good bye. It's weird to just hang up when a call is over. Sometimes we say "thanks" but pretty much every call I am on ends with people saying goodbye.

Answer 2

In my light, fictional reading I've come across many examples of people hanging up without anybody saying 'goodbye' or whatever.

When I was in the U.S. in the late 1990's, I called my new landlord (in Bowling Green, KY) and as soon as we'd finished discussing the first reason I'd called -- he hung up! I called back but couldn't get a hold of him right away. I now tell people ahead of time how many points I have to talk about.

Answer 3

I suspect it may not necessarily be enough to just specify the United States. This may vary by region even within the US.

I can only recall a handful of times I, or whoever I was talking to, simply hung up with no closing statement, and they all had unique circumstances. Things like the phone's battery dying leading to a follow-up call on a different phone to continue the conversation, or the conversation being more of an argument and one side hangs up in frustration.

In NY, we would probably consider it mildly rude to just abruptly hang up. What if your conversation partner has more to say? It's only fair to give them a chance.

As others have said, hollywood phone conversations are for the viewers, not the characters.

Answer 4

This is a great question and something that has irritated me about TV / Film making for more than a decade. In my opinion, it just ruins the integrity of every scene that they do it in (and they do it in every scene involving a phone call, in every TV show and every Film).

Over many years, I have come to believe that this has evolved as a part of the "this is just how we do it here" toolkit of making TV / Films, and that they somehow believe that the act of saying 'bye' is too mundane, and so by instead just hanging up, they believe that this adds an element of 'things left unsaid', to give a sort of added tension / emotionality to the scene.

However, as we all know, in almost 100% of situations, people do say 'bye' at the end of a phone call, and it would be almost unthinkable not to (the only exception being after a shouting phone argument, where one person hangs up in rage), but in TV/Film, we see people omit the 'bye' even during calm / friendly conversations - not saying 'bye' at the end of such a call is just not true to life. Of course, acting is not real life, but by omitting the 'bye', they just destroy the any pretence of realism that a scene might have had up until that point. In reality, it's just nonsense to omit the 'bye'. Once you've started to notice this, you will never be able to un-notice it happening in all Films and TV, and it always looks ridiculous (to anyone that is observant and cares about details, that is...).