"Welcome in!" again
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A little over a year ago, as I was running through the little town of Wamsutter (pop. 203) in southwest Wyoming, I was stunned when the attendants and clerks at the three gas stations there uniformly greeted me with a hearty "Welcome in!"
Last week, as I walked into a small store in the rural Dallas area, the shop assistant hailed me naturally with "welcome in!" I couldn't help but catch my breath and momentarily halt my pace, because I hadn't heard that interjection a single time in the Philadelphia area.
I asked my son, who lives outside of Dallas, how prevalent this expression is. He replied:
I would say it's fairly common.
Maybe 1 in 3 times one enters a restaurant or smaller store you hear that or a similar greeting
This only goes to show how accustomed we become to the niceties of habitual speech patterns.
Selected readings
- "'Welcome in!'" (9/9/24)
- "Irasshaimase?" (4/19/21)
- "Irasshaimase?, part 2" (11/10/21)
- "On-the-job jargon" (9/7/23)
- "Hyper-inclusive Speaker-exclusive we" (10/4/23)
Lillie Dremeaux said,
January 1, 2026 @ 9:22 am
I heard "Welcome in" for the first time in a store in a mall in Westchester County, New York, sometime between 2015 and 2019. The phrase sounded off grammatically and also contrived, as if a retail consultant had told corporate leaders their salespeople needed to sound more friendly. (As if "Welcome" weren't welcoming enough, but "Welcome IN" showed you were bringing customers INTO the store.)
As you did, I noticed it more and more until it became commonplace. Then, over the past year, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and Eater all wrote about it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/trends/2025/11/28/welcome-in-retail-greeting/
https://www.wsj.com/business/welcome-in-the-two-word-greeting-thats-taking-over-and-driving-shoppers-nuts-8443421f
https://www.eater.com/24022477/why-is-everyone-saying-welcome-in
The Eater article says it most likely started in the South and West, and it has a citation of "Welcome in" from a training manual in 2012. This makes me wonder if the saleswoman I first heard say it had brought it to New York from elsewhere in the country.
Victor Mair said,
January 1, 2026 @ 9:32 am
@Lillie Dremeaux
Your observations and documentation are greatly appreciated.
Chris Button said,
January 1, 2026 @ 9:46 am
It almost sounds like an anglicization of German willkommen.
Mai Kuha said,
January 1, 2026 @ 2:19 pm
At first I wondered if it could be a calque of Finnish "tervetuloa sisään" — seems like a bit of a stretch for Wyoming and entirely improbable for Dallas.
I don't know how common it is in Finnish, but here is one example I found:
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/fi/clippings/tervetuloa-sis%C3%A4%C3%A4n-designmuseon-syksyn-p%C3%A4%C3%A4n%C3%A4yttely-vie-vuokko-ja-a/
SlideSF said,
January 1, 2026 @ 2:25 pm
San Francisco Bay Area resident here. I am sure I heard it earlier, but only as an anomaly. Then, around 2017 or 2018 I started noticing it more and more until, by the time stores and restaurants opened up more generally after covid, it was the default greeting everywhere I went. It drives me nuts. To me, it de-emphasizes the "welcome" aspect in favor of the "in" part. It's never "WELCOME! in" but always "welcome IN!", as though the fact that someone is patronizing their business is more important than that the person feels welcome, taking the emphasis off the customer and onto the business.
My wife, a Millennial, thinks I spend too much time thinking about trivialities
KevinM said,
January 1, 2026 @ 4:09 pm
The recording of East Virginia by the Carter Family (1934) contains the line "Oh, at my heart you are my darling/At my door you're welcome in." Not quite a standalone greeting, but in the neighborhood. Practically every other phrase in the song, btw, seems to be a standard folk music trope, so the origins could be older. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNHqF_OyFkk
David Morris said,
January 1, 2026 @ 4:39 pm
As well as German willkommen (per Chris above) (are there German heritages in the places you mentioned), another possible original is a conflation of 'welcome' and 'come in'.