Michelle had barely knotted her apron strings before the day turned ugly.

“When I told her I could only serve regular coffee—not the waffle-flavored one she wanted—she threw the boiling-hot pot at me,” she tells Fast Company, recounting one violent encounter with a customer.

Working at a popular all-day breakfast chain, Michelle has learned that customer “service” often means surviving other people’s rage: “I’ve been cussed out, had hot food thrown on me…even dodged a plate thrown at my head,” she says. Lately, the sexual comments from male customers have gotten worse. (Workers in this story have been given pseudonyms to protect them from retaliation.)

Still, she shows up, because she hopes to save enough to launch her own business soon.

Once upon a time, “the customer is king” was a rallying cry for better service. Today, it’s a management mantra gone feral. What began as good business sense, touted by historic retail magnates like Marshall Field and Harry Selfridge, has curdled into a corporate servitude that treats employees as expendable shock absorbers for awful behavior and diva demands.

With the holiday rush looming, customer-facing workers in cafés, call centers and car garages are bracing themselves to smile through every client’s tantrum—no matter how absurd.

Rampant hostility—and it’s getting worse

At Michelle’s workplace, the patron always comes first, while the safety of staff barely makes the list. Even after several viral videos of incidents at the chain’s restaurants, she says her complaints rarely go anywhere.

One of her managers will step in if he sees something on the floor that’s out of line, but others just ask what she did to provoke it. “It makes me angry, yet I feel I just have to take it,” she says. “It’s an epidemic.” That dynamic is baked into North American service culture.

“The ‘customer is king’ mantra has become a free pass for people to act however they want, with impunity,” says Gordon Sayre, a professor at Emlyon Business School in Lyon, France, who has been studying its impact on employees. “It breeds entitlement—and that entitlement gets abused, leaving workers with almost no room to push back.”

The mantra dictates that service staff stay deferential—careful about their every word and gesture—while clients hold the upper hand. With some workers getting all of their take-home pay from tips and gratuity, customers can quite literally decide how much an employee earns. And according to Sayre’s research, that mix of financial power and enforced politeness makes sexual harassment at on the job more likely.

The data mirrors reality. In a 2025 survey of 21,000 US frontline workers in healthcare, food service, education, retail, transportation, more than half (53%) said they’d recently faced verbally abusive, threatening or unruly customers.

There’s also been a meaningful uptick in customers acting out. According to Arizona State University’s annual National Customer Rage survey, 43% admit to having raised their voice to show displeasure, up from 35% in 2015. And since 2020, the percentage of customers seeking revenge for their hassles has tripled.

Such encounters take a toll: employees on the receiving end are twice as likely to report that their jobs are damaging their physical health, and nearly twice as likely to feel unsafe at work, according to analytics platform Perceptyx.

‘Management didn’t back my coworker’

Madison has been a server for more than a decade, bouncing between casual spots and fine dining rooms. These days, she’s at a former Michelin-starred restaurant in New York, and she’s long since accepted the industry’s devotion to ‘customer is always right.’ She sees it play out nightly, usually when someone insists a dish isn’t cooked properly, or worse, admits they just don’t like it.

“There’s a specific type of persnickety person who gets drunk on the power of being rude and demanding,” she tells Fast Company. “Once I spot a table with that vibe, I know I’m in for a long night.”

The problem is, the mentality rewards bad behavior. Recently, a diner claimed he’d only had one beer—when it was clearly two. “Management didn’t back my coworker, and the guy was charged for just one, which ultimately comes out of our tip pool,” says Madison. “He might have left with a bad taste, but he still got what he wanted.”

Most hospitality staff Fast Company spoke with said the same thing: comping drinks, desserts, and even entire checks has become routine when someone complains. That generosity, however, comes at a time when restaurants and bars can least afford it.

Across the US, the industry is being squeezed from both sides—soaring labor and ingredient costs on one end, and cautious consumer spending on the other. Growth in 2025 has been even slower than during the pandemic lockdown years. So why are so many establishments still giving freebies to difficult customers?

Because in the age of online reviews, every unhappy diner is a one-person marketing department, ready to dish out brutal takedowns. A single post can tank a spot’s reputation, and naming individual staff is common practice. To avoid bad publicity, businesses are trading profit for peace, and making sacrifices to get those all-important five-star ratings. Even a middling three-star review, which most customers equate to a good or average experience, can obliterate visibility on platforms like Yelp or Google.

For individual frontline employees, those digital judgments hit harder. A dip in ratings can mean being moved to a slower section or losing a lucrative shift. And in the platform gig economy, where algorithmic rankings rule, a single bad review can mean less work, or none at all. Danielle, a salon owner in Washington, remembers when an unhappy client not only left a bad review, but recruited 200 others to do the same.

“I’ve no idea how she found so many people, but it was traumatizing watching one-star reviews just flood in,” she says. Danielle has contacted Google and Yelp in the past, but they refuse to remove reviews.

Even on online platforms stuffed with fake and fraudulent bot reviews, the customer is always right, right?

‘Rest assured, we’ll be talking about you behind your back’

The real problem with the beloved slogan isn’t the complaints or stingy tips. It’s the emotional contortion required to stay polite while being treated like a punching bag.

Rose Hackman, author of Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power, interviewed service workers across the industries for her book and found a resounding answer: what counts isn’t the service, it’s the smile. “Emotional labor is highly devalued, feminized and rendered invisible, despite it being one of the most central forms of work in our economy,” says Hackman. “We need to value it more.”

Of course, that responsibility sits not just with consumers, but with employers too. Until the culture actually changes, employees cope the best they can.

Avery, a server in an upmarket seafood restaurant in Philadelphia, has gotten better at protecting herself with age. “I used to fold like a beach chair to their needs and demands, but I’m less willing now,” she explains. “Outside of this job, I’m a performer, and there are similarities there: I put on a mask, act out a show, then the lights come up, I clock out, and I get to be someone else.”

Sadly, no coping strategy is perfect.

“Closing yourself off and faking an emotion—also known as surface acting—can look professional, but it impacts your mood,” explains Sayre. “Trying to fix the situation or reframe the customer’s behavior can protect your emotional health, but hurts performance.” Instead, venting with trusted coworkers acts as a vital pressure valve—a place to express real emotions and recover from the constant stress.

Jesse, a New York bartender, is amazed by the “rancid” behavior he sees on the daily, but the camaraderie with his team keeps him sane.

“If you walk in and make my life harder, talking to me in a way you would never speak to a friend or your mother; babe, you’ve decided what our relationship is gonna be,” he says. “Rest assured, we’ll be talking about you behind your back, laughing and joking about how you’re dressed.”With ‘customer is king’ still reigning, America desperately needs a reminder about the inherent social contract of emotional labor—a contract that only works if respect flows both ways. Without it, the whole system falls apart, leaving behind burnt-out staff and sour customers.

As Jesse says: “You’re a guest in my home, so I’m gonna take care of you. All you have to do is enjoy your night, and pay me for the work I do.”