31 Times Rude Humans Mistook Others For Employees And Were Less Than Pleasant About It

Though in this post we shared stories where people were mistaken for employees and got targeted instead, people who are most impacted by entitled customer behavior are the service workers. Even though we think that what all service workers want to actually do in these situations is to shout in their faces, the reality is much, much sadder.

Lucas shared what they found in the research regarding the impact of customer entitlement on waitstaff employees' physical and psychological health. “We expected a story about petty and satisfying acts of retaliation. We didn't find it. What we found, which was striking and depressing, is that such encounters simply led to burnout. Service workers most often talked about going even further above and beyond, trying to mitigate the demands of entitled patrons by anticipating their needs and preemptively meeting them. And they left their shifts feeling doubt about their own abilities and fit with the job.”

“We all want to feel confident and capable in our jobs, and dealing with the constant and escalating demands of the entitled robs us of this basic need to feel competent.”

The inspiration for conducting this research stemmed from a desire to understand how workers handle these types of customers and resolve conflicts. “We wanted to better understand the costs of entitlement for those who have no choice but to bear the brunt of entitled behaviors. We honestly went in thinking there would be a really interesting story about the ways in which service workers enact revenge or otherwise settle the score,” shared Lucas.

So the question is, how can businesses better support their employees in dealing with entitled customers? Lucas shared: “In many cases, the support provided by managers was both positive and negative. On the upside, some managers would intervene and spare the front-line employee from having to deal with the patron. But on the other hand, we heard about managers simply trying to placate these patrons with extras and special treatment, all of which feed into the expectations that entitled patrons have about how they ought to be treated.”

“My advice might be hard for managers in contexts like restaurants, where margins are already slim, and nobody likes to turn away a paying customer. But nonetheless, I think those in the service industry need to know when and how to fire a customer. The cost of such a strategy is clear. But there are also costs to not firing customers. When you tolerate misbehaving and excessively demanding customers, you demoralize and burn out the very employees who are the face of your brand and the ones who most directly create the customer experience.”

Hopefully, managers will get a better understanding of the value of their employees' mental health and will provide them with the necessary support when it comes to handling entitled customers. We were wondering if people could potentially recognize entitled customers by certain personality traits and behavior. Lucas shared: “We don't have an answer in our paper, but Wayne Hochwarter and his colleagues have some research showing that one of the things that help people cope with entitled people at work is what they call 'political skill'. Those who are well-connected at work and know how to manage relationships seem to weather the experience of entitlement better, perhaps because they know how to go about asking for and receiving support.”

“Imagine trying to get support from a manager or coworkers to deal with an excessively demanding customer. The more you know how to skillfully manage those relationships, the more likely you are to get the kind of support that would help you.”

“To me, this reinforces the need for managers to be proactive in helping employees manage customer entitlement. If you wait for employees to come to you for support, it'll often only be the politically skillful who do so. Everyone else may very well suffer in silence if you are reactive rather than proactive.”

If you ever find yourself in a situation where an entitled customer lashes out at you, and you try to do everything in your power to satisfy their needs, resulting in self-doubt, feel free to follow this advice from Lucas. “Talk about it with your colleagues. The feeling that you're bad at your job occurs in part because your reference point isn't a reasonable standard, it's whether you met the unreasonable and unmeetable demands of a patron who will likely never be satisfied or grateful. Talking about the experience with your colleagues helps you get some needed perspective.”

“The key issue, though, is powerlessness. In a consumer culture where 'the customer is always right' and where service workers work in precarious roles, are dependent on tips, and are unprotected from customer aggression, these problems are bound to be worse. Whether managers grant power to employees (by setting clear behavioral standards for customers), or employees take power (say, by unionizing), it's clear to me that the heart of this problem is an imbalance of power between customers and service employees that make workers vulnerable to mistreatment.”

Lastly, Lucas shared his thoughts on whether entitlement is a growing problem in our society. He responded: “I think it's a serious social issue. It's a source of strain in our working lives. It's a source of conflict. And in an era where costly collective action is needed to solve serious social problems, it's a trait that interferes with cooperation.”