THE COST OF NOW: The Customer Is Not Always Right Now
There is a phrase we have absolutely butchered.
The customer is always right.
Whatever its original meaning, we seem to have gradually translated it into something much broader:
The customer gets what they want.
When they want it.
The customer should not be inconvenienced.
The customer should not have to wait.
The customer should be able to contact somebody immediately.
Their problem should become your priority.
Their deadline should become your deadline.
And if any part of the experience contains friction, somebody should probably apologise.
I run businesses.
I am a customer of plenty of others.
Good service matters enormously to me.
If you tell me you'll call Tuesday and don't, that's poor service.
If I pay for next-day delivery and you send it next week, you've failed to deliver what you sold me.
If I repeatedly contact a company about a genuine problem and nobody bothers answering, that's shit.
Customers should have standards.
Businesses should keep promises.
But none of that means handing over money gives me priority over another human being's time.
Somewhere along the way we stopped distinguishing between:
Good service
and
immediate service.
They are not the same thing.
There is a difference between what I bought and what I want
Suppose I ask a professional for a piece of work.
They tell me:
“Absolutely. I can have that to you by Friday.”
I agree.
Friday is the deal.
If Wednesday arrives and I suddenly decide I would really like it Thursday morning, something has changed.
Not their commitment.
Mine.
I can ask.
Maybe they can accommodate me.
Maybe they'll happily move something.
Maybe there is a charge for expedited work.
Maybe Thursday happens to be easy.
Brilliant.
But I haven't uncovered a customer-service failure because they won't.
I bought Friday.
I now want Thursday.
Those are different things.
It sounds painfully obvious written down.
Yet consumers blur that distinction constantly.
And businesses encourage us to.
Businesses trained us to expect exceptional service
Customers did not create modern immediacy on their own.
Companies competed on it.
Faster delivery.
Faster replies.
Longer opening hours.
Instant refunds.
Live chat.
Same-day appointments.
Twenty-four-hour support.
Order in the next 36 minutes for delivery tomorrow.
Competition kept making service easier.
Usually that's fantastic.
Customers rewarded it.
So competitors copied it.
Then somebody went faster again.
As we've already seen in this series, customer expectations operate partly as reference points.
Research published in the Journal of Retailing examined how customers responded when service waits were shorter or longer than expected.
Across three studies, customers were particularly pleased when waits were shorter than expected. Interestingly, a wait that ran slightly longer than expected caused a comparatively modest reduction in satisfaction, although satisfaction deteriorated much more sharply once the delay became substantially longer than expected.
And expectations mattered differently when the business itself had explicitly provided the estimate. Breaking a communicated expectation was more consequential because the customer could reasonably interpret it as a broken promise.
That distinction is incredibly useful.
There is a difference between:
You promised ten minutes and kept me waiting forty.
and:
I personally decided this should take ten minutes and I'm angry that it didn't.
Only one contains a broken promise.
Expectations have two forms
Researchers studying consumer expectations sometimes distinguish between predictive expectations and normative expectations.
Predictive:
What do I think will happen?
Normative:
What do I think should happen?
Those sound similar.
They aren't.
I might predict that a restaurant will take twenty minutes to bring my food.
My normative expectation might be that any decent restaurant should do it in ten.
That second category is where entitlement can creep in.
Recent research examining consumer expectations found that psychological entitlement was associated particularly with higher normative expectations in several dimensions of the service studied. The research was specifically about institutional food and older Norwegian consumers, so we shouldn't generalise its precise findings to every customer interaction, but the distinction is useful.
What I expect a company to do based on experience is one thing.
What I believe a company owes me because I am the customer is another.
And that difference becomes important the moment another human being has to fulfil the expectation.
“I'm the customer” isn't a magic spell
We've all seen it.
Someone clicks their fingers at a waiter.
Talks to a receptionist as though they are furniture.
Demands to speak to a manager because a perfectly reasonable policy applies to them.
Becomes aggressive because the person behind the counter cannot magically produce stock that does not exist.
Explains loudly how much money they spend here.
“I am a paying customer.”
Yes.
That's normally how businesses work.
You pay them.
They provide something.
The transaction creates obligations.
It does not create a temporary class system.
Yet customer-facing workers frequently operate under an extraordinary constraint.
The person speaking badly to them can leave.
The employee often has to remain polite.
That's a very uneven interaction.
The human being has to keep smiling
There is a whole academic literature around customer incivility.
Not necessarily dramatic abuse.
Often lower-level behaviour.
Rudeness.
Dismissiveness.
Condescension.
Sarcasm.
Disrespect.
Unreasonable demands.
A 2026 systematic review examined 112 empirical studies published between 2009 and 2025.
The review describes customer incivility as a structurally unusual form of workplace mistreatment because the person behaving badly sits outside the organisation while the employee is constrained by the service role.
The literature reviewed associates repeated customer incivility with outcomes including psychological strain, emotional exhaustion, burnout and reduced performance.
That does not mean every impatient customer is abusive.
There is an enormous gap between:
“Excuse me, we've been waiting quite a while. Can you tell me what's happening?”
and:
“What the fuck are you doing back there?”
One is completely reasonable.
The other turns dissatisfaction with a service into permission to mistreat the human delivering it.
The problem is that “customer first” cultures can sometimes make employees responsible for absorbing both.
Entitlement changes the interaction
An older but fascinating study looked specifically at customer entitlement and waitstaff.
Glenda Fisk and Lukas Neville interviewed 56 people with waiting experience about entitled customer behaviour.
Participants described negative effects including physiological arousal, negative emotions, burnout and feelings of dehumanisation.
They also described inadequate organisational support when dealing with these customers.
Small study.
Specific occupation.
We should not turn it into a universal claim about every customer-service interaction.
But the language matters.
Dehumanisation.
That's quite a price for someone's lunch.
And it reveals what happens when we stop seeing service as an exchange between humans and start seeing the other person as an interface.
Click.
Request.
Receive.
Except this interface has feelings.
Technology made companies feel less human
This creates an interesting paradox.
Modern services increasingly hide the humans.
I don't know who processes my order.
I don't know who answers the chat.
I don't know who approves the refund.
I often don't even know where they are.
I interact with:
a button,
a status,
a queue number,
a chatbot,
a ticket,
an estimated response time,
an automated email.
That makes service incredibly scalable.
But I think it also alters the way we perceive delay.
When I press a button, I expect a system response.
Systems are instant.
So when the process reaches a human and slows down, it can feel broken.
The website answered instantly.
The payment processed instantly.
The confirmation arrived instantly.
Why hasn't support answered instantly?
Because at some point your completely digital-looking transaction reached Sarah.
Sarah has fourteen other people waiting.
Sarah needs the toilet.
Sarah has been called into a conversation with her manager.
Sarah is trying to fix a problem created by software.
Sarah may not even be called Sarah.
The point is that there is a person there.
Digital interfaces can remove almost every visible sign of their existence.
Until they become the bottleneck.
Then we're suddenly furious with them.
Customer expectations can create emotional labour
Frontline service doesn't merely require people to do tasks.
It often requires them to manage emotion.
Smile.
Stay calm.
Remain helpful.
Sound warm.
De-escalate.
Do not match the customer's tone.
A 2024 study involving 1,040 frontline employees across retail, banking and hospitality examined what happened after customer incivility.
The researchers found relationships between customer incivility and how employees subsequently performed emotional labour, including greater surface acting—displaying the emotion the job requires rather than necessarily feeling it.
Think about the asymmetry again.
Customer has a bad day.
Customer snaps.
Customer leaves.
Employee remains.
Next customer.
Smile.
“Hi, how can I help?”
We talk endlessly about customer experience.
There is another experience happening at exactly the same time.
Businesses sometimes make this worse
This cannot all be dumped on customers.
Companies have spent decades telling people they should expect extraordinary treatment.
Putting customers first.
Customer obsession.
Delight.
Never say no.
Go above and beyond.
Fine.
Those philosophies can produce excellent businesses.
But slogans create incentives.
If management communicates that keeping customers happy matters more than almost anything else, what happens when the customer is unreasonable?
Someone has to pay the difference.
Often it's the employee.
The 2011 waitstaff study is interesting here because participants described feeling abandoned by management when dealing with entitled customers.
That is the dark side of:
The customer is always right.
Sometimes they're not.
Sometimes the employee is right.
Sometimes company policy is right.
Sometimes reality is right.
Sometimes nobody is wrong and the answer is simply:
You'll have to wait.
A healthy service culture needs the confidence to say that.
Good service requires boundaries too
That sounds counterintuitive.
We tend to think boundaries reduce customer service.
I think they can improve it.
Imagine a professional services firm that promises every client:
“Contact us whenever you like. We'll deal with it immediately.”
Sounds incredible.
Until enough clients believe it.
Now everyone is urgent.
Staff are constantly interrupted.
Planned work gets displaced.
Quality suffers.
Important jobs are rushed.
Nobody knows which demand genuinely matters most.
The firm becomes reactive.
Eventually the service deteriorates precisely because the company promised too much service.
This is the same availability trap from the previous essay, viewed from the customer side.
If businesses teach customers that somebody is always available, customers will reasonably begin to expect somebody to be always available.
Then the business becomes trapped by the expectation it created.
Sometimes slower is better service
This is another thing we've muddled.
Fast service is useful.
But it is only one dimension of service.
Suppose I ask an accountant a complicated tax question.
They respond in four minutes.
Impressive.
Wrong.
Was that good service?
I ask a structural engineer to review something.
“Can you just have a quick look?”
No.
Please don't.
Have a proper fucking look.
There are things where I actively want the professional to resist my impatience.
Medical advice.
Legal advice.
Engineering.
Financial planning.
Complex technical work.
Research.
Anything safety-critical.
The customer may want now.
Professional responsibility may require later.
That is not bad customer service.
That is expertise.
Sometimes the most valuable service a professional provides is refusing to let the customer's preferred speed determine the quality of the answer.
Service speed can have diminishing value
This is something businesses should think about very carefully.
Suppose the industry average response time is 48 hours.
You reduce yours to 12.
Huge improvement.
Customers notice.
Then six.
Then one.
Then fifteen minutes.
At what point does additional speed stop creating meaningful customer value?
The waiting research is helpful here.
Caruelle, Lervik-Olsen and Gustafsson found that customers were relatively tolerant of slightly longer-than-expected waits and considerably happier with shorter-than-expected ones. Their practical conclusion included a warning against assuming every delay needs expensive service recovery or that every possible reduction in waiting time is equally necessary.
This challenges an assumption embedded in modern customer service:
Faster must always be better.
Not necessarily.
Sometimes predictable is better.
Accurate is better.
Human is better.
Clear is better.
Reliable is better.
Getting it right first time may be vastly better than replying in thirty seconds.
Speed is one service variable.
We turned it into a religion.
The customer usually wants certainty
I suspect this is where a lot of unnecessary conflict could disappear.
Customers often aren't actually demanding completion now.
They want to know what's happening.
Has anyone seen this?
When will I hear?
Is the order coming?
Has my complaint been logged?
Do I need to chase?
Earlier in this series, we looked at research showing that expectation and information materially affect waiting experiences.
Tell me:
“We've received this. Our current response time is three working days. You'll hear from us by Thursday.”
Fine.
Now I can get on with my life.
Silence creates uncertainty.
Uncertainty creates chasing.
Chasing creates workload.
Workload creates slower responses.
Slower responses create more chasing.
Congratulations.
We have invented a self-sustaining customer-service nightmare.
Sometimes businesses don't need to respond faster.
They need to communicate better.
Customer chasing is often a symptom
This is something businesses get defensive about.
“Customers keep chasing us.”
Why?
Are they all impatient arseholes?
Possibly.
Or have you given them no idea what happens next?
Did you acknowledge the enquiry?
Did you set a timescale?
Did you explain the process?
Did you update them when the timescale changed?
Did you keep the promise you made?
A customer who has been told three days and waits three days is in a completely different psychological situation from a customer who sent something into a black hole.
Businesses have responsibilities here.
You cannot complain about impatient customers while creating uncertainty at every stage.
But the opposite is also true.
Once a business has provided a reasonable timescale and is operating within it, repeated chasing doesn't magically create additional capacity.
It often does the opposite.
Now somebody has to stop doing the work to tell you they're still doing the work.
Every customer cannot be first
This should be obvious.
It isn't.
Businesses serve multiple customers.
That's the model.
But every individual customer experiences the organisation primarily through their own need.
I know my problem.
I don't see the other fifty.
So when someone says:
“We'll deal with this as soon as possible,”
I naturally imagine the shortest plausible version of “possible”.
The employee knows there are fourteen things before mine.
That difference in visibility creates tension.
If everyone is treated as top priority, priority ceases to mean anything.
Businesses have to sequence work.
Urgency.
Risk.
Order received.
Contractual commitment.
Vulnerability.
Operational consequence.
Whatever criteria make sense.
But there must be criteria.
The alternative is whichever customer shouts loudest gets served first.
And that teaches customers something extremely unhealthy:
Being difficult works.
Rewarding aggression creates more aggression
This is where “keep the customer happy” can become self-defeating.
Customer behaves reasonably.
Waits.
Follows the process.
Receives normal service.
Another customer shouts.
Demands a manager.
Threatens a negative review.
Suddenly gets expedited.
Free upgrade.
Discount.
Immediate resolution.
What did the organisation just teach?
Not only the difficult customer.
The employee too.
Being reasonable gets the normal queue.
Being abusive gets priority.
A 2026 systematic review of customer incivility argues that organisations should reduce reliance on individual employees simply absorbing the behaviour and instead use organisational policies, training and other structural responses.
That feels right.
Service workers shouldn't have to negotiate company values from scratch every time somebody becomes rude.
Complaints are useful
I don't want the argument to drift into:
Customers should shut up and be grateful.
Absolutely not.
Complaints are valuable.
I complain.
If a company does a shit job, it needs to know.
Feedback exposes weak processes.
Customers identify things organisations become blind to.
Sometimes the only reason a terrible system changes is because enough customers refuse to tolerate it.
And if a company takes my money while failing to provide what it promised, I'm not going to apologise for expecting resolution.
The dividing line isn't:
Customer complains = entitled.
It is closer to:
Does the expectation come from an agreement, a reasonable service standard or a genuine failure—or merely from my desire to be prioritised?
That's the uncomfortable question.
Paying buys the service, not the servant
Perhaps this is the simplest version.
When I pay a plumber, I buy plumbing work.
I don't buy a plumber.
When I pay an accountant, I buy professional services.
I don't buy immediate access to the accountant whenever a thought enters my head.
When I order dinner, I buy food and delivery within whatever service terms we've agreed.
I don't buy the right to treat the person bringing it as inferior because traffic exists.
Money creates a transaction.
Not ownership.
Modern service culture sometimes forgets that because the language is so customer-centred.
“My driver.”
“My waiter.”
“My cleaner.”
“My accountant.”
“My builder.”
Usually harmless grammar.
But there is a useful reminder hiding underneath.
They aren't yours.
They're people temporarily performing a service for you.
There are customers businesses should probably lose
This will horrify some customer-service textbooks.
But it is true.
Not every customer relationship is worth preserving.
A customer who repeatedly abuses employees, ignores agreed processes, creates artificial emergencies, disputes every invoice, expects immediate attention and consumes vastly more capacity than the relationship justifies may be commercially unprofitable even before we consider the human cost.
The assumption that every piece of revenue deserves protecting can turn one difficult customer into a disproportionate tax on everyone else.
Their demands interrupt work for good customers.
Their escalations consume management time.
Their behaviour exhausts employees.
Their artificial urgency displaces planned work.
Sometimes excellent customer service means protecting the organisation's ability to serve reasonable customers well.
That may require saying no to an unreasonable one.
The customer is right about some things
They are right to expect honesty.
Right to expect what was promised.
Right to expect products reasonably fit for purpose.
Right to expect mistakes corrected.
Right to expect respectful treatment.
Right to ask questions.
Right to complain.
Right to leave.
Businesses survive because customers choose them.
None of that should be diluted.
But customers are not automatically right about:
how long technically complex work should take,
which existing customer should be displaced for them,
whether every employee should be immediately reachable,
whether policy should disappear because it inconveniences them,
or whether their personal preference constitutes an emergency.
Expertise still matters.
Capacity still exists.
Queues still exist.
Other customers still exist.
Human beings still exist.
Perhaps good service needs a new definition
Not:
Give the customer everything immediately.
Something more adult.
Make clear promises.
Keep them.
Set realistic expectations.
Communicate when things change.
Make genuine urgency visible.
Provide excellent work.
Correct mistakes.
Treat customers respectfully.
And expect customers to treat employees respectfully too.
That sounds less exciting than customer obsession.
But it is probably more sustainable.
Because good service should create trust.
Permanent immediacy creates dependency.
And once customers learn that every request can become immediate, no business can ever be fast enough.
There will always be a faster response.
A longer opening hour.
A shorter lead time.
Another competitor prepared to promise more.
Eventually somebody has to ask:
Does this actually make the service better?
The customer is not always right now
That is the distinction.
Not:
The customer is not always right.
Sometimes they're completely right.
Sometimes the business has fucked up.
Sometimes they have every reason to be angry.
But even a right customer isn't necessarily a right-now customer.
Their issue may matter without being an emergency.
Their enquiry may deserve an answer without deserving the next answer.
Their money may purchase excellent service without purchasing permanent access.
Their preference may deserve consideration without automatically becoming another person's deadline.
We've spent decades getting extraordinarily good at putting the customer first.
Maybe the next stage is learning that first does not have to mean immediately.
Because businesses contain people.
People contain limits.
And a service culture that forgets that eventually becomes worse for everybody.
Employees first.
Customers eventually.
Including the reasonable one who never shouted loudly enough to jump the queue.
Sources And Further Reading
Delphine Caruelle, Line Lervik-Olsen and Anders Gustafsson, “The Clock Is Ticking—Or Is It? Customer Satisfaction Response To Waiting Shorter Vs. Longer Than Expected During A Service Encounter”, Journal Of Retailing (2023).
Across three studies, the authors found that customers respond strongly positively to waits shorter than expected, while waits slightly longer than expected can produce comparatively modest reductions in satisfaction. Much longer waits become increasingly damaging. They also found that expectations explicitly provided by the company carry different consequences from expectations customers form themselves.
Guro Andreassen et al., research into antecedents of normative and predictive consumer expectations, Journal Of Consumer Behaviour (2024).
The study distinguishes predictive expectations—what consumers think will happen—from normative expectations—what they believe should happen. In the specific context studied, psychological entitlement showed positive associations with several normative expectation dimensions. Because the study concerns institutional food and Norwegian baby boomers, its precise findings should not be generalised to all service markets.
Glenda M. Fisk and Lukas B. Neville, “Effects Of Customer Entitlement On Service Workers' Physical And Psychological Well-Being: A Study Of Waitstaff Employees”, Journal Of Occupational Health Psychology (2011).
An exploratory qualitative study involving 56 people with waitstaff experience found that entitled customer behaviour was reported as negatively affecting employee wellbeing, with participants describing physiological arousal, negative affect, burnout and feelings of dehumanisation.
Pengfei Cheng and Zhuangzi Liu, “Predicting Frontline Employees' Emotional Labor After Suffering Customer Incivility: A Job Passion Perspective”, Acta Psychologica (2024).
Using data from 1,040 frontline employees working across retail, banking and hospitality, the authors found relationships between customer incivility and employees' subsequent emotional labour, including greater surface acting through the job-passion mechanisms examined.
Bhutto et al., “Exploring Customer Incivility In The Service Sector: A Systematic Review And Roadmap For Future Research”, International Journal Of Consumer Studies (2026).
A PRISMA-based systematic review synthesising 112 empirical studies published from 2009 to 2025. The review highlights customer incivility as a distinct workplace stressor because customers exist outside normal organisational controls while frontline staff remain constrained by service-role expectations. The literature links customer incivility with outcomes including psychological strain, emotional exhaustion and reduced performance, while identifying substantial remaining research gaps around culture, digital service interactions and interventions.
Research Gaps
Customer impatience and customer incivility are not the same thing.
A customer asking firmly about a delay, requesting compensation or expressing justified dissatisfaction should not be labelled uncivil or entitled simply because the interaction is uncomfortable. Customer-incivility research concerns norm-violating behaviour such as disrespect, hostility or rudeness, not ordinary complaints.
There is no universal boundary between demanding and reasonable service expectations.
What counts as an acceptable response time varies enormously between industries, products, contract terms, price points and consequences. Waiting three days for routine professional advice may be perfectly reasonable; waiting three days for an emergency breakdown response may not be.
Businesses themselves shape customer expectations.
This essay argues that competition and repeated improvements in service speed can train customers to expect increasingly rapid service. Expectancy-disconfirmation research supports the importance of expectation in satisfaction, but more direct longitudinal research would be needed to quantify how industry-wide service improvements alter consumer expectations over time.
The relationship between entitlement and service expectations needs broader evidence.
Research links psychological entitlement with aspects of consumer behaviour and employee experiences, but some studies are small, qualitative or context-specific. It would be inappropriate to describe ordinary customers with high service expectations as psychologically entitled without individual evidence.
Customer mistreatment research is concentrated in particular sectors.
Hospitality, retail, call centres, banking and tourism appear frequently in the literature. Professional services, construction, technical consultancy, trades and business-to-business relationships may involve different customer dynamics.
“The customer is always right” is used conceptually rather than historically here.
The essay addresses the modern cultural meaning attached to the phrase rather than making a claim about the precise original wording, authorship or historical intent of the slogan. A historical essay would require separate sourcing.
Faster service frequently creates genuine value.
Rapid medical communication, emergency repair, banking access, digital support and many other improvements can reduce costs and substantially improve customer welfare. This essay does not establish that slow service is inherently more humane or higher quality.
The organisational consequences of refusing abusive customers need stronger study.
There is good evidence that customer incivility affects workers, but the commercial effects of policies that remove, refuse or deprioritise repeatedly abusive customers are likely to vary by market. The claim that some customers are commercially not worth retaining is an organisational judgement rather than a universal research finding.
The effect of digital interfaces on customer dehumanisation requires direct evidence.
The essay proposes that interacting through highly automated service systems may make the human labour behind them less visible. This is a plausible interpretation, but the research cited here does not establish that digitalisation itself causes customers to treat workers as less human.
Employee protection and customer service can conflict in genuine edge cases.
Organisations need procedures for distinguishing abusive behaviour from legitimate anger following serious failure. Automatically siding with staff can be as simplistic as automatically siding with customers. Fair processes require evidence, context and proportionality.