“People that rude cannot be real.” “Does anyone actually demand someone else’s reserved seat?”
That reaction is understandable if you only experience shops, trains, restaurants, or service counters as an ordinary customer. You enter, buy something, pay, and leave. You usually do not know what another customer said at the returns desk, how long someone argued at another register, or who cornered an employee after closing time.
Move behind the counter, and the scenery changes.
Someone demands a refund without the item. Someone treats an exception to policy as a basic human right. Someone summons the ancient spell, “But they did it for me last time.” Someone repeats the same demand after the explanation is finished. Someone attempts to modify company policy through sheer volume.
To a customer, these people can feel like urban legends. To staff, it can feel like: “Right. Today’s rare character has spawned.”
The difference does not require a theory that civilization becomes feral only near cash registers. The simpler explanation is that the samples are different.
Customers and staff observe different populations
An ordinary customer has meaningful contact with only a handful of people during a visit. Other customers may be physically nearby, but most of their disputes are invisible.
Frontline staff in retail, restaurants, pharmacies, call centers, service desks, and similar jobs interact with many customers every shift. When something goes wrong, cases are often concentrated further: a cashier calls a supervisor, a service desk takes over, or a complaint is escalated.
The customer is a casual observer walking through society. The employee is closer to an automatic collector of human edge cases.
So “I used the service 100 times and never saw it, therefore it does not exist” stretches one person’s observation window into a claim about the whole population.
Even a 0.1% rare event becomes common with enough encounters
Consider a toy model.
Suppose a seriously troublesome behavior appears in only 0.1% of encounters—one in a thousand. Under the simplifying assumption that encounters are independent, the probability of seeing at least one such event within 100 encounters is only about 9.5%.
So “I tried it 100 times and never saw one” is entirely unsurprising.
At 1,000 encounters, the probability rises to about 63%. At 10,000, it exceeds 99.995%.
A tiny event rate can become an almost-certain personal experience when the number of trials explodes. Working in customer service is, in part, running the human gacha machine at industrial scale. Unfortunately, the prize pool includes “refund demand,” “intimidation,” and “infinite complaint loop.”
Real customer encounters are not independent or identically distributed, of course. These numbers are not prevalence estimates. They simply show how dramatically exposure volume changes intuition.
Difficult customers also occupy more observation time
There is another bias besides sample size.
A normal customer may complete the interaction in thirty seconds or a few minutes. A conflict may require an explanation, a second explanation, a supervisor, policy checks, refund discussions, and documentation.
One difficult customer can also interact with several employees: cashier, floor staff, supervisor, security, or call center.
That means a difficult case may be rare but still have four properties that make it highly visible:
- longer contact time,
- more employees involved,
- more escalation,
- stronger memory.
It is therefore natural for staff to experience a much denser version of the phenomenon than customers do.
Public data says the phenomenon is not imaginary
This is not merely service-worker folklore.
Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare reported in its FY2023 workplace-harassment survey that 10.8% of workers said they had experienced “seriously troublesome behavior by customers or others” at work during the previous three years. The same survey found that 27.9% of companies reported receiving consultations about such behavior during the previous three years.
Those figures do not mean that 10.8% of customers are abusive. The population and definition are completely different. But they are difficult to reconcile with the strong claim that this kind of customer effectively does not exist.
Academic research also treats customer incivility as an ordinary research subject. A 2024 study analyzed data from 1,040 frontline employees in retail, banking, and hospitality and examined how customer incivility relates to emotional labor.
In other words, the legendary rude customer is not classified as mythology in the research literature.
“These people exist” does not prove that a specific viral story is true
The correction must work in both directions.
Rude customers and abusive complaints exist in reality. Therefore every individual anecdote posted online is true.
That conclusion does not follow.
Three levels should be separated:
- A type of behavior is humanly possible.
- That type of behavior is actually observed in society.
- This specific post happened exactly as described.
Evidence for the first two does not automatically establish the third. Fabrication, exaggeration, memory errors, and missing context remain possible.
So “I have never seen it, therefore it is fake” is weak reasoning. But “something like this happens, therefore this post is true” is weak reasoning too.
Match the strength of the claim to the strength of the evidence.
Social media selects “what on earth?” over ordinary transactions
Social media adds another filter.
“Today a customer bought groceries and quietly left.”
Almost nobody posts that. If they do, it rarely travels far.
“A person demanded a refund without the product.” “Someone demanded my reserved seat.” “Someone arrived after closing and demanded immediate service.”
Those stories generate surprise, anger, anxiety, and jokes.
Research by Berger and Milkman found that online content evoking high-arousal emotions such as anger or anxiety was more likely to be shared, while surprising and interesting content was also positively related to virality.
A social-media feed is therefore not a random sample of society. It is a highlight reel of events people found worth telling.
Employees collect rare cases through massive exposure. Social media then selects the most narratable rare cases from that collection.
After those two filters, it is also a mistake to conclude that society is full of nothing but nightmare customers.
Conclusion: customers, employees, and social media use different cameras
You can ride or shop 100 times and never see one. You can work behind the counter and meet several. You can open social media and see one every day.
All three experiences can be true.
The customer camera has low exposure and poor visibility into disputes. The employee camera has high exposure, and problem cases are observed for longer and by more people. The social-media camera preferentially broadcasts unusual, emotionally activating stories.
The most accurate conclusion is something like:
“I have not seen it myself, so I do not know how common it is. But that does not mean it does not exist.”
And when a veteran service worker stares into the distance and says, “No, seriously, they exist,” it may not mean they have a darker worldview.
They may simply have rolled the human gacha machine hundreds of times more than you have.
