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Michelle had barely knotted her apron strings before the day turned ugly. When I told her I could only serve regular coffeenot the waffle-flavored one she wantedshe 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 peoples rage: Ive been cussed out, had hot food thrown on meeven 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, its 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 clients tantrumno matter how absurd. Rampant hostilityand its getting worse At Michelles workplace, the patron always comes first, while the safety of staff barely makes the list. Even after several viral videos of incidents at the chains restaurants, she says her complaints rarely go anywhere. One of her managers will step in if he sees something on the floor thats 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. Its 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 entitlementand that entitlement gets abused, leaving workers with almost no room to push back.The mantra dictates that service staff stay deferentialcareful about their every word and gesturewhile 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 Sayres 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 theyd recently faced verbally abusive, threatening or unruly customers. There’s also been a meaningful uptick in customers acting out. According to Arizona State Universitys 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 didnt back my coworker Madison has been a server for more than a decade, bouncing between casual spots and fine dining rooms. These days, shes at a former Michelin-starred restaurant in New York, and shes long since accepted the industrys devotion to customer is always right. She sees it play out nightly, usually when someone insists a dish isnt cooked properly, or worse, admits they just dont like it. Theres 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 Im in for a long night. The problem is, the mentality rewards bad behavior. Recently, a diner claimed hed only had one beerwhen it was clearly two. Management didnt 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 sidessoaring 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 spots 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. Ive 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, well be talking about you behind your back The real problem with the beloved slogan isnt the complaints or stingy tips. Its 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 boo and found a resounding answer: what counts isnt the service, its 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 Im less willing now, she explains. Outside of this job, Im 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 emotionalso known as surface actingcan look professional, but it impacts your mood, explains Sayre. Trying to fix the situation or reframe the customers behavior can protect your emotional health, but hurts performance. Instead, venting with trusted coworkers acts as a vital pressure valvea 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, youve decided what our relationship is gonna be, he says. Rest assured, well be talking about you behind your back, laughing and joking about how youre dressed.With customer is king still reigning, America desperately needs a reminder about the inherent social contract of emotional labora 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: Youre 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.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Trump recently promised to make America the “crypto capital of the world.” And his administration is working hard to make that pledge a reality. White House officials have established a working group on digital asset markets and directed federal agencies to craft a strategy to cement U.S. leadership. The president’s legislative team, meanwhile, helped push the GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act),through Congress earlier this summer, thus creating the first federal framework for stablecoins. And they’re working to pass the Clarity Act (Digital Asset Market Clarity Act), which would finally settle disputes over which regulator oversees digital assets. It’s refreshing to see our political leaders working to bring digital assets into the financial mainstream, especially after years of hostility from the prior administration. But the work is far from finishedand achieving universal legitimacy will require not just favorable laws and regulations, but also behavioral changes at leading crypto firms. Conflicting guidance For more than a decade, crypto innovators faced a patchwork of state regimes and conflicting federal guidance. The lack of clear regulation led to a proliferation of scams and bad actorsand kept many investors on the sidelines. Big banks and other legacy financial institutions hesitated to adopt cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology they’re based on, even as top financiers acknowledged blockchain’s potential to reshape the entire industry. The GENIUS Act represents Washington’s first serious attempt to genuinely regulaterather than ignore or suppressone of the leading forms of cryptocurrency. The new law requires stablecoin issuers to maintain dollar-for-dollar reserves and submit to audits. Far from rejecting this level of regulation, crypto leaders practically begged for it. They recognized that federal oversight and transparent standards are needed to transform what the public previously viewed as a speculative product into a reliable payment instrument. That’s why industry leaders are also working with the White House and Congress to finalize the Clarity Act, which would define the boundaries of authority between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, delivering the kind of predictability that underpins every functioning capital market. Cultural shift But better regulation alone won’t bring about the mainstream approval that industry leaders seek. Only an internal cultural shiftand rigorous self-policingcan deliver that. Every blockchain transaction depends on various forms of intellectual propertyfrom patents on mobile crypto wallets and bitcoin mining data centers to trade secrets in proprietary trading algorithms, and copyrights protecting exchange software to trademarks that build consumer trust. Coinbase, for instance, holds nearly 200 active patents. But most of the intellectual property powering today’s blockchain activity belongs to third parties outside the crypto industry. Yet even as leading platforms generate billions in revenue, the industry remains reluctant to acknowledge the legitimacy of IP rights. This reluctance is playing out in court. In May, Bancor’s nonprofit arm sued Uniswap, alleging that the leading decentralized exchange built its multibillion-dollar business on Bancor’s patented automated market maker technology without authorization. And earlier this summer, Malikie Innovations filed suits against Core Scientific and Marathon Digital, claiming their bitcoin mining operations infringe on Malikie’s patents for elliptic curve cryptography. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), a cryptographic technique developed and patented by Certicom years before crypto went mainstream, was licensed by companies like Cisco and Motorola as well as the National Security Agency. Cases like these highlight the tension: Crypto companies depend on IP to function, but too many are willing to disregard the IP rights of others, even as they clamor for legitimacy. Not how respectable companies operate This simply isn’t the way respectable companies in mature industries operate. Spotify and Apple Music wouldn’t enjoy their positive reputations if they refused to pay royalties to artists and record labels. Streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu would be pariahs if they pirated films. Banks would be shunned by investors alike if they treated software licenses as optional. If leading crypto firms want to be seen as respectable, investable pillars of the global economy, they need to meet those same standards when it comes to intellectual property. Digital assets are here to stay. But universal legitimacy will come only from a combination of comprehensive regulation and a cultural shift within the industry itself.
Category:
E-Commerce
If you slip a tiny wearable device on your fingertip and slide it over a smooth surface like a touchscreen, you can feel digital textures like denim or mesh. The device, designed by researchers at Northwestern University, is the first of its kind to achieve human resolution, meaning that it can more accurately match the complex way a human fingertip senses the world. In previous attempts at haptic devices like this, once you compare them to real textures, you realize theres something still missing, says Sylvia Tan, a PhD student at Northwestern and one of the authors of a new study in Science Advances about the research. Its close, but not quite there. Our work is trying to just get that one step closer. [Photo: Northwestern University] The wearable, made from flexible, paper-thin latex, is embedded with tiny nodes that push into the skin in a precise way and can move up to 800 times per second. Past devices had low resolutionthe touch equivalent of a pixelated image or an early movie from the 1890s with so few frames that the movement looks jerky. Using nodes and arranging them in a particular density improves that resolution. [Photo: Northwestern University] Earlier devices were also bulky. The ultrathin new technology, which weighs less than a gram, is designed to be comfortable to wear. A big goal was to make it very lightweight so you arent distracted by it, Tan says. And [to make] something that we call ‘haptically transparent’that means that even when youre wearing it, you can still perceive the real world, so you can perform everyday tasks. [Photo: Northwestern University] In the study, users could identify fabrics like corduroy or leather with 81% accuracy. The technology is still in development, but in the future, it could make it possible to feel products as you shop online. It could also have more immediate uses for people who are visually impaired, like making it possible to feel a tactile map or translating text on a screen to braille without a large, expensive device. On devices like microwaves, where physical buttons have often been replaced by flat touchscreens, the wearable could help a visually impaired person know where to push. It could also help improve human-robot interfaces. “In the medical field, the Da Vinci robot has very good kinesthetic force feedback,” Tan says. “But getting a surgeon to feel exactly what’s happening at your fingertip as you move the angle of your finger is not quite there. And that’s very important for high-skill workers.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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