In my experience in Canada, there's usually more to those situations. Customers can certainly get frustrated or upset, but time and time again I've seen that h

In my experience in Canada, there's usually more to those situations. Customers can certainly get frustrated or upset, but time and time again I've seen that happening because the front-line staff either directly or indirectly provoked a hostile response to begin with. The most common direct cause I've seen is simply a staff member providing objectively poor service. This can include ineptitude, a lack of care, making mistakes, a bad attitude (such as disinterest), slowness, language barriers, lying, and taking personal phone calls while in the middle of assisting customers, among others. Indirect causes would be company policies that harm the customer, equipment/facility/utility outages that prevent services from being delivered, long waits, and so on. The vast majority of customers I've ever been around or dealt with have had much better things to do with their time than hassle retail or other front-line staff. The customers get upset because the retail staff, or the businesses the staff represent, are impeding the fast and successful completion of the transaction at hand.