I had an angy customer curse me up and down because I would not keep our shop open after closing time for her to browse. She screamed about how when her husband was stationed in Germany she hated the fact that all the shops kicked anyone out at closing time (usually military personnel since locals generally knew better). She said here in the US where the "customer is king" we care about sales more than "catering to our lazy employees" and gladly stay open later hours. I told her we valued our hard working staff and our customers equally and we would re-open tomorrow at 8am. She cursed me some more and left. She also called back the next day and insisted on speaking with the owner. I told her she was but that every employee was allowed to make the same call I did anyway and I would back them up since I trusted their judgement. She refused to believe it saying no business owner would kick out a paying customer. I asked her if Barnes & Noble would stay open after closing time to let her browse and of course she said she thought they would.
This was an extreme example but I lost track of the number of customers who became hostile after being told we were closing and they would have to leave. They expect small shops would be easier to bully into catering to them I guess. There is also an expectation of keeping very late hours today that didn't exist 20 years ago. I mostly blame Wal-Mart's 24 hour superstores for creating this expectation.
One of the best things about being a small business owner was telling jerks like this that since we couldn't make them happy with our stores policies they should leave and shop elsewhere from now on. Most then apologized for being rude and asked for permission to continue shopping there. Very weird behavior I never fully understood.
Customers are also far more rude to retail sales staff than they used to be. I'd like to blame Wal-Mart for this too but I'm not sure how to do that yet. I've been doing retail for 15 years now, half of it as proprietor and I would like to get out of it for this reason. I took a retail sales job in the very early '80's while at university and the customers are very different today than they were then. The rude customer accounts of sales people are far more numerous and ugly today than 20 years ago.
John Thornton