Angry customers

Customer rage:

A man who was not allowed to return an unused can of paint drilled a hole in it and carried it dripping around the store.

A woman whose light mocha was not stirred properly poured it on the counter.

You get the picture. Anyway, it's on the rise, and a team of Sydney academics is studying the problem. They have come up with some amazing findings:

If we can predict the things that trigger customer rage, we can stop most of it from happening, said Paul Patterson, head of the school of marketing at the University of NSW.

... "Already we are seeing some patterns forming. There seems to be some correlation between someone's personality type and their propensity to fly into a rage."

Not surprisingly, people with short tempers are the most likely to explode when they are tired, in a hurry, or just frazzled.

For this they needed research? And for this:

The researchers found that most serious incidents occurred after a "double deviation", when a customer feels he or she has been treated disrespectfully twice in succession.

"We all have an ego, a sense of self-esteem, and standing in a bank queue for 20 minutes threatens that," Professor Patterson said. "If someone is rude to you again, after you have already asked them to fix it up, that's when we have problems."

What, people are more likely to get angry after repeated anger-inducing incidents? Stone the crows. And bravo the research team.