The phrase “The customer is always right” dates back at least to 1905, when a Boston Globe profile of Chicago department store owner Marshall Field reported that every employee was taught “absolute respect for and compliance with” Field’s business principles, chief among them the theory that “the customer is always right.”

A few years later, the maxim had already produced a joke about what it meant for retail workers. In 1910, the New York Sun ran a satirical item about two department store employees eating lunch. Jim asked Tom how many times he had lost his job that day. “I was only fired six times,” Tom replied. He was the store’s “professional fired man.” Whenever a customer complained about a mistake and demanded that someone be reprimanded, Tom was summoned and blamed for it. Management fired him in front of the customer; he walked away “apparently crestfallen” and waited until he was needed again.

The professional fired man was a joke, but it captured something real about the customer’s power over workers. Sociologists Marek Korczynski and Ursula Ott call it it the “myth of customer sovereignty”: management organizes the workplace around its own needs while telling the customer that everything is being done for them. The customer gets to make demands of the worker without getting much say over the conditions under which the worker has to meet them.

Comment cards provided a way to get the customer’s observations back upstairs. By 1982, The Washington Post found them sitting in “what seems like every hotel room these days.” Marriott was receiving around 200,000 comments a year, feeding them into a computer once a month and producing reports for each hotel. At the Washington Sheraton, the cards went to the executive offices, where responses were tallied for weekly meetings of forty department heads.

Workers knew whose opinions carried weight. In 1993, two women eating lunch at a hotel restaurant complained that its china cups had been replaced by heavy white mugs. Their waiter agreed and encouraged them to fill out a comment card. “The managers don’t necessarily listen to us,” he told them. “But they always read the comment cards.”

Filling out a comment card might not feel like supervising anyone, but management had given the customer’s observations a place in how the workplace was run. The waiter worked there, yet his own knowledge of the workplace counted for less until a customer supplied it back to management.

Mystery shopping was more deliberate. The practice had earlier been used to catch workers stealing. Commercial Service Systems, founded in 1947, ran what were known as “integrity shops,” sending people into businesses to pose as customers and look for dishonest employees.

By 2002, the Los Angeles Times reported that around five hundred mystery-shopping companies were sending as many as half a million shoppers a week into American businesses. They checked into hotels, went to restaurants, and posed as prospective tenants and even patients. The boom came amid layoffs of middle managers who had traditionally done much of this supervising themselves; mystery shoppers were much cheaper.

The Times followed one shopper into a Taco Bell. She counted the straw wrappers and napkins on the counter, timed the wait, and listened to see whether the cashier repeated her order. Then she took her tacos to the car, stuck a thermometer in them, weighed the food on a digital scale, and checked the tomatoes before writing up her report. Taco Bell credited mystery shopping with helping it cut its average drive-through wait from five minutes to three and a half.

The reports had consequences for workers. Kim Wirshing, an attorney for the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Local 2 in San Francisco, told the Times that he knew of at least six workers who had been fired following mystery-shopper visits in the previous four years. One was a hotel bartender spotted giving a free drink to a high-paying customer.

The shopper wasn’t a manager. She couldn’t tell the cashier to work faster, and the cashier wasn’t supposed to know she was there. Still, she was timing the service and checking the food, then sending what she found to someone who could do something about it. The manager didn’t even have to be there. Comment cards had given customers a way to report what they noticed. Mystery shoppers were sent in specifically to notice things the workers were doing wrong.

McDonald’s had spent decades trying to specify what should happen between worker and customer. Robin Leidner spent time behind one of its counters while researching her 1993 book, Fast Food, Fast Talk. She attended Hamburger University, McDonald’s training school for managers, and then worked as a crewmember. There were rules for almost everything.

Window workers followed the “Six Steps of Window Service”: greet the customer, take the order, assemble and present it, take payment, then thank the customer and ask them to come back. Everyone was taught to call customers “guests,” smile, and remain cheerful and polite.

Leidner found that some workers liked the routines, which could make the job easier and provide some protection from difficult customers. What bothered them more was what happened when customers became abusive.

“We’re sort of at their mercy,” one worker told her.

Another explained that “when a customer’s rude to me, I just have to walk away.” Korczynski and Claire Evans later found the same pattern across thirty book-length ethnographies of service work: customer abuse was associated with workplaces that promoted customer sovereignty while leaving workers with little power.

Technological advances eventually made the mystery shopper unnecessary at many workplaces. DoorDash can ask every customer to rate the person who delivered their food. Those ratings are averaged over the worker’s last hundred reviews, and a Dasher whose customer rating falls below 4.2 can be deactivated. The company no longer has to pay someone $10 to pose as a customer and report back. Rating the delivery is simply presented as part of ordering dinner.

Some customers are taking matters into their own hands, without the company’s prodding. In 2024, amid complaints that Chipotle was skimping on portions, people started filming workers as they made their orders. The idea was that workers would give them more food with a camera pointed at them.

Atulya Dora-Laskey, who worked at the chain’s only unionized store, in Lansing, Michigan (workers there organized with the Teamsters in 2022 but never secured a first contract, and the union eventually gave up its representation rights), told The Guardian that filming could have the opposite effect. “We actually go lighter on portions,” she said, “because we don’t want to be on the record violating Chipotle’s proportion policy.”

Chipotle hadn’t asked these customers to inspect its workers. They had picked up the technique themselves. Dora-Laskey was now being asked to break the company’s rules while the customer produced video evidence that she had done it.

Meta glasses make the camera less conspicuous. They have one built into the frame, which can be activated by voice or by pressing a button. A white light on the front is supposed to indicate that the camera is running. As Sato reported in The Verge, some users have tampered with the glasses so they can record without the light giving them away. Meta says that with the second generation, covering the light disables the camera, and the company has begun rolling out an update designed to disable it when the glasses detect physical tampering.

Hinkle’s tormentors were doing more than filming an unpleasant encounter. They kept asking a question Hinkle had already answered, purposely misgendered both employees who tried to help them, and waited for a reaction. Target hadn’t asked these guys to watch Hinkle. They were making a video for themselves, and the fact that Hinkle was at work made it easier to keep the bit going.

Retail workers have never had much privacy at work. But a video taken by a customer can end up anywhere, including back with the boss. Hinkle’s reached hundreds of thousands of people; they say another Target manager happened across it while scrolling, though it did not result in disciplinary action.

Getting filmed is hardly the worst thing a customer can do to you. But it is a strange addition to the job. Someone is giving you a hard time, you’re trying not to lose your temper in the midst of what you think is a normal human interaction, and then all of a sudden you discover it’s not a normal human interaction at all: they’re making a video, and you’ve become a star player without your consent. But you still have to finish the interaction. And the filmers have one more reason to treat you badly: the worse the interaction gets, the more there may be to post. Your livelihood, meanwhile, hangs in the balance.

Phones at least tend to give the game away. One woman who was secretly filmed with Meta glasses recently told The Guardian, “If he would’ve pulled out a camera, I could have said no.” With the glasses, she didn’t get the chance.

The mystery shopper was paid to watch, and companies like DoorDash figured out how to get the same kind of information for free. The person with the camera doesn’t need to be doing anything for the company, though. They might want a bigger burrito, a reaction, maybe just something to post.