Being able (and willing) to adapt to the needs and wants of the customer is pivotal to organizational success in most contemporary theories of marketing. Today’s customers are also increasingly expecting to be treated if not as kings so at least as free, independent individuals entitled to be heard, obeyed and exclusively attended to. However, in practice, the actual room for such customer sovereignty is often quite limited. Instead the customer is subjected to an often repressive operational logic, driven not least by the ever increasing complexity of the technological and administrative systems characteristic of contemporary service offerings. The result is a potential, often unspoken and surprisingly under-researched conflict between the customer role and organizational realities. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the customer role in relation to concrete service encounters. We especially focus on situations where the customer, in the role of being a customer, acts in a manner which is not acceptable according to general norms and values. Empirically, the study builds on interviews with frontline employees in retail and public transportation - two industries which both have embraced various forms of customer-orientation and which display a high level of problems related to customer misbehavior. The study contributes with an understanding of how the concepts of customer authority and autonomy, play an important role in explaining the underlying causes of customer misbehavior.