The customer has become an organizational imperative, a “sovereign ruler” and orienting both organizational activities and individual subjectivities towards customer needs is therefore not merely a desirable ideal, but in many cases also an explicit norm. There are however few studies that directly address the more fundamental consequences of this customer paradigm. In this conceptual paper we address that there are potential structural conflicts between the customer-orientation/customer ideal and other, often unspoken, operational logics and argue that customer misbehavior emerges as a result of maintaining and reproducing the customer discourse. In addition we broaden the prevailing individual-centric view on misbehavior by bringing forward the structural positions held by customers and customer oriented staff.