Following their recognition as value co-creating partners, customers have been ascribed an increasingly active role in service production. However, what is expected of customers in service situations is a surprisingly uninvestigated area. The purpose of the paper is to explore expectations about customers among frontline employees in retail. The paper draws on 35 in-depth interviews with frontline employees in three retail industries. The identified expectations reveal a service practice that is heavily structured by ideals of rational efficiency. These ideals make the customers’ value co-creating capacity conditional: just as the employees themselves, the customers have to conform to the logic of the service system if value is to be created. Arguably, co-creation needs to be discussed both on a strategic level, in terms of what the “customer”/the market wants, and on an operative level, to bring forward how frontline employees and customers together are trying to accomplish co-creation in practice.