‘Don’t take it out on our staff!’: How did Britain become so angry?

theguardian.com:

In November 2019, a customer made a complaint to the insurance firm Ageas. Repairs had been carried out on his car after it was damaged in an accident, but he felt necessary work had been missed. Ageas sent out an engineer to inspect the vehicle, but it was decided that no further action was required. That’s when the abuse began, says Rachel Undy, operations leader at the company. “It was mostly sexist abuse – very angry – shouting, disgusting language and quite personal insults.” Over the months that followed, the customer contacted Ageas 98 times, in an increasingly threatening, and often grotesque, manner.

“Eventually, we refused to speak to him, but then his emails carried on with the same language,” says Undy. At one point, she recalls, he made viciously crude remarks to her, before eventually directing his ire at the male engineer, too – “even threatening to come to the office and deal with him face to face”.

Undy has seen an increase in the number of aggressive customers over the past couple of years, and staff at call centres are far from alone. You may have noticed the proliferation of “Don’t take it out on our staff” signs on pallid surgery walls, at train stations and family restaurants, or sometimes felt a palpable tension in the public spaces we all inhabit. From shop workers to waiters to surgery receptionists, public-facing staff say they have experienced a surge in abusive treatment since the Covid pandemic began. The number of shop workers who faced abusive customers has risen 25% since February this year according to the latest Institute of Customer Service (ICS) data, while the British Medical Association revealed in May that criminal violence in GP surgeries had almost doubled in five years.

In October