Customer mistreatment refers to customers’ unreasonable demands and impolite behaviors directed at service employees. While customer mistreatment imposes significant physical and mental costs on service employees, the factors drive customer mistreatment remain underexplored. This study integrates employee (employee incivility), environmental (noise from other customers), and customer (perceived status) antecedents of customer mistreatment and incorporate customer negative emotions, ego depletion, and a sense of entitlement as focal mechanisms. Drawing on environmental psychology literature, this study also examines whether restorative servicescapes can buffer these detrimental effects. This study utilized the field observation method to collect 261 data from customer-employee interactions (Study 1) and conducted a field study to collect data of 201 customer-employee encounters (Study 2). Across both studies, the results consistently showed that: (1) employee incivility indirectly increases customer mistreatment through heightened customer negative emotions, but restorative servicescapes attenuate this indirect effect; (2) noise from other customers indirectly enhances customer mistreatment via enhanced customer ego depletion, while restorative servicescapes mitigate this indirect effect; (3) customer perceived status is positively associated with customer entitlement, but customer entitlement is negatively correlated with the occurrence of customer mistreatment.
