Customer ‘gapjil’ is a widespread phenomenon in South Korea. Although the term ‘gapjil’ seemed to receive the attention from the public around 2015, one ‘gapjil’ accident, where a mother and her daughter expressed their reckless anger, aggression and verbal abuse towards a sales person in the deportment store in Seoul in 2015, has intensified the mess media and the public. There is no consensus among researchers regarding how the term ‘gapjil’ is defined. Statistics show that the customer ‘gapjil’ occurs frequently more in the service and sales business areas than in other business sectors.

Although customer ‘gapjil’ has a few positive effect on customers such as enhancing and improving quality of service towards themselves, it has a significant number of negative effects on the service and sales workers. Very little studies on the victimization by the customer ‘gapjil’ has been conducted. This was an exploratory research because this study aimed at investigating the victimization by the customer ‘gapjil’ in South Korea and to provide useful information in order to prevent the ‘gapjil’ related victimization.

The data (N = 1,000) were collected from the self-administered internet-based questionnaire survey, targeting service and sales workers aged over 20 who were residing in South Korea during the period of 13 days between September 18 and September 30, 2019. In order to collect the data from the service and sales workers who were ever victimized by the customer ‘gapjil’ the booster sample survey (N = 300) was also conducted. The survey questionnaires included the respondents’ socioeconomic characteristics, the perception and the type of victimization by the customer ‘gapjil’ the experience and the type of violence as the customer ‘gapjil’ assailants, the job-related and psychological scales, and so on. In order to supplement the information obtained by the quantitative research, the qualitative research, such as the Focus Group Interview(FGI), was also conducted with a total number of 24 voluntary participants or 12 groups based on two per group.

Results from the survey showed that 83.6% of the respondents were the victims of consumer misbehavior. In the past year, 92.0% of the respondents were victims of psychological victimization, 48.6% economic victimization, and 45.8% physical victimization. It was also found that those victims were also suffering from severe work-related stress due to the lack of any social support from the company. Surprisingly, 53.7% have never received any consumer misbehavior education in the workplace.

It was found that most worker were dependent on other workers in sharing their bad experience and coping with any stress. Most workplaces did not have any response manual or education and rather tended to eschew any responsibility in dealing with consumer misbehavior problems.

Based on the findings, we suggest several policies in order to root out consumer ‘gapjil (misbehavior)’ in Korean society. First, public education for the prevention of consumer ‘gapjil’ is urgently called for. The severity of ‘gapjil’ behavior needs to be publicly known by campaigns and public broadcasting so that healthy consumer behaviors should be promoted. Second, it is urgent to provide substantial and effective measures for ‘gapjil’ victims to cope with severe offenses by consumers - a separate rest area from work place is a good way for victims to rest right after a consumer’s violent behavior. Third, consumer misbehavior manual should be institutionalized so that employers can have initiatives in helping victims. Fourth, it is required to promote consumer ethics in the cyberspace because consumers tend to get unscrupulous ways to maximize their profits from other consumers. Consumers share their ‘successful’ ‘gapjil’ practices in the cyberspace which in turn causes more ‘gapjil’ in the society. Cyberspace can be utilized for the space facilitating just and fair consumer behaviors. Fifth, victim therapy programs are necessary for victims of consumer misbehavior. PTSD can cause workers to have difficulties in performing their duties at work due to consistent exposure to consumer misbehavior. Employees cannot use any active measures to respond to consumer misbehavior so that some necessary measures for employees is urgently called for.