Something that has occurred to me is that I have sometimes been that asshole entitled customer, and as I've matured I've learned to remove myself from a situation when I feel the urge to yell at a service worker.

It has never been about the money really. The only exception I remember was when I was upset about the way my bank processed my paycheck and yelled about it in my early 20s (my bad, I didn't know how depositing checks at an ATM worked but I ought to have). But usually it's because I felt insecure or disrespected in some way (which wasn't, to my memory, reasonable. It wasn't what the kids call a "valid crash out".).

For instance, it really gets under my skin when I am talking to technical support on the phone and they try to blame the problem on my running Linux. Argh! If it was Linux I wouldn't need their help! I'd either fix it on my own or ask some help forum.

I don't know how much that translates to the larger phenomenon, I'm not even talking about face-to-face interactions anymore, but that's my two cents.