I worked at a McDonald’s (in the US) as a teenager, and my coworkers and I occasionally had customers who became verbally abusive. This was decades before the pandemic, so being an asshole to customer service workers is nothing new.
From a friend whose family has operated a number of McDonalds franchises for over 40 years, the number of abusive customers has grown exponentially in the last few years. What was once a monthly occurrence is now almost daily. The neighborhoods haven’t changed all that much. Some have gentrified some. But the assholes come from every socioeconomic group, race and ethnicity.
Well, around here, it became a political party thing during covid with Maga hat wearing maskholes being really nasty about it.
Two other items I think of as similar:
Strangers approaching pregnant women in public and wanting to touch their bellies
Strangers approaching black women in public and wanting to touch their hair
By “similar,” I mean I don’t believe these things actually happen with any regularity.
When I was a kid (I was probably 12 or thereabouts) I took golf lessons one summer and the course wrapped up with a tourney. In the tournament I won…the most honest golfer award. In other words I had the worst score😄
I have - returning home via 4-hour bus ride from a junior high band trip. The floor was about an inch deep in crushed junk food by the time we got home.
My husband has. Once, we were at an airport, and he made faces at a cute little girl, sitting in her mother’s lap, who made faces back at him. The mother freaked out.
It was a fucking AIRPORT, with security all over the place, and hundreds of people within earshot. The girl was IN HER LAP. What on earth did she think my husband was going to do to her daughter? But it upset my husband, who loves little kids, and was just innocently interacting with one at a distance.
A mother was upset another time when we were at a restaurant with our kids, and he smiled at a girl in the next booth over, and she smiled back.
I believe it’s a combination of “The customer is always right” (NO THEY’RE NOT) and people trying to make viral videos.
Even before You Tube, there were indeed places that would reward people for complaining, or even being abusive to the staff, whether it was legitimate or not, as long as the money they spent was green.
Anecdote: About a week ago, I bought some plain potato chips at a gas station near my house. As I got closer to the bottom, I noticed that a few of the chips had BBQ flavoring, and while I didn’t have a problem with it, someone else might, so I sent an e-mail to the “Contact Us” link on their website, with the issue, the address of the store where I bought them, and I also kept the bag so I would have a lot number and expiration date. I have a feeling I will soon get a gift card in the mail for my trouble.
you’ve never been on Ganefaqs or any PC arcade or console game board have you?
Mine is some guy somewhere who needs to take a piss and is nowhere near a restroom and goes somewhere in an alley or something and gets caught and charged with indecent exposure and ends up on being on the “list” for all his days
Clearly, you’ve never been to Gene and Jude’s. 
More seriously, I’ve heard people getting gently ribbed about it (or “made” to ring a bell like at 35th Street Red Hots), but, no, no one legitimately berates someone for putting ketchup on a hot dog. Put some people do make an off-hand comment about it if you’re in the city. (Though this is happening much more rarely than when I was growing up.)
p
Mostly places like slashdot and other tech forums. The thread always looks something like:
Apple releases new device…
An Apple story, waiting for the legions of fan boys to show up…
That is an overpriced piece of junk, only fan boys would like it
I played with one and it’s pretty good
Suckit fan boy
But then no fan boys ever arrive. It’s just used as an ad hominem against people that like Apple or Tesla.
I’m sure it’s real, but like the title says, something I rarely encounter in real life.
They have all come to my yard 
It’s cool though. Nice when they trim our ‘grass’ down around our fire pit. And It’s not an ‘event’ other than my Wife and I will give a heads up when moose are about.
Moose look slow and docile, and mostly are. Mostly. No problem sitting on deck with them 40 feet away (I make sure I have an escape route) munching on what they find (they like willows). And they like to lick the road salt off our cars. Makes a bit of a mess of the car though.
Yeah “Man caught pissing in bush, gets arrested as a sex offender” is something I see pop up all the time in anecdotal stories (“My roommates friend totally is on the sex offender list for pissing in public!”) But when I asked that question on the SDMB the only two cases users found was a man who PLED DOWN to public urination on a sex offender charge and an undocumented immigrant who got deported for peeing in public.
Like the other situation, I’ve heard it reported too many times to doubt it. But I’ve never seen it.
However I can tell you that as a man who shaves his head sometimes, there have been multiple occasions when co-workers would come up and rub my head after I shaved it, without even asking.
I wasn’t injured nor traumatized by it, but I had to marvel at some people’s presumption that you can just walk up and rub someone’s head just because it looks very attractive and has a pleasing texture.
Oh wow! I can’t believe you had COWORKERS do that. I have twice rubbed the head of someone who shaved their hair down very short, and both times i had explicit permission and still felt awkward about it. (The guy invited me to when i commented that it looked like it would be nice to touch, and the non-binary friend who had just gone masc is a very close friend. I asked them if i could feel their hair.)
Back in high school when the afro came out I did hear some other black girls want to touch other black girls hair "Is it soft? But that was a fashion thing.
I have never, ever heard of a man wanting to touch a pregnant belly, but some women do, and apparently it can be okay then, if the asking is done right.
I was so damn inconsistent. My Dad and grandfather were golfers, and my Grandfather bought a house next door to the country club, and played a lot. One year he got to par on that course, I heard.
So I tried it. After a class and lessons- I would hit a bogie or once in a while par or
even an eagle. Then, next hole 5 over par. My coach was despondent.
Some time ago, right here on this MB, there was a thread about a guy sitting in a car watching the kids play. The posters were such he was a sicko, I remember one posters saying something like “Grrr, my Motherbear instincts would be on full alert”.
But it is not the guy in the car. It is your kids swim coach, or uncle or someone else in a trusted position. It is almost never “stranger danger”.
Convictions seem to be rare, but sometime ago I did a Google search and at least two lawyers in CA advertised defending that as a specialty. So, dudes are arrested for it. How many are convicted? I dunno, I don’t think it is a lot.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Teddy Roosevelt’s son-in-law Nicholas Longworth; a horseshoe bald philanderer, when a colleague came up behind him and rubbed his shiny pate. “Why, that’s as smooth as my wife’s bottom!”
Longworth rubbed it himself and said “why yes, you’re right! It is!”
When I was a little girl, I thought people touched my hair (red, curly) because adults can be jerks to kids and not respect their body autonomy. Then I grew up and strangers still touched my hair, without permission. I almost reflexively punched an old lady who grabbed a lock from behind when I had no idea she was there.
Tons of adults were apparently never taught the whole ‘we look with our eyes, not our hands’ thing kids are.
I know a (white) woman who went to school in Birmingham AL. She said that walking down the hall, black girls would touch her (blond) hair—not asking permission or anything. She really hated that. Was it the texture, color, or what that attracted them? She said they seemed fascinated by it. The Alabama schools hadn’t been desegregated very long so a certain amount of novelty was probably involved.
Every time I search for this , I get results that are full of weaseling like :
While it may seem trivial, a public urination ticket in New York can be a crime. There are many well-documented cases throughout the country where public urination can quickly turn into a sex crime. One minute a person can be urinating in public, thinking they’ll face a minor misdemeanor and the next minute, a child sees what’s happening and the person faces a felony charge of indecent exposure or lewd conduct.
This doesn’t describe a person who was arrested for public urination and becomes a sex offender when convicted of it. It describes someone who was charged with indecent exposure or lewd behavior.
Or this
Prosecutors occasionally charge defendants with the crime of indecent exposure or public lewdness. If convicted, these defendants face the onerous duty of registering as sex offenders, a sentence that will follow them for the rest of their lives.
This again describes people who were charged with something other than public urination.
The defendant could be charged with harsher charges, such as indecent exposure or lewdness , which require defendants to register as sex offenders.
Same
The thing you hear all the time isn’t “I was peeing in public and exposed my genitals in the presence of someone (child or not) and was charged with and convicted of indecent exposure and had to register as a sex offender. " which absolutely can happen. What you hear is " I was peeing in the bushes and got arrested for public urination and had to register as a sex offender” as if everyone involved agreed that it was simply public urination and there hadn’t ever been any other charges. Which apparently can’t happen anywhere in the US - because I’ve been looking for years, and every single thing I can find talks about someone mistaking public urination for weenie-waving and that mistake leading to an arrest for a more serious charge.