Reading teacher education, as is true with much of higher education, is plagued with pressures of providing "here and now" answers to very complex, entangled issues. The reading methods course becomes the site of many of these pressures, despite considerable insights provided by scholars such as Kumaravadivelu (2001) that "methods" may be more of the problem than the solution. In this article, we explore an emergent conceptualization of the reading teacher educator as "customer service provider" and discuss how this approach threatens reading teacher education. We voice our concerns that the pressure on reading teacher educators to deliver content in the "customer service" model denies preservice teachers access to critical pedagogies. (Contains 1 footnote.)