Internationalization raises the issue of whether, and to what extent, the inherent culture of a country may have particular influence on the nature of service interactions, and on education (i.e., student-professor interactions) specifically. Thus the service encounter in the classroom becomes a subject of increasing importance and interest with respect to satisfactory and unsatisfactory outcomes, and also with respect to related behavioral outcomes such as word-of-mouth and repatronage. This paper investigates these issues in classrooms of higher education by utilizing the Individualism-Collectivism dimension of culture in four different samples: China, New Zealand, Poland, and the United States. Differences are identified with respect to the types of critical incidents reported, nature of the outcome, and behavioral responses to those encounters. (Contains 6 tables.)