Always Right

The phrase “the customer is always right” stirs up many questions:

• Where does it come from?

• Which customers?

• The customer is what, what the fuck?!

• Is there a better way?

The words have been intertwined in the zeitgeist, not just in our training but throughout popular culture, for longer than anybody on this planet has been alive. It’s inaccurate, outdated, and enables bad behavior. It’s about time we took a brutal, unflinching look at it.

By now everyone can agree that nobody actually believes the customer is always right. We understand that customers are just people; sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong, and sometimes they’re pieces of shit for no reason. Customer service workers can usually tell the difference between a good faith customer (just wants to make their purchase) and a bad faith customer (actively scamming or taking advantage), both of which can be equally nasty. However, the Always Right philosophy trains us, and by extension our customers, that every customer, whether acting in good faith or bad, should be treated as if they’re in the right, thus acting as if something we know to be false is actually true.

In case you haven’t been on the internet in the last, like, 6 years, this practice is referred to as “gaslighting”. It attempts to warp our sense of reality and gives the tormentor power over the tormented.“The customer is always right” isn’t just an idiom or retail philosophy. It’s a code to let customer service workers know they have no choice but to comply. It’s a dog whistle signaling “you better give me what I want or else”. It’s a gun to the head of an entire industry held hostage by a ridiculous standard.But it wasn’t always intended as such….

The Fuckery of Harry Selfridge, et al.

Back in the era historians refer to as “The Long Ago Before Times” when everyone still understood Latin, retailers lived by the philosophy of “caveat emptor” (“let the buyer beware”) or, as we’d say in today speak, “fuck the customer”. What glorious days those must have been. However, this was not a sustainable business practice for retailers in a post WWI economy as competition for the attention of a growing customer base ramped up. Retailers needed something new, a lure and hook to get customers to favor their store above the others. Thus, some unknown shitwad came up with the answer: The Customer is Always Right.

Seriously, fuck that guy.

Unfortunately, the originator of the cursed phrase has been lost to time, despite what many of the clickbait articles or memes circulating have to say about it. All we can do now is hope there is a Hell and they’re in it. And I’ll just rip this band-aid off now: There is no evidence I can find that Harry Selfridge ever said “in matters of taste”. I’m sorry, meme sharers.

That being said, most sources will agree that retailer Harry Selfridge, author of the book Romance of Commerce (which is as horny for retail as you’d expect), was one of the first to adopt this philosophy on a large scale and, along with fellow retailers John Wanamaker and Marshall Field and hotelier César Ritz, pioneered this new approach that prioritized customer satisfaction above all else. Although the exact speaker of the words has been lost to the annals of time, these guys are the source of all our suffering.

Like anything new The Customer is Always Right was not without its critics and detractors.

An article titled “Successful Salesmanship: Is the Customer Always Right?” by Frank Farrington appearing a 1914 issue of Mill Supplies had this to say on the subject:

“If we adopt the policy of admitting whatever claims the customer makes to be proper, and if we always settle them at their face value, we shall be subjected to inevitable losses. Those losses produce additions to the expense of conducting the business…. In other words, the customer who makes no claim, who returns no goods, is called upon to pay for the expense incurred in settling the claim of the other fellow.”

Hell, Harry Selfridge even said himself in Romance and Commerce:

“The time has passed when an irritable customer, no matter who he or she may be, can, whether right or wrong, ride rough-shod over the young man or woman behind the counter and demand his or her dismissal, and it is a good thing it is so.”

Wow, it kind of seems like he’s saying the customer isn’t always right. Weird.Despite criticisms, this philosophy came to dominate the retail landscape. In the following century, it became synonymous with not only people getting what they want and workers getting stepped on but also as a placation tactic of the hard sell. It was pervasive to say the least, rearing its ugly face in every form of media. “The customer is always right” had become a household term.It was an annoyance, for sure, but a necessary evil in the industry. But then Amazon came along and made it all so much worse.

The Customer is Always Daddy

It might be hard to imagine that a time existed before the internet, but I assure you, it did. Back then, retailers primarily only had to compete with other brick-and-mortar retail stores, or “stores” as we called them. This new internet fad brought with it a threat retailers were ill-prepared to meet. E-commerce, and particularly Amazon, was able to outplay them in almost every way; price, convenience, overhead, etc. Brick-and-mortar retailers had only one advantage to press and keep themselves in the game: They doubled-down on customer service.

In this new world, keeping a customer happy and coming back was of the utmost importance and it was done by any means necessary. Some stores instituted “anything goes” return polices. Others made their employees smile and greet any customer who came within six feet of them. Bob Farrell suggested we “just give ‘em the pickle”. Managers were given permission to bend or abandon long-held store policies in an attempt to stop customers from leaving unhappy. 

Maintaining a relationship with an existing customer, even at the cost of lost stock or unnecessary refunds, was considered cheaper and therefore preferable to drawing in new customers. After all, an unhappy customer, whether right or wrong, could just get the same crap on Amazon. The expectation of The Customer is Always Right had shifted from keeping the customer happy to bending to their whims completely.

In their desperation to maintain profits, retailers became completely obsessed with customers. It’s a phenomenon I refer to as “Customer Fetishization” in which businesses get so thirsty for customer attention that they’ll do anything to keep them coming back. Think Boyz II Men’s On Bended Knee. Like that level of thirsty.

The customers were catered to at every turn, whether they were right or wrong. They had total control over everybody in the store, and they knew it. This is the Karen origin story and at its core is Customer Fetishization.

So you have this dog, and, oopsies, your dog just did a poopies on the carpet. You don’t want the dog to hate you, so you give it a treat. It shits on the carpet again and you again give it a treat. Three or four times this happens and guess what? This is just where the dog craps now. Through positive reinforcement, the rewarding of a specific behavior, you have now trained your dog to shit on the carpet.

This is what happened to our customers.

The Customer is Always Right has reached its inevitable and unsustainable conclusion: a customer that is accustomed and entitled to always getting their way, an entity we are constantly fighting who will not back down until we give in, because that is how we’ve trained them to behave.

The philosophy of The Customer is Always Right is the relic of a bygone age and a weight around the neck of the retail industry and its workers, drowning us. Like those oh so thirsty Boys II Men say, we’ve come to the end of the road.

So where do we go from here?

A Long Overdue Change

For those who may have missed it, not long ago a screenshot of a Tweet, a “meme” as the kids call it, started making its way around the community. I referenced it above, but if you’re not paying attention it claimed that Harry Selfridge’s full quote was “The customer is always right, in matters of taste”.Whether or not that’s true (it appears to not be), I don’t feel like the addendum, or any addendum, can fix Always Right. It’s rotten at its core and its poisoned generations of shoppers so completely we can’t amend, reframe, or rebrand it as the concept itself is so problematic.That being said, we obviously can’t go back to the “fuck the customer” days of caveat emptor, swinging the pendulum from one extreme to the other. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle and return it for a full cash refund, as they say.No, what we need is something totally new. We can’t dismiss the need for good, personable customer service but also can’t ignore the perils of catering to “Karens” who operate in bad faith. I guess I better make a suggestion since I’ve already wasted your time thus far.It’s called Customer Pacifism, or, boiled down to a catchy maxim, “the customer is not worth fighting”.While taking a pacifistic approach to customers may seem like rolling over and accepting defeat, it actually asks that combatants reach peaceful resolutions in contrast to the unconditional surrender implied in the defeatist views of Always Right.One key to Customer Pacifism is recognizing that every dispute between a worker and customer actually has three participants: the customer, the worker, and the company. Under Always Right workers are asked to act on behalf of the company, as a unified front. In reality, the customer, the worker, and the company can all be working for or against each other in any given incident.This can be expressed in a three-way game of chess between these combatants. Using Customer Pacifism, a customer service worker or manager will weigh each occurrence by which entities stand to benefit from a given solution and act accordingly.

For example:A customer wants to buy a display of an item that’s been discontinued. Who benefits from letting the customer buy this item?

• The customer benefits as they get the item they want.

• The worker benefits as they don’t have to take it down themself later.

• The company benefits as the customer is spending money on something that would probably have gotten thrown out.

In this scenario, since all three entities benefit, the decision would be to sell the display.Another example:A customer would like to open a pack of underwear to try on a pair (as if they’d ask first). Who benefits by letting them?

• The customer benefits as they get to try on the underwear before they buy.

• The worker does not benefit as they now have to damage out a package of underwear and possibly handle the grody pair.

• The company does not benefit as they lose a sellable package of underwear. At best they break even if the customer buys a pack (as you know they never buy the one they open).

Easy call. No, you shouldn’t allow this as only the customer benefits.Sometimes it’s not as clear cut, as in this example:A customer brings in an ice cream maker they bought a year ago, used a couple of times (so they say), and just didn’t like it. The ice cream was apparently soupy. Who benefits from the customer getting a refund?

• The customer benefits as they get money back for something they probably just needed to learn to use correctly.

• The worker benefits in the short term as that customer will leave, but does not benefit in the long run as that customer will likely reoffend.

• The company does not benefit as they’d lose money on what is probably a bad faith return. However, they might see retaining the customer and avoiding a complaint as a benefit.

You can see here how this might get foggy. Not everything will have a clear-cut answer, but this will hopefully lay down a decent foundation of how to solve the customer problem as we move forward.Obviously, It’s not 100% original, borrowing a little game theory and the old win/lose formula, but it’s really just a starting point for changing the way we approach customer issues. That’s the easy part. It gets a lot harder from here.In the last example, you can’t possibly refuse that customer refund without a fight. If they came up to the returns desk in bad faith they were fully ready for and expecting a throw-down. This is where the true pacifism of comes into play.Remember, it was the coddling of customers that made them expect to have their donuts powdered every time they come into the store. Well now we’re going to have to undo all of that if we ever want to move on from Always Right.I’m not working under a delusion that somehow a new philosophy will make customers easy to deal with or alleviate the Karen phenomenon. Far from it. In fact, it’ll probably get worse before it gets better.What I propose is that when we find ourselves faced with one of those bad faith customers that we simply say “I’m not going to fight you”. Let them yell, scream, threaten to have your job or never come back, whatever. Don’t match their tone, don’t give them what they want, and, for the most part, don’t even engage. Stand firm and resolute on those grounds: “We. Will. NOT. Fight you.”Maybe they’ll leave unhappy and maybe they won’t come back, but they’ll know, and so will your staff, that their particular brand of bullshit isn’t going to fly at your store anymore.

As a matter of fact, going back to Frank Farrington’s 1914 critique on Always Right, it’s the customers who don’t make your job harder, who are the majority, who ultimately pay the price for Karen behavior. I’d go so far to say that the cost is both financial and in the loss of a peaceful shopping experience. I am firmly of the belief that once word gets around, and it will, that your business no longer licks Karen’s Uggs that it will draw in a more desirable customer base, one who hates entitled Karens as much as you do.Behavioral adjustments don’t come easy, but over time it can be demonstrated, reinforced, and eventually learned that fighting with customer service workers is NOT acceptable and will not be tolerated. We’re not exactly punishing the dog, we’re just no longer rewarding it for shitting on the carpet.It might seem a bit far-fetched, but remember there was also a time when it seemed insane to go into business under a philosophy that claimed the customer was always right.Well, maybe that’s a bad example.