"The Customer Is Always Right"- Did you grow up hearing this and assuming it was some sort of law of trade beween businesses and customers? Do you personally believe in this enough to act up in public and blurt it out when you feel you should get your way?

Having worked in retail for several years, I can assure you that the Customer is almost always wrong. ;) That said, it is often in the business’ best interest to act as though the customer is right, because it’s never just that one customer who “will never shop there again.” It’s all of that customer’s friends and family who will perceive that business as being in the wrong, simply because they trust their friend more.

For those who did blurt it out where I worked, yeah, they might get their way that once, but they had absolutely lost the goodwill of the employees. No longer would we go out of our way to be extra nice, to provide coupons we had cut out of the paper ourselves to discount what they were buying, or to pre-emptively open up products to allow them to “sample” things. I hope being always right was worth being hated.

On the rare occasions when the customer was actually right, I certainly did my best to help out. In my experience, though, the actually right customers didn’t tend to be the ones to bring up that dreaded phrase.

I believe that this mentality is extremely flawed in the fact that the customer is not always right and this just means to customers that they can do and say whatever they want. i don’t think that is cool

It is all about economics.

The saying comes from the fact that the cost of acquiring a customer vastly exceeds the cost of retaining a customer. Further, once a customer leaves in a huff, usually you can’t throw enough money at them to make them come back, plus they are likely to badmouth the establishment to friends and family (causing th eloss of other customers).

I think it’s horrible. I work at Pier 1 and most of our customers believe that they are right even if they are terribly wrong. Luckily, customer service has been on our side in the past few scrapes my store has gotten into with customers. The economy has gotten so bad that people think they deserve a discout for anything and everything and that’s not right. I’ve had customers demanding free trees, nightstands, candles, mirrors, vases….etc. People are really losing touch with reality. A customer who understands that human error (I.e.- forgetting reciepts, merchandise arriving damaged, merchandise tagged incorrectly, etc) happens and that apology and promise that the problem will be resolved asap is all they really deserve is the one who is right.

Customers can be obnoxious, there is no doubt about that, but since I am in business for myself, I put up with a lot of garbage to make a sale because that is what puts food on my table. I can’t afford to have the luxury of making people angry enough that they go somewhere else to spend their money. I tell my employees the same thing, if they don’t subscribe to that theory then they should not be working for me.

I think a customer subscribing to that mentality and trying to bring it into an establishment is someone who feels they are entitled to whatever their opinion of the situation is regardless of what’s really going on with the rest of the world. I often find that it’s a last, desperate blade of grass that one grabs for when they’re falling off the cliff of Being Wrong and Losing the Argument.

@rooeytoo: Being in sales of all sorts, I agree about tolerating 80% of customer crap that can be reasoned out because 80% of it is miscommunication, misunderstanding or just “a bad day”. It’s my job to un ruffle the 80% and retain their patronage.

@Amoebic: There are those customers that have habits or bad attitude no matter where they go and they don’t care to be reasoned with because they’ve learned along the way how to be obnoxious in order to take advantage. They’ll badmouth no matter what so there is a growing trend to recognize those people acknowledge their complaints and politely tell them, “I see why you feel this way and I understand why you won’t be coming back” that type of deal.

@Marina: Trial and error has brought me to the opinion that most situations can be resolved politely and even to an advantage because the customer gets to know the servicer a bit better and feels they have been treated better than just a transaction, especially if the servicer can be consistent. The other grinders and scammer sorts are poison everywhere- kind of like forum trolls.