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"The customer is always right" is a motto or slogan which exhorts service staff to give a high priority to customer satisfaction. It was popularised by pioneering and successful retailers such as Harry Gordon Selfridge, John Wanamaker and Marshall Field. They advocated that customer complaints should be treated seriously so that customers do not feel cheated or deceived. This attitude was novel and influential when misrepresentation was rife and caveat emptor ('let the buyer beware') was a common legal maxim.^[2]

Variations of the phrase include le client n'a jamais tort ('the customer is never wrong'), which was the slogan of hotelier César Ritz,^[3] who said, "If a diner complains about a dish or the wine, immediately remove it and replace it, no questions asked."^[4] A variation frequently used in Germany is der Kunde ist König ('the customer is king'), an expression that is also used in Dutch (klant is koning), while in Japan the motto okyakusama wa kamisama desu (お客様は神様です), meaning 'the customer is a god', is common.^{[citation needed]}

Origin and usage

American department store entrepreneur Marshall Field is sometimes credited with coining the phrase, as is his one-time employee Harry Gordon Selfridge, and the marketing pioneer John Wanamaker.^[5] The earliest known printed mention of the phrase is a September 1905 article in the Boston Globe about Field, which describes him as "broadly speaking" adhering to the theory that "the customer is always right".^[6]^[7] A November 1905 edition of Corbett's Herald describes one of the country's "most successful merchants", an unnamed multimillionaire who may have been Field, as summing up his business policy with the phrase.^[7] During the construction of Harry Selfridge's London store in 1909, the British press ridiculed the project and its policy, unheard of in London, that the customer would be "always right".^[8]

A Sears publication from 1905 states that its employees were instructed "to satisfy the customer regardless of whether the customer is right or wrong".^[9]

The phrase was coined at a time when most stores operated on the principle of caveat emptor, and could not always be trusted by customers.^[5]^[10] In 1909, a representative of an unnamed New York company said that their policy of "regarding the customer as always right, no matter how wrong she may be in any transaction in the store" was "the principle that builds up the trade", and that the cost of any delays and unfairly taken liberties were "covered, like other expenses, in the price of the goods".^[11] A 1930 article in The Rotarian wrote that while an expensive disagreement over whether a fur coat or diamond ring had been delivered to a customer would be settled by lawsuit rather than assuming that the customer was in the right, it may still be considered profitable for stores to accept small losses over disputes in the interest of maintaining goodwill towards future sales.^[5]

Reception

Frank Farrington wrote to Mill Supplies in 1914 that this view ignores that customers can be dishonest, have unrealistic expectations or try to misuse a product in ways that void the guarantee: "If we adopt the policy of admitting whatever claims the customer makes to be proper, and if we always settle them at face value, we shall be subjected to inevitable losses."^[12] He concluded: "If the customer is made perfectly to understand what it means for him to be right, what right on his part is, then he can be depended on to be right if he is honest, and if he is dishonest, a little effort should result in catching him at it."^[12] An article a year later by the same author, written for Merck Report, addressed the caveat emptor aspect while raising many of the same points as the earlier piece.^[13]

In a 1939 newspaper article, Damon Runyon wrote of the phrase being intended to "inspire the customer with greater confidence in trade", but remarked that from his own observations of people getting "mighty brash" with wait staff and clerks, that some took it to mean "the customer is always right in taking advantage of the tradespeople".^[14]

Forbes wrote in 2013 that there are occasions where the customer makes a mistake and is too demanding, and that therefore one ought to strike a balance between the customer being right and wrong.^[15] Business Insider said that the adoption of this motto has "created a sense of entitlement among shoppers that has led to aggression and even violence toward retail workers".^[16]