The customer is always right



"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.

Variations of the phrase include le client n'a jamais tort ('the customer is never wrong'), which was the slogan of hotelier César Ritz, who said, "If a diner complains about a dish or the wine, immediately remove it and replace it, no questions asked." 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.

1900s
The earliest known printed mention of the phrase is a September 1905 article in the Boston Globe about Marshall Field, which describes him as "broadly speaking" adhering to the theory that "the customer is always right". 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.

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

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." 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." 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.

2000s
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. 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".