"The customer is always right" is a motto or slogan which exhorts service staff to give a high priority to

customer satisfaction Customer satisfaction is a term frequently used in marketing to evaluate customer experience. It is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. Customer satisfaction is defined as "the number ...

. It was popularised by pioneering and successful retailers such as

Harry Gordon Selfridge Harry Gordon Selfridge, Sr. (11 January 1858 – 8 May 1947) was an American retail magnate who founded the London-based department store Selfridges. The early years of his leadership led to his becoming one of the most respected and wealthy re ...

, John Wanamaker and

Marshall Field Marshall Field (August 18, 1834January 16, 1906) was an American entrepreneur and the founder of Marshall Field's, Marshall Field and Company, the Chicago-based department stores. His business was renowned for its then-exceptional level of qua ...

. 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 ''Caveat emptor'' (; from ''caveat'', "may he/she beware", a subjunctive form of ''cavēre'', "to beware" + ''ēmptor'', "buyer") is Latin for "Let the buyer beware". It has become a proverb in English. Generally, ''caveat emptor'' is the contra ...

'' ('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 César Ritz, born Cäsar Ritz (23 February 1850 – 26 October 1918), was a Swiss hotelier and founder of several hotels, most famously the Hôtel Ritz Paris, Hôtel Ritz in Paris and the The Ritz London Hotel, Ritz and Carlton Hotel, London, Ca ...

, first recorded in 1908. 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'' (), meaning 'the customer is a god', is common.

Origin

American department store entrepreneur

is sometimes credited with coining the phrase, as is his one-time employee

, and the marketing pioneer John Wanamaker. The earliest known printed mention of the phrase is a September 1905 article in the ''

Boston Globe ''The Boston Globe,'' also known locally as ''the Globe'', is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes. ''The Boston Globe'' is the oldest and largest daily new ...

'' about 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. 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". However,

John William Tebbel John William Tebbel (1912–2004), was an American journalist, editor, writer, teacher, and media historian. He was known for his four-volume book, ''A History of Book Publishing in the United States'' (1972, Bowker). Biography John William Tebb ...

was of the opinion that Field never himself actually said such a thing, because he was "no master of idiom". Tebbel rather believed it probable that what Field would have actually said was "Assume the customer is right until it is plain beyond all question that he is not.". Field's "Rules of Business", reported in his obituary in the ''

Chicago Daily Tribune The ''Chicago Tribune'' is an American daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1847, it was formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper", a slogan from which its once integrated WGN radio and WGN tel ...

'', contain no such rule; the ''Tribune'' describing Field's business methods, inherited from

Potter Palmer Potter Palmer (May 20, 1826 – May 4, 1902) was an American businessman who was responsible for much of the development of State Street (Chicago), State Street in Chicago. Born in Albany County, New York, Barry Pain used both terms in his 1917 ''Confessions of Alphonse'', writing "The great success of a restaurant is built up on this principle—''le patron n’a jamais tort''—the customer is always in the right!". In the 21st century, social media users and

TikTok TikTok, known in mainland China and Hong Kong as Douyin (), is a social media and Short-form content, short-form online video platform owned by Chinese Internet company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which may range in duration f ...

videos began claiming that the phrase had been abbreviated from "The customer is always right, in matters of taste", with some directly attributing this longer quotation specifically to Selfridge.

Fact-checking Fact-checking is the process of verifying the factual accuracy of questioned reporting and statements. Fact-checking can be conducted before or after the text or content is published or otherwise disseminated. Internal fact-checking is such che ...

website

Snopes ''Snopes'' (), formerly known as the ''Urban Legends Reference Pages'', is a fact-checking website. It has been described as a "well-regarded reference for sorting out myths and rumors" on the Internet. The site has also been seen as a source ...

found no evidence for this.

Usage

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. Writer

Howard Vincent O'Brien Howard Vincent O’Brien (1888–1947) was an American novelist and journalist best known for his memoir ''Wine, Women and War'' and his columns for the Chicago Daily News, "All Things Considered" and "Footnotes". O’Brien was born in Chicago ...

described the more customer-friendly policy as "breaking down the barriers of mistrust which from time immemorial have existed between men in the exchange of goods". A

Sears Sears, Roebuck and Co., commonly known as Sears ( ), is an American chain of department stores and online retailer founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosen ...

publication from 1905 states that its employees were instructed "to satisfy the customer regardless of whether the customer is right or wrong". 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". A 1930 article by William Henry Taft took the view 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. The president of "a big Chicago store" was quoted as saying that their policy was to assume that "the customer is right, until she has been proved wrong three times", which Taft considered to be "the 1930 version of the 1890 maxim".

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." 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 ''

'' aspect while raising many of the same points as the earlier piece. In a 1939 newspaper article,

Damon Runyon Alfred Damon Runyon (October 4, 1880 – December 10, 1946) was an American journalist and short-story writer. He was best known for his short stories celebrating the world of Broadway theatre, Broadway in New York City that grew out of the Proh ...

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". ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917. It has been owned by the Hong Kong–based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes. The co ...

'' 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 ''Business Insider'' (stylized in all caps: BUSINESS INSIDER; known from 2021 to 2023 as INSIDER) is a New York City–based multinational financial and business news website founded in 2007. Since 2015, a majority stake in ''Business Inside ...

'' 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".

Footnotes

References

Bibliography

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