We ALL have heard the old adage “the customer is always right” at some time in our lives and when I heard it recently I found myself saying NO, THEY ARE NOT. Below are the reasons and my thoughts as to why I have come to this conclusion, I offer examples and solutions you may not agree with but I hope it makes you think and for those of you SMART ENOUGH (lol) to agree I hope you will help to try and evoke change. When I was younger there was a thing called SHAME…it was something that was foisted upon you by society as well as by one’s self if they were brought up right. It was something you NEVER wanted to face but inevitably did and you tried to keep away from it as much as possible. Complaining was something you rarely did in public but if you were forced to it had meaning, complaining was something you did not want to have to do and you certainly did not want to do anything that warranted complaints to be directed to you, compensation for your complaining just was not something you accepted except under the harshest of situations. Lack of shame and constant complaining about compensation are just 2 REASONS why I truly believe that the customer is NOT always right. An example I KNOW you all have experienced…you walk into any store with an express lane you pick up a couple of items and you are in a hurry there will inevitably be someone in the express lane that didn’t want to wait in a regular line like most folks with their basket full of products, so they chose the express lane for THEIR convenience…the customer is NOT always right. When challenged, and I have challenged people on a number of occasions the response is “f” off or something along the lines of challenging my heritage or my mothers sexual proclivities…the customer is not always right. I was told about 6 months ago by a customer that they would NEVER tell a colleague at work about my former restaurant of employment as their colleague would come in almost every day bragging about how they had “beat” a restaurant out of a free meal by complaining (whether true or not). Or, the customer that would come in and not PAY for fries as he felt they were too expensive and then when food was delivered complain that their fries were forgotten and begin to raise hell…the list goes on and I bet you could add to this list quite easily! I was in a store in Panama City recently where a young gal had hot pink shorts that bore some commercial logo, had a shopping cart full of pre-packaged beef loins, she had half a dozen…she also had a number of other food only items that seemed excessive (all large packaged meat items), she then proceeded to run her ebt credit card and decided she had some extra money, sooooo, she got a couple of Starbucks coffees out of the cooler and realized she still had some left over soooo, she bought a pack of beef jerky, no shame, a customer that certainly wasn’t right, all the time, I stood behind the young lady and her friend as they discussed their plans for the evening…and work was not in the plans! As a society that unfortunately is becoming increasingly “low information”, we are teaching our kids that 1+1=3 is not wrong if you can explain it, a society where EVERYONE is a winner and that there are no losers, we are giving people free smartphones, govt credit cards and in return expect nothing. People laugh at the “scams” that people pull and get away with. We are becoming a society of entitlement regardless of how little is given. The result, we are creating a society, of whiners, cheaters, takers and “low information, low productivity” “customers” that will, lie, cheat, and do whatever under the banner of the “customer is always right” and feel perfectly entitled to do so. Companies give away billions in profits every year to “complaining customers” so they can be done with it and they are vilified for being rich money grubbing, capitalists. Too many small companies and businesses run into the same problems and they are afraid to say or do anything that “give in” for fear of being social media massacre victims. My solution, let’s all do our part and let’s reintroduce shame into society for wrongdoing or misbehavior, take a stand against those that are scamming businesses of all sizes and hold our governmental leaders to a standard that helps people with a “hand up” instead of a “hand out”. I truly believe that a vast majority of people agree with me, however, I also believe that they would rather sit idly by and complain rather than take action and face the wrath of the individual or group that is being challenged…if we ALL work together to make changes to the above issues the old adage the “customer is always right” may once again mean something, better still we as a society will be MUCH better off and the whiners and complainers will be relegated to the proverbial “ash heap” where I believe they belong!
