“The customer is always right” is an adage most people are inherently familiar with, whether or not they have experience working in customer service. Though its usage is ubiquitous, its alleged origins are murky and writings about it across the internet are rife with unverified information masquerading as fact.
One particularly popular claim about “The customer is always right” alleges the saying was shortened from the longer phrase, “The customer is always right in matters of taste,” as discussed in this Reddit thread and various TikTok videos.
@ghosting.jpeg Replying to @xiimlly #retail #fyp #customerisalwaysright #retailstories #customers #customerservice ♬ Stranger Things – Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein
One TikTok user replied, “I’ve actually completed customers who have said this to me. ‘In matters of taste’ and they give you the stunned pikachu face.” A poster on Reddit said, “I always heard it that way too, and that makes sense. If you work at a Best Buy and a customer is absolutely, immovably insistent they want a Mac for gaming, or a PC for music production work, it’s not your job to tell them they’re asking for the wrong thing. Your job is to find them the best product you can within their requirements.”
However, Snopes could find no evidence that “in matters of taste” was part of the original phrase.
Further, based on research, it is difficult to pinpoint a specific person or business responsible for coining the phrase in the first place. Rather, it appears to be the work of several influential business owners and an evolution in consumer culture in the late 19th to early 20th century.
Prior to this philosophy becoming commonplace, the buyer-seller relationship was primarily thought of as “caveat emptor,” a Latin phrase that means “Let the buyer beware,” putting the responsibility of all purchases strictly on the consumer.
In a 1944 issue of The Rotarian, the official magazine of Rotary International, then-president of department store Marshall Field and Co., Hughston M. McBain, wrote of the outdated philosophy, “High-pressure selling, deceptive advertising, false marketing of goods or no marking at all — such practices were so common as to be almost the rule in the latter half of the 1800s. The customer had the entire store at his beck when he bought — but when he came back with unsatisfactory goods, the best he got was glacial stares.”
(The Rotarian, November 1944)
However, in the late 19th century, Chicago business owner Potter Palmer instituted a “no questions asked” return policy for his dry goods store, one of the first of its kind, that allowed customers to return items they were dissatisfied with. (Palmer is also credited with being the first retailer to offer home delivery services.)
“The customer is always right” emerged soon after and is most often credited to a few different individuals: Marshall Field, a retail magnate brought in by Palmer when the latter was seeking a change of career, who ultimately evolved Palmer’s company into the influential Chicago department store Marshall Field and Co.; Harry Selfridge, a 25-year veteran of Marshall Field’s who later founded the London department store Selfridge’s; César Ritz, a hotelier whose business would eventually evolve into what is today The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co.; and, to a lesser extent, John Wanamaker, an innovative Philadelphia retailer also credited with inventing the “fixed price” tag.
Marshall Field
Though no primary source was found to absolutely verify these intimations, the earliest usage of “The customer is always right” that Snopes could verify comes from a Sept. 24, 1905, article in The Boston Globe about Marshall Field’s payment of taxes.
It reads: “Every employe, from cash boy up, is taught absolute respect for and compliance with the business principles which Mr. Field practices. Broadly speaking, Mr. Field adheres to the theory that ‘the customer is always right.’ He must be a very untrustworthy trader to whom this concession is not granted.”
(The Boston Globe, Sept. 24, 1905)
These traits of Field are reflected in a 1919 article from The Magazine of Business:
Field, it is well known, was the first to say, “The customer is always right.” … The exact version of the saying was not just as it was given above. It was, “assume that the customer is right until it is plain beyond all question that he is not.” But it turned out that when treated this way the customers nearly always did the right thing. So the policy is practically, “The customer is always right.”
In nothing was Field’s genius better illustrated than in his success in getting able assistants. He had a way of finding the right man at the right time. This was not an accident. It was not something done spur of the moment. It was the result first of drawing in all the promising youngsters he could, then of watching their records closely, giving them a little and then more responsibility, and finally, selecting his junior partners according to what they could do what was needing to be done, and not because he happened to like them personally.
Harry Selfridge
Field’s encouragement of junior partners is notable because elsewhere in the 1905 Boston Globe article is the mention of Harry Selfridge’s retirement from Marshall Field’s in 1904. However, following a brief few years of retirement, Selfridge relocated to London where he opened Selfridges and Co. in 1909.
Sometime later, in 1932, a newspaper profile in the Milwaukee Journal from Selfridge’s home state of Wisconsin was published with the headline “The Yankee who taught Britishers that ‘the customer is always right.'” Selfridge seemed to take what he had learned from Field and apply it to a new market entirely.
The article describes him as a “Wisconsin born merchant prince, head of London’s greatest department store” and offers a quote from Selfridge describing his move from Chicago to London.
“I was pretty much the kid and untamed man from the wild and untamed west when I came to London from Chicago more than a quarter of a century ago,” Selfridge said. “And for me to introduce American business methods to Londoners was regarded as no less than an intrusion.”
Many modern claims about the origin of “the customer is always right” allege that the original quote was shortened over time from Selfridge saying, “The customer is always right, in matters of taste.”
This version undercuts the sentiment of the philosophy as we’ve come to know it, but Snopes found no evidence that Selfridge ever said this, including in his own 1918 book, “The Romance of Commerce.”
He did, however, appear to ponder some limitations with the sales philosophy he inherited from his time at Marshall Field’s. On Page 372, he wrote, “The time has passed when an irritable customer, no matter who he or she may be, can, whether right or wrong, ride roughshod over the young man or woman behind the counter and demand his or her dismissal, and it is a good thing it is so.”
César Ritz
In 1908, “Piccadilly to Pall Mall: Manners, Morals, and Man,” a book documenting the changing social conventions of the time, wrote of hotel magnate César Ritz:
He it was who effected the veritable revolution in hotel management which has since spread all over the world. One of the principal causes of the success of this Napoleon amongst hotel keepers was a maxim which may be said to have largely influenced his policy in running restaurants and hotels. This maxima as “Le client n’a jamais tort,” no complaint, however frivolous, ill-grounded, or absurd, meeting with anything but civility and attention from his staff. Visitors to restaurants when in a bad temper sometimes find fault without any justification whatever, but the most inveterate grumblers soon become ashamed of complaining when treated with unwavering civility. Under such conditions they are soon mollified, leaving with blessings upon their lips.
The French “Le client n’a jamais tort” translates to “The customer is never wrong” — logistically speaking, the same as “the customer is always right.”
Though published three years after the first mention of “the customer is always right” in The Boston Globe, the quotations investigative website QuoteInvestigator points out — because there is no definitive primary source on who originally coined the phrase — it’s “conceivable that César Ritz or another business person was following the adage before 1905, but there was a delay before the slogan appeared in print.”
A Philosophical Debate
“The customer is always right” is a customer service philosophy that has been debated almost since its first appearance. A 1914 article published in the trade magazine Mill Supplies asked, “Is the customer always right?” and answered, “Not by any means. The man at the buying end of a deal is theoretically as likely as the man at the selling end to make mistakes, honestly or dishonestly.”
The debate continued in a 1930 issue of The Rotarian, with two different authors debating both sides of the issue.
Writer William Nelson Taft argued that the customer is most definitely not always right:
Marshall Field is credited with having been the first stop say it, though legend also connected the statement that “the customer is always right” with John Wanamaker, the elder Selfridge, and two or three other and less well-known merchant princes.
Unquestionably, however, the maxim was coined years ago, at a time when retailing bore little resemblance to its present form, when the sale of merchandise across the counter was a trade of small repute and caveat emptor was the motto of the majority of stores.
Meanwhile, writer Howard Vincent O’Brien ultimately argued in favor of Field’s philosophy, saying, “It exalts the individual. It makes life less a problem of law, and more of conscience. It is breaking down the barriers of mistrust which from time immemorial have existed between men in the exchange of goods; and is steadily bringing business under the sway of faith and charity.”
The debate has continued into the current day, with blogs like The Serving Times, a website dedicated to the experience of customer-service professionals, writing in 2021:
The Always Right philosophy trains us, and by extension our customers, that every customer, whether acting in good faith or bad, should be treated as if they’re in the right, thus acting as if something we know to be false is actually true.
In case you haven’t been on the internet in the last, like, 6 years, this practice is referred to as “gaslighting.” It attempts to warp our sense of reality and gives the tormentor power over the tormented.
“The customer is always right” isn’t just an idiom or retail philosophy. It’s a code to let customer service workers know they have no choice but to comply. It’s a dog whistle signaling “you better give me what I want or else.” It’s a gun to the head of an entire industry held hostage by a ridiculous standard.
Snopes has covered the origins of many colloquial phrases in the past, including the origins of “holy smoke,” “a shot of whiskey,” “elementary, my dear Watson” and “one for the road.”