The Customer Is Always Right (and Other Things Nobody Said)
Lately you’ve probably seen a correction going around on social media. The phrase “the customer is always right”, it says, has been cut short. The original was “the customer is always right in matters of taste”. So the customer was only ever right about colours and styles, not about refunds, rudeness or returning a half-eaten cake.
It’s a satisfying story. It gives retail workers a comeback and turns an old slogan on its head.
It’s also made up. Nobody has found any historical source for the longer version. Snopes looked and came up empty. The “in matters of taste” ending appears to be a 21st-century addition, written to give the slogan the meaning people wish it had.
The real history is interesting enough on its own. The phrase took off in the early 1900s with the big department-store owners: Marshall Field in Chicago, John Wanamaker in Philadelphia and Harry Gordon Selfridge, who took the idea to London. The earliest known printed use is from 1905, in a Boston newspaper describing Field’s approach. Around the same time, the hotelier César Ritz was saying something similar in French: le client n’a jamais tort, the customer is never wrong.
It was never a statement of fact. Field and his peers knew perfectly well that customers could be wrong, dishonest or mistaken about whether they’d worn the dress. The slogan was a policy: when there’s a dispute, the store absorbs the cost, not the customer. That was radical at a time when caveat emptor, buyer beware, was the norm. Treat everyone as right, and people trust you enough to come back.
The pushback started almost straight away. As early as 1914, a writer in a trade journal argued that taking every customer’s word would mean “inevitable losses”, because some customers lie. In the 1930s the columnist Damon Runyon noticed customers using the slogan as a licence to treat staff badly. Every generation since has had the same argument.
What strikes me is that both sides are arguing about the words instead of the decision. “The customer is always right” isn’t true or false. It’s a rule about who absorbs the cost of uncertainty. Some businesses should take it on, because trust is their product. Others shouldn’t, because the cost falls on staff who never agreed to it.
The invented “matters of taste” ending is a good example of how we treat language. When a phrase stops suiting us, we don’t argue with it. We give it a backstory. We decide the real meaning was something more reasonable all along, then credit it to someone who’s no longer around to object.
If your organisation lives by a slogan, ask what decision it actually makes, and who pays for it. That’s the meaning that matters, whatever the history books say.
