Always Right?

I got a colorful response from someone I obviously agitated over a subject that I no longer believe is 100% true any longer, namely… The customer is always right! There may be instances where they may be correct - I just haven’t witnessed any lately.

Once upon a time, and a very long time ago in a world that was a lot different than the one we live in today, that may have been true.

Today we have the wild and wonderful world wide web where you can drown yourself not only in some very useful information but be terribly misinformed about, well, practically everything. 

I’m aware of the delicate art of servicing customers and besides, I became a customer myself from the day I could walk to the corner variety store with a shiny quarter burning a hole in my pocket. Back in the 60s, you could buy five pieces of penny candy, a Coke and baseball cards and still have change left over. The customer was not always right at Louie’s corner market - if you took too long picking out your penny candy or making up your mind on which ball cards you wanted, he would toss your adolescent butt out the door. 

I see it here, too. One day while I was waiting in line to cash out at an island supermarket, a woman was giving the cashier a hard time about the buy one get one free special on glass cleaner. The customer only wanted one and wanted to pay ½ the price for the BOGO. Of course, I’m in line behind this ding-a-ling holding a bag of quickly melting ice. I explained that it’s not going to happen - she can’t ring it up that way! She still insisted, “I only want one!” Wow, this is going nowhere! I gave the cashier the dollar “The Karen” did not want to pay and took the second bottle of glass cleaner. I paid for my half a bag of ice and cold water and stepped out of the puddle I was standing in. “Clean up at cashier number three!”  

And they are not always right in our local restaurants either. I have witnessed “malcontents” complain about the water, the bread, and the wine, including the appetizer and main course, only to consume nine-tenths of their meal and nearly polish off the whole bottle of wine and then tell the server they refuse to pay. It was a ploy to avoid paying until the owner summoned the local boys in blue, demanding they pay up or it won’t be a cushy suite at the Marriot where they will lay their heads tonight.

I have my fair share of the misinformed, claiming they know how to do this or that and know how long a certain repair will take and what I should charge because they saw it done on YouTube.

Only today I had someone come in and tell me she was in a year or so ago, and I gave her an estimate on some work she needed done - she refused to do it then. Here and now she told me she expects the same price I quoted back then. Her feathers got ruffled when I said that’s not possible; the gold price was $600 less per ounce last year than it is now. I would lose money when I ordered what I needed in gold to complete her project and so it will cost more than last year’s quote.

He (or she) who hesitates is lost… And not always right.

A gentleman left a watch for a battery replacement (note 99.9% of all customers assume the reason their watch stopped running is because their battery died. That’s not always the case).

An hour or so after he left, I opened the back to replace the battery, water dripped out of the watch and the internal movement was a rusted mess. I had one of my staff call and inform him of the situation. When told about the condition of his watch he said he never got the watch wet and we must have done it! Oh yeah! And I threw in a year’s worth of rust for good measure. He was in the shop in a matter of minutes, madder than Hades, claiming it was not that way when he brought it in an hour or so. “Sir, there is no way we did that kind of damage in an hour. You submerged your non-waterproof watch in either the pool or the ocean - the water has been sitting in there for some time for it to be rusted that badly. You then brought it to me in this condition. A battery change isn’t going to fix it, and I am not accepting the blame for this and from what I can see here, it’s beyond repair. Face the fact you submerged your watch… end of story!”

The same subject of always being right comes up on returns. I used to adhere to a fairly casual return policy and had to revise it due to the fact today, there are devious kinds of people who would wear my baubles for a special affair and promptly return it the following morning for a full refund thinking they were so clever because it cost them nothing to look so elegant and impress people wearing my diamond pieces with no intentions of actually purchasing them or leasing them for that matter. It gets better - there are those who want to return jewelry after they wore it, enjoyed and abused it for a number of years and they have now decided they have either grown tired or don’t like it any longer. Your sudden unexpected displeasure after several years does not warrant me issuing a full refund or exchanging it for something excitingly new!                               

That would be a resounding NO. Lock it in the safe, gift it to someone, then buy something else that brings you joy.