There are days when I feel like an old curmudgeon. This is one of them.
When did we decide that the customer is always right? And, have we ever considered what it has done to us and what it says to us about how we consider people who serve us and what types of behavior it encourages?
I have become convinced that the policy that the customer is always right encourages misbehavior by the customer. Does it increase sales? Certainly, but at an incredible cost to the people who are involved with them. It is a policy that is neither good for the customer nor good for the person serving them. In fact, it is a policy in which employers encourage employees to behave like 19th century house servants, lest they be fired.
The policy that the customer is always right leads us to regard our fellow human beings as second-class citizens whom we have a right to mistreat and abuse. Moreover, it encourages our worst behavior towards each other, encourages us to think that we are not responsible for any events that may happen, and inflates our sense of entitlement.
For the employee, it is not surprising that periodically some of them break. We see the videos of employees taking revenge, and are properly horrified. Have we ever thought that we are partially responsible for the acting out, by our insistence that people who serve us must also act in a servile manner? Moreover, I am convinced that the longer employers encourage employees to behave like servants, the more likely they are to begin to see their employees as a type of servant whom they can also mistreat. And, so, the employee gets squeezed between the customer and the employer.
But, what does our Lord say to us? — So when He had washed their feet, taken His garments, and sat down again, He said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call Me Teacher and Lord, and you say well, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you. Most assuredly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master; nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.
Let us then propose, in our lives, never to behave as though the customer is always right. And, I would encourage those of you who are employers to take the burden of the customer always being right off of your suffering employees’ shoulders. Insist on courtesy, but be willing to also speak truth in love to your customer and to hold firm when they are truly misbehaving and when they are truly wrong. You will both gain the love of your employees and you may even help your customer to acquire a more appropriate view of life.
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