Whenever you write the phrase “The customer is always right” online, there’s always someone showing up to show you up in the comments, confidently proclaiming that this utterance is actually a shortened version of the original phrase, “The customer is always right in matters of taste.”
Attributions for either version normally go to one of several pioneering and successful department store retailers who reshaped trade in the late 1800s, and publications on the retail philosophy emerged in the early 1900s, yet, there is nothing to be found supporting the commonly-accepted-online-idea that the more common phrase “The customer is always right” is omitting the specifying phrase “in matters of taste.” In fact, evidence would suggest otherwise, though no evidence of origination is concrete to begin with.
And, still, if we’re going to accept angry online commenter’s insistence that “The customer is always right in matters of taste” is the actual full phrase, we will quickly find that just as in the case of the shortened “The customer is always right”—neither is actually true, as much as your boss would like you to believe otherwise.
See, customers are wrong all the time, as anyone who has worked in a customer-facing role will happily tell you—in fact, they might even be wrong as often as they are right. Simultaneously, people are also wrong in their matters of taste. Not only are their people with terrible taste, decorating their houses in varying shades of grey and sad beige but some people’s tastes are based on ignorant opinions altogether, formed from ignorant perspectives resulting from a stubborn refusal to take on board new information.
Take this guy, for example, who refused to listen to staff regarding how ridiculous his request for a pizza with everything on it was. The customer failed to listen to repeated advice and warning, insisting that he wanted a pizza with everything on it, resulting in something that was entirely inedible and expensive to boot.
See the pizza joint’s manager’s account of events below, in a story that they originally shared with Reddit.
