In our world, businesses profit off of customers to succeed. Businesses make decisions to appeal to their audience. Because of this ideology, the phrase “customers are always right” has been used to garner what businesses believe to be trust with customers. They’ll tell you, “Hey! You’ll always be right, so come and use our services.” This makes businesses susceptible to damage. Customers are enabled to feel like they have all the power. They can start yelling at employees and go endlessly on and on about how they’ve been wronged. This turns into a demon possessing the patron’s body and going rabid.
We must stop this enabling. No more customers yapping like chihuahuas and no more employees having to deal with them.
We’ve all seen or heard about people who go out of their way to argue that they’re right. Let’s say you encounter a situation like this in a restaurant–you can see the patron fuming about their fries not being hot, a volcano ready to erupt. A server is trying to fix things but it isn’t working. When the customer finally erupts, you hear their loud, echoing voice throughout the room. It’s the lava to the eruption, creating fire and ready to burn everything in its surroundings. Everyone watches as the server, the target of the attack, is scarred and burnt. The people watching eruption is silently judged by the people watching.
Imagine the situation proceeds to an even more ridiculous level where the customer takes the employee to court. In the imaginative world, there would be multiple cases like this where being in the courtroom is like watching a sitcom with a laugh track– the plaintiff’s claims against the business are so outrageous. At the end of every trial the verdict is the same; the judges rule that the customer has no legitimate grounds for complaint. .
If we started to think of customers as having a job with certain responsibilities, explosions might happen less often. Let’s say a customer starts to complain about how they wanted their steak cooked medium, not medium rare. Then an employee tries to amends things. The complaint soon turns to yelling, but the employee suddenly stops the customer and yells, “You’re not doing your job you imbecile!” and asks pointedly, “Who trained you to be a customer?”
Of course, business staff would still be expected to treat customers decently. But with the new approach, the same would be expected of the customer. You’re allowed to put five fingers to their face (let them talk to the hand) maybe not literally and say “no,” politely declining their antics.
Article by July Two. Graphic from Unsplash by Charles Deluvio.
