You've probably heard a manager say it, usually while taking the side of someone who's just shouted at a member of staff. Every time that happens, your team learns they're on their own. And a team that feels on their own won't look after your customers.
So where did the phrase come from, and why are we still listening to it?
It started as a way to win trust
Back in the 1800s, most shops worked on "buyer beware." If you got home and your new coat was faulty, tough luck. "The customer is always right" was a promise to shoppers that they wouldn't be fobbed off. They could take goods home, bring them back, and get a refund with no quibbling.
It first turns up in print in 1905, in a Boston Globe article about Marshall Field, who owned a big Chicago department store. Even then, the paper only said he followed the idea "broadly speaking". One of Field's managers, Harry Gordon Selfridge, later took it to London and made it famous.
His biographer reckoned the real line was a lot more sensible:
"Assume the customer is right until it is plain beyond all question that he is not."
So there was a get-out clause from the start. But it's the short version that stuck. When Selfridge opened his London store in 1909, the British press laughed at the idea that shoppers would always be right. By 1914, a writer called Frank Farrington was already pointing out that some customers are dishonest, and if you settle every claim, you'll lose money.
Now it's used against staff
These days, the phrase gets wheeled out when a customer's being rude and someone just wants the complaint to go away. And it's whoever's behind the till who has to deal with it.
There's plenty of rudeness about. In Usdaw's 2025 survey of over 3,000 shop workers, 71% had been verbally abused by customers in the past year (this is down by 6 points from the previous year, it actually used to be higher). Nearly half (48%) had been threatened.
People leave over it. The Institute of Customer Service found over a third of customer service workers had been abused in the past six months. Of those, 39% were thinking about quitting, and one in four had taken time off because of it.
Unhappy staff give worse service
If you want good customer service, look after the people giving it. How your staff feel shows up in how your customers get treated.
Back in 1994, a group of Harvard researchers called it the service-profit chain. Look after your staff, and they stay longer and do a better job. That means better service, more loyal customers, and more profit.
Gallup has been testing the idea for decades. Its 2024 meta-analysis looked at over 180,000 teams, and the most engaged made 23% more profit than the least engaged. Highly engaged teams also get customer ratings about 10% higher, and a 20% increase in sales.
Hal Rosenbluth, who ran a big American travel company, wrote a whole book about it called The Customer Comes Second. Put your people first, and they'll look after your customers for you.
Throw a member of staff under the bus to keep one angry customer happy, and everyone they serve for the rest of the week gets a slightly more fed-up version of them.
