There's a story in a book called Nuts!, which two authors wrote about Southwest Airlines back in the 1990s, about a customer the people in Southwest's customer relations department had a nickname for. They called her “Pen Pal”, because she wrote in after every single flight she took. And she took a lot of them.

She didn't like that Southwest didn't assign seats.

She didn't like that there was no first class.

She didn't like that there was no meal.

She didn't like the boarding process.

She didn't like the flight attendants' uniforms.

And she didn't like the peanuts.

Every flight, another letter, and every letter got a polite response from somebody whose job it was to keep her happy.

Then one day her latest letter came in with the usual list of complaints, and the customer relations people had finally had enough. So they did something smart. They sent it upstairs to the founder and CEO, Herb Kelleher, with a sticky note on it that said, "This one's yours."

Kelleher read it, and about 60 seconds later he'd written his reply. Here it is, word for word: "Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb."

That was it, the entire letter. He fired her. And when somebody asked him later whether the customer is always right, he didn't hedge. He said, "No, they are not. And I think that's one of the biggest betrayals of employees a boss can possibly commit. The customer is sometimes wrong. We don't carry those sorts of customers. We write to them and say, 'Fly somebody else. Don't abuse our people.'"

Now I want you to think about what he said for a second because it doesn't get enough publicity in my opinion. Herb Kelleher didn't build a struggling airline. On the contrary, he built what has been one of the most consistently profitable airlines in American history, and he did it while telling some customers to go fly someone else's airline. What does that mean? It means he either got lucky for 40 years, or it could possibly mean that the phrase "the customer is always right" is simply not true.

I've been writing all month about lies that have an author, and this lie that “the customer is always right” has a couple of them. Let's look at where it came from.

The earliest anybody has been able to find it in print is 1905, in a Boston newspaper article about Marshall Field, the man who built the biggest department store in Chicago. A man who worked for Field named Harry Selfridge took the idea to London, opened his own store there in 1909, and used it to train his staff. Around the same time, a famous French hotel man named César Ritz was telling his people "the customer is never wrong." These were different men in the same era, using a similar slogan, and this slogan spread like wildfire.

Here's what most people don't know, though. There's no record of Marshall Field ever saying those exact words to his staff. A man who wrote about Field's business methods in 1919 says Field's rule actually was: "Assume that the customer is right until it is plain beyond all question that he is not."

What?!? Read that again. “Assume the customer is right until it's plain beyond all question that he isn't.” That's not a rule about who's right. That's a rule about how you treat people, and it comes with a built-in exception for the moment when somebody is clearly in the wrong. The problem with this lie is that we only quote the first half of the sentence.

And it gets better...or worse, depending upon your perspective. If you've been on social media at all in the last few years, you've probably seen somebody "correct" the slogan. They'll tell you the full quote was actually "the customer is always right in matters of taste," and that the ending got cut off over the years. That's actually what I've heard for years, and that's actually what I have said to correct people when they say things like, "The customer is always right." Oh, but I was wrong.

It's also made up. Snopes went looking for it and couldn't find it anywhere, not in The Romance of Commerce, the book Selfridge himself wrote about his business in 1918, not in any newspaper from the era, nowhere. The "matters of taste" version is, as far as anyone can find, a 21st-century invention that got passed around the internet long enough for it to make it into common lore that everybody quotes as truth when it's not true. So the lie you were taught has a fake correction on top of it, and neither one is what Marshall Field said.

I call what the slogan does to a business the Customer-First Trap, and here's how it works.

Somebody who runs something, a company, a store, a church staff, a construction crew, hears "the customer is always right" and decides that's the standard. So the first time a customer yells at one of his people, he takes the customer's side. Maybe he apologizes for the employee. Maybe he gives the customer a refund, a discount, a free something. The customer calms down, and the boss walks away thinking he handled it correctly because the customer is always right after all.

What he actually did was teach two lessons at once. He taught the customer that yelling works, so the customer will yell again, and so will the next one who watches it happen. And he taught his employee exactly what she's worth to him, which is less than a refund. She'll remember that a whole lot longer than the customer remembers the discount.

Do that a few dozen times and you've built a business where your worst customers set the rules and your best people leave. And you'll never see it in the numbers, because the refund shows up on this month's statement and the resignation shows up a year from now with no explanation attached.

Kelleher understood this, and it is what prompted him to write that short note to Mrs. Crabapple. His order of priorities at Southwest was employees first, customers second, shareholders third. (Please hold all nasty comments about how Southwest is “shareholders first” now with their recent changes. I get it. I'm not happy with what they've done lately either, but stick with me on the main point here, okay?) When people pushed back on putting employees ahead of customers, he explained it in one sentence: "If the employees come first, then they're happy. A motivated employee treats the customer well. The customer is happy so they keep coming back, which pleases the shareholders." And then he added, because he was Herb Kelleher, "It's not one of the enduring green mysteries of all time, it is just the way it works."

He wasn't alone. A guy named Hal Rosenbluth built one of the biggest corporate travel companies in the country and wrote a book about how he did it. The title was The Customer Comes Second. His argument was that if you want your people to put customers first, you have to put your people first, because they will treat customers exactly as well as they've been treated.

Notice that none of these men were saying customers don't matter. They were saying something more nuanced than that. The people who deliver your service are your service. The customer never meets your strategy or your values or your mission statement. He meets your employee. And if your employee has been told, by your own actions, that she'll be thrown under the bus the first time somebody complains, that's what the customer is going to meet.

So how do you get out of the trap of this golden cage called “the customer is always right”? You go back to Marshall Field's real statement with the second half still attached.

Assume the customer is right. Give him the benefit of the doubt, listen to the complaint, fix what's broken. That's just good business, and it's what Field meant. But the moment it's plain beyond all question that he's not right – and especially the moment he starts abusing your people – you stop. You take your employee's side, in front of the employee, and if it comes to it, you write the customer a letter that says you'll miss him.

That takes a spine, and it costs you a sale now and then. It also tells every person who works for you that you'll stand behind them, and there is nothing you can put in a handbook that will do more for the way they treat your customers than that.

Just like most things we write about in this blog, King Solomon wrote about this topic 3,000 years ago, and he put it in farming terms because that's what his readers understood.

"Know well the condition of your flocks, and give attention to your herds, for riches do not last forever; and does a crown endure to all generations?" (Proverbs 27:23-24)

Look at what he tells the owner to pay attention to. It isn't the buyer at the market. It's the flock. Know its condition, give it your attention, because the flock is where the wealth actually comes from, and if you neglect it, the riches don't last. A shepherd who spends all day pleasing the man who buys the wool and never checks on the sheep is going to run out of wool.

Your people are the flock. They're the ones producing everything the customer pays for, and they're the ones who'll still be there, or won't, after this month's difficult customer has moved on to make somebody else miserable. Solomon is telling you where to look first, and it isn't at the guy who's yelling.

The customer is not always right. Marshall Field never said he was, Herb Kelleher proved he wasn't, and the version of the quote that's supposed to fix it was invented on the internet. What's actually true is simpler and harder: treat the customer like he's right until he proves he isn't, and never make your people pay for his mistake.

Take care of your people, and the wool takes care of itself.

Before You Go

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– The Real Jason Duncan