It is a retail slogan from the early twentieth century, usually credited to Harry Gordon Selfridge and sometimes to Marshall Field. The hotelier César Ritz used a French version meaning “the customer is never wrong.” It was a policy for staff, not a moral rule.
Where the line actually comes from
The phrase belongs to the era of the great department stores. Selfridge in London and Chicago, Marshall Field in Chicago, and Ritz in hospitality were all building something new: shops and hotels you could enter without being pressured, where complaints were settled rather than argued. Multiple versions of the slogan circulate in trade press from the first decade of the 1900s, which is why no single first utterance can be pinned down.
Ritz’s formulation, *le client n’a jamais tort*, is the more careful one. “Never wrong” is about how you treat a complaint in front of other guests; “always right” sounds like a statement of fact about the world.
The point of the slogan was internal. It told a nervous new class of shop assistants: do not argue, take the return, protect the relationship. It was a competitive strategy at a time when haggling and refusal were normal.
What it originally meant
Read as it was meant, it is a rule about default behaviour under uncertainty. When you cannot tell who is right, side with the customer, because one refund costs less than one story told to twenty people.
It also assumes a specific setting: a business with margins, a manager nearby, and a customer who has to come back through the same door. It was never a claim that the customer’s judgement is better than the expert’s.
How it gets used today — and why that’s off
The famous misuse is customers quoting it at staff who have no authority to fix anything, converting a management policy into a licence for abuse. The slogan was written to protect a business relationship, not to remove a worker’s dignity from it.
It also gets misused inside companies as an excuse to skip judgement — shipping whatever a loud client asks for, even when the expert in the room knows it will fail.
An honest way to quote it
Use the Ritz version: “the customer is never wrong” — in public. It preserves the service instinct without pretending the customer has the facts.
If you are setting policy, say what you actually mean: “We give the benefit of the doubt on refunds under £50, and we never argue with a customer in front of other customers.” Specific policies beat slogans.
People also ask
Who said “the customer is always right”?
It is usually credited to Harry Gordon Selfridge, and sometimes to Marshall Field. It circulated as a retail slogan in the early 1900s rather than originating in one recorded sentence.
What did it originally mean?
It was staff guidance: settle complaints instead of arguing, because keeping the relationship is worth more than winning the dispute.
Is the customer always right in practice?
No. It was a default for ambiguous complaints, not a claim about who has better knowledge or a licence to mistreat staff.
Stories on the same idea
A translator who agreed to everything for eleven years, and the four-word sentence that saved her career.
A hotel night manager on the four kinds of difficult, and why only one of them is about you.
One small refusal — and the surprising, funny, honest week that followed it.