Who was first to tell us that “the customer is always right”?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a Wikipedia page about the well-known slogan that:

“The customer is always right.”

 

On January 1, 2025 there was a pair of articles about that quotation. One by Jake Rossen at Mental Floss is titled Who First Said “The Customer Is Always Right”? The other by Joey Esposito at Snopes is titled The Enigmatic Origins of ‘The Customer is Always Right.’ Back on October 6, 2015 there was a third article by Garson O’Toole at Quote Investigator titled The Customer Is Always Right – referenced by the Mental Floss article. The Quote Investigator article refers to two articles from almost a hundred and twenty years ago in September 1905: one on September 3 in the Boston [Sunday] Herald, and another on September 24 in The Boston Globe. The quote is attributed to Chicago department store operator Marshall Field.

 

But I found a very different answer by searching in another database - Google Books. 75 years earlier, in 1830, a book by Carl Albert Naether and George Francis Richardson titled A Course in English for Engineers – Volume II The Engineer’s Professional and Business Writing says on page 207:

 

“Moreover, there are a good many firms whose policy that ‘the customer is always right’ prompts them to adjust a claim even though the customer is to blame, rather than to run the risk of refusing and so displeasing him.”

 

The similar phrase “the customer always is right” first appeared in The Black Diamond for 1913 on page 33. And “Is the customer right – always?” was in The Transfer for December 1915 on page 3.

 

 

 

TRY A DIFFERENT BOX OF TOOLS

 

On July 6, 2024 I blogged about The magic of reading books – stories told by librarians and booksellers. At the end I said:

 

“Back in high school I found a life-changing little book by George Polya titled How to Solve It: a system of thinking which can helpyou solve any problem. It gave me a whole new intellectual toolbox – which I used in my careers in applied research and engineering consulting.”

 

Physicist Richard Feynman came up with diagrams that are pictorial representations of the interaction and behavior of subatomic particles. And in the 1985 book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman – Adventures of a Curious Character there is an essay starting on page 84 titled A Different Box of Tools about how he learned calculus in his high school physics class. The last five paragraphs say:

 

“One thing I never did learn was contour integration. I had learned to do integrals by various methods shown in a book that my high school physics teacher Mr. Bader had given me.

 

One day he told me to stay after class. ‘Feynman,’ he said, ‘you talk too much and you make too much noise. I know why. You’re bored. So I’m going to give you a book. You go up there in the back, in the corner, and study this book, and when you know everything that’s in this book, you can talk again.’

 

So every physics class, I paid no attention to what was going on with Pascal’s Law, or whatever they were doing. I was up in the back with this [1926] book: Advanced Calculus, by [Frederick] Woods. Bader knew I had studied Calculus for the Practical Man a little bit, so he gave me the real works – it was for a junior or senior course in college. It had Fourier series, Bessel functions, determinants, elliptic functions – all kinds of wonderful stuff that I didn’t know anything about.    

 

That book also showed how to differentiate parameters under the integral sign – it’s a certain operation. It turns out that it’s not taught very much in the universities; they don’t emphasize it. But I caught on how to use that method, and I used that one damn tool again and again. So because I was self-taught using that book, I had peculiar methods of doing integrals.

 

The result was, when guys at MIT or Princeton had trouble doing a certain integral, it was because they couldn’t do it with the standard methods they had learned in school. If it was contour integration, they would have found it; if it was a simple series expansion, they would have found it. Then I come along and try differentiating under the integral sign, and often it worked. So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else’s, and they had tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.”

 

Images of a customer and a toolbox were revised from those found at Wikimedia Commons.