Death of a customer

The customer comes first, the customer is king, know your customer, customers matter more than anything: to be in business is to be focused almost manically on customers and customer service. As Gordon Selfridge put it: "The customer is always right."

What a load of baloney. I hate customers. They are horrible people; not remote either; they are you and me; and the problem is that you and me have become very badly behaved over the years.

We take six outfits to a dressing room where we discard them for members of staff to put back on the rails. We go in to a shop and make some outrageous demand for some service then complain when we're told we have to pay for it. We knock things off shelves and don't pick them up. We finger vegetables and put them back.

We thumb through books but never buy the book that's been thumbed through. We mix up CDs in record shops that other staff must then sort out. We stand at counters and speak in to our mobile phones while people are serving us. We can't be bothered to find the right change even if we have it in our pockets.

But sometimes we can be much much worse. We damage things through misuse then expect the item to be replaced. We ask for discount routinely that simply leads retailers to put up their prices by 20 per cent.

Going the extra mile

So who loses out from all this bad behaviour? Ultimately we do. We get poor service from shop assistants who have had their fill of rude and ignorant customers, who are fed up of "going the extra mile" for employers who don't pay them for working an extra 10 minutes or spending part of their lunch break attending to a customer enquiry.

Good manners

Something else is lost too and that's everything to do with basic good manners. How can we put things right? Well we shouldn't wait for the retailers. The first thing that we, the customers, should get straight is that, however much the shopkeeper insists that our satisfaction is paramount, that should not be interpreted as a licence for boorish behaviour.

We can be pleasant with shop staff, even when they are surly; we can pick things up off the floor that others have knocked down. We can shop around rather than ask for discount; we can appreciate that customer service adds value to a product - a shop assistant's time is money; and we can look after products on the shelves as if we owned them ourselves. Damaged goods add to overhead and we pay for that overhead.

Need for respect

Underpinning this is a need for greater respect in all walks of life. Let's start in the shops.

As Arthur Miller once wrote in Death of a Salesman: Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.