The customer is always right just means that if the customer wants a bright pink top with bring pink shorts, they are right.

It doesn't mean every stupid thing the customer does is right.

> The customer is always right.

This adage only works when marginal value of a customer is high, and monetary preferences aren't utterly dominating customer's thought process. Business dealing with necessities, or ones where demand outweights supply, aren't like that - that's why in a grocery store, customer is trash. There's plenty more where he/she came from.

Have you ever worked in grocery?

The customers tend to be brand loyal, and the lifetime value of a customer is very high (family with 2.4 kids and a dog is minimum $10k/year in gross sales), so when you start banishing customers for doing things that they may not even realize that they did, they will loudly tell everyone they know what a bunch of assholes you are! The $25 roast will cost you $500.

If I stop shopping at a local grocery that uses a loyalty card for two weeks, they will immediately begin sending coupons worth 10-20% of my average transaction value to get me back. The ROI of giving away $20 at a pretty low margin implies a high value.

Only briefly, helping with inventory. But my SO did, and well... I eat food, and so does my family. And so I learned that with grocery, the one consideration that literally trumps all others is... price. Other significant factors are geography - people tend to shop closest to home or their commute path, and assortment - the more you can buy in one place, the better. There's very little a grocery store can do to chase away customers living in the area except having prices higher than the shop next door.

Now my experience is of course limited to shops in urban Europe, servicing low- and middle-income populations. Maybe high-income people can afford to vote with their wallets, but with all the people I know, the ability to save $100+ / month by just going to the cheaper store of the few nearby is enough to make them not mind grumpy cashiers.

> they will loudly tell everyone they know what a bunch of assholes you are!

I have never in my entire life seen this behaviour impact a single company. Even though I'm first to badmouth asshole businesses and praise the nice ones. Even in tech, I'm yet to see a single company seriously impacted by people's reaction to bad behaviour. I mean, how is Uber still around? Or how is Lenovo still selling laptops?

This is a tangent, but I think that's better stated as "the customer is never wrong". That frames it as a customer support challenge rather than a surrealist exploration of what your customer may claim as their desire.