Having worked in retail for several years, I can assure you that the Customer is almost always wrong. ;) That said, it is often in the business’ best interest to act as though the customer is right, because it’s never just that one customer who “will never shop there again.” It’s all of that customer’s friends and family who will perceive that business as being in the wrong, simply because they trust their friend more. For those who did blurt it out where I worked, yeah, they might get their way that once, but they had absolutely lost the goodwill of the employees. No longer would we go out of our way to be extra nice, to provide coupons we had cut out of the paper ourselves to discount what they were buying, or to pre-emptively open up products to allow them to “sample” things. I hope being always right was worth being hated. On the rare occasions when the customer was actually right, I certainly did my best to help out. In my experience, though, the actually right customers didn’t tend to be the ones to bring up that dreaded phrase.