Episode 22: The Customer Is Always Right

Fair warning, this might be the sassiest I've ever gotten on this show, and it's because my personal story this episode is about my bartending days. If I ever served you and was a little sassy about a pour, I apologize in advance. "The customer is always right" started as a marketing pledge from a department store, not a rule anyone was supposed to live by forever.

In this episode of Lies We Bought, I trace it back to Marshall Field and Harry Gordon Selfridge, follow it through a hundred and twenty years of retail history, and get into what the research actually says about what this slogan does to the people saying it and the people hearing it. We cover the psychology study that surveyed call center workers about customer aggression, the moment even Selfridge's own store publicly admitted the phrase wasn't true, and the corporate mythology the internet invented to make the whole thing sound more reasonable than it ever was.

Plus, why this phrase quietly turned into a form of consumer deception, a promise that got flipped into a weapon. Welcome to Lies We Bought, a podcast about advertising lies, branding history, and the marketing deception hiding behind the slogans, myths, and shiny cultural truths we were sold.