#the customer is always right !!

[rabbithollering]

Fun fact, that’s his ex-girlfriend’s face haha. Praying I drew this piece sick enough that he doesn’t hate this in a few years

[noots-wears-blue-boots]

WIP time, girlies

First artpiece of 2024 and I'm already going insane

[csbtv]

"The Customer is Usually Wrong." is a sketch comedy series about customer service and the eclectic customers. Only on CSB Television. Search for it on Rumble and YouTube.

[mrmcwigglyman]

I hate that the intended recipient of discord's feedback page will never see the actual messages. I feel like the company would respond faster to complaints if the higher-ups were the ones reading through everyone's unbridled rage instead of some poor intern.

[groundrunner100]

I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate III, but I’m GLAD it won Game of The Year.

This needs to be a wake-up call for western video game publishers/development studios that it pays to deliver EVERYTHING the game has to offer day 1.

Also that live-services & Wokeness aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

[treehuggingwitchyhippy]

Okay, so all us tiddy endowed people know we store things in our bras, especially the bustier among us.

We're finally getting more pockets in clothes, so it's time.

It's time

to get

Bra Pockets.

This needs to come back, but bigger and better than ever!

I always thought that “woman pulls something out of her cleavage” was really just sort of a cliche historically

But nope

I’m reading this incredibly niche book about the history of pockets, and there is a picture of a pair of stays from the 18th century that someone sewed a giant pocket inside of

It was apparently a big thing for women who wanted to keep their money safe or to steal it off of other people and hide it quickly

INCREDIBLE

[rollerska8er]

"The actual saying is the customer is always right in matters of taste"

One thing I see trotted out a lot is that the phrase "The customer is always right", often used to justify abuses by patrons interacting with workers in the service industry, is actually a corruption of "The customer is always right in matters of taste", something supposedly said by Harry Selfridge, an American retail magnate who founded the London-based department store Selfridges & Co.

What a shame, then, that there are literally no sources recording him ever saying this, nor any evidence that "The customer is always right" is a contraction of a longer phrase spoken by someone else. What Harry Selfridge is thought to have said (at least, according to Jeff Toister) was "Right or wrong, the customer is always right", which is, if anything, an even more emphatic way of saying "The customer is always right", and a response to an earlier adage: "Assume that the customer is right until it is plain beyond all question he is not."

As I have stated in previous posts, it is important to be sceptical of the things you see and read on Tumblr and the wider Internet, because oftentimes, they're not true.

I'm not sure why this myth persists in common speech. Maybe it's because it's nice to imagine that there was some time in the past where service workers were treated with dignity. Maybe it's nice to use it as a kind of counter-charm, a magic spell which dispels any notion that customers should be given free rein to behave any way they like when dealing with a seventeen year old retail clerk. Both very noble ends.

The fact is, "The customer is always right" has been used more or less the way it is used today for at least a century. I can't speak for Harry Selfridge - at the time "The customer is always right" entered popular parlance, it was quite common for unscrupulous shopkeepers and businessmen to fleece unwary customers; Selfridge wanted to create a relationship of trust between customer and seller.

Over time, however, that much-maligned phrase has come to mean that customers should be allowed to behave however they want and make whatever outlandish demands of minimum-wage staff they please, since if the business does not meet these demands, the business might lose their custom.

While many retail businesses balk at customers being allowed to outright abuse staff (verbally, emotionally and physically), many of them are genuinely concerned about losing the custom of assholes, so they of course instruct their employees to try to be as accommodating as possible. Hence, the saying persists, despite being clearly, factually wrong.

It isn't that there was a time when service work was not exploitative. It has been exploitative since the time of Marx. It's that retail work of the calibre offered by Selfridges & Co. used to be a fairly respectable occupation. Selfridges in particular used to offer a higher rate of pay than most other shops, which often required barbarously long hours with shit pay. The expectation was of distinguished service, to set Selfridges apart from the other shops, a place for the well-to-do to buy luxuries without fear of being swindled.

At this time, most of the people we traditionally think of as "working class" were involved in manual and industrial labour: manufacture, construction, material extraction, trade work, and so on. But as capitalism has advanced, manual labour has dried up for the most part, or at least been exported overseas, where regulators, if they exist, will happily turn a blind eye to things like basic health and safety and PPE in return for a few more zeroes on the national GDP. It's exploitation within exploitation.

So now, the people who used to be doing manual labour, making stuff, are told they have to work. Where do they go? McDonald's and Walmart and the hardware store, Primark and Tim Horton's and yadda yadda yadda. Point is, the dynamic of customer service has changed. No longer is it an exclusive occupation in which the service worker is expected to offer tailored service to every customer.

Instead, it has become a replacement for the factory line. It's a simple, manual job and considered to be close to the "bottom" of the career ladder. But the sentiment that customers should receive tailored service has endured. Why? Exploitation.

The ability to coerce another person into doing your bidding by through abuse, or by threatening to take resources from them, is probably as old as humans. As Marx himself pointed out, the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.

Being able to lord that power over someone, especially someone female, especially someone very young, is one of the simplest forms of exploitation accessible to the average consumer, who, again, due to the advancement of capitalism, may not actually own any capital at all. Instead, retail allows a kind of "rental" exploitation, where you can exploit any poor soul. It's part of the transaction between consumer and distributor.

The insistence that the phrase used to be "The customer is always right in matters of taste" is, it seems, an attempt to skirt around the real issue at play in interactions between customers and service workers. It is not that businesses used to treat retail workers nicely. It is that retail work has, through the advancement of capitalism, become more exploitative and abusive than it ever was at the time Harry Selfridge supposedly said that.

Your issue is not with the maxim that "the customer is always right". It's with capitalism for perpetuating an ever-accelerating race to the bottom in working standards.

[johnnymartyr]

The Conundrum of Supporting My Local Camera Shop

by Johnny Martyr On my way to work, I called the local camera shop to verify they had the camera I found on their website the night before. I was so excited when the employee reported that he had the Zeiss Super Ikonta in his hand that I replied “I’ll be there in about ten minutes to buy it!” It’s amazing that I didn’t notice the Zeiss when I’d visited the shop just a week ago looking for a…

[n0thingiscool]

The jack of all trades really resonates with me. I've always thought being jack was a fault... oof. I feel like a weight's been lifted.

[fantasyworldassistantmanager]

Yeah, the gardening section is over there. Under the giant sign that says "gardening." You might want to visit the safety gear section first. No? Okay. No, I'm sure you'll be fine.

[artykyn]

Reminder that “the customer is always right” is about personal tastes, and personal tastes only.

Since everyone has different personal tastes, then obviously you’re going to have customers who LOVE things that you think are stupid or gross. 

It’s not about them being “right” as in “objectively correct” but rather “the customer knows what they want better than you do.” If you think pineapple on pizza is gross, you’ll still put it on the pizza if that’s what the customer orders.

The idea of “the customer is always right” is only to remind you to be open-minded about the range of services/products you offer in order to please a range of tastes. If you only make dresses in colors you like, you lose a lot of potential profit from customers who like other colors.

It basically just means “the customer is always right about their opinion.” Someone demanding you to honor an expired coupon is indeed right about their opinion, but they are absolutely wrong about your store policy.

To be honest I think you should be allowed to like. Have a sign that explains this, and the policy should be to make people read it out loud every time they try to invoke “the customer is always right” before you’re able to continue helping them. Like a real-life captcha.

[csbtv]

The Customer is Usually Wrong is a comedic mini series that looks at customer service in a different point of view. Only on CSB Television

Watch on Rumble and YouTube

For details go to

[d00dlerabbit]

I want a refund

[misa-chan13]

Me dealing with a sexist jackass that most definitely does not provide my salary no matter how many pennies he throws at the evil corporation I'm employed by trying to use fear tactics against me (HAHAHAHAHAHAHA I was abused most of my life by my mother I KNOW FEAR TACTICS WELL FUCKER)

Sj:If this is how you act (I'm paraphrasing I was shaking after dealing with vizzini) they I should talk to your manager

Me:she's over there gesturing around the corner

Sj: *surprised I called him on it* what's his name

Me: HER NAME IS TAYLOR SHE'S RIGHT OVER THERE SHE HAS RED HAIR

Vizzini storms off I see my boss come around the corner less then 5 minutes later sees its me cause I gave him my name as a "fake name" sees its me and peels back around the corner like nope she looks pissed

Apparently he stormed into the back and asked to speak to her was taken aback when he realized my boss was a pretty girl who was even younger then me yeah not a happy man

All this because when I was doing my job he moved his cart blocking me from moving cause I only had so much space to get out and there was also someone in front of me and asked to get behind where I was which I said I was trying to get thru where he'd just blocked me and if he hadn't he'd never had to say anything at all told me to go ahead

Then proceeded to berate me because I should have let him get his cookies instead of being concerned with idk getting out of his way so he COULD get his cookies and I could do my job and he's a customer so he's the one paying my salary

My coworker described him as an unsuccessful mafia boss and thus I'm dubbing him vizzini

[kcrabb88]

I feel like we really lost something when we started looking at writing as a reader-centric product meant to appeal to the desires of a specific audience rather than a writer-centric approach of someone writes whatever particular thing particular compels them/whatever weird thing the demons in their head want to talk about, and people out there who are also compelled, and/or relate, find that writing. A lot of discussions of writing really center around what readers want rather than a writer's exploration. Sometimes as a reader I don't know what I want. I click on a fic or pick up a book I'm not sure about but that looks interesting, and I love it. Reading what I expect to get is it's own joy, but we always need to expand our horizons and not get mad at creators for not always writing what we want/expect.