No, the customer is not always right

As a business aphorism, "The customer is always right" is as stupid a saying as the personal-side one of "We're all in sales now," a bit of inanity that I tackled a while back.

And, not only is the customer not always right, he or she is not even deserving of unconditional respect.

Rather, the customer deserves reasonable respect. This degree of reasonableness is based on past interactions with repeat customers and current customer behavior.

One should never behave with out-of-control emotion of course, even if a customer does, and especially not if an actual or would-be customer is deliberately doing so to try to provoke a response. Rather, one should be calm, cool, and correct — and nothing more.

Treating every customer as though he or she is always right encourages bad behavior in general, and specifically, "alligators." Having seen them as a newspaper editor, a publisher, and, years ago, a divinity school student and ministry candidate, I've seen this in action.

The stupidity of trying to work for Barnes and Noble

I visited my nearest B&N yesterday, job-hunting.

As expected, I was told it had no openings right now. I asked if I could have an application. As halfway expected, I was directed toward the website.

First, the B&N’s main page’s most obvious careers link is only for corporate jobs.

Second, if you find the correct link, for store jobs, you read:

If you want to join our community of booksellers, please check out our job listings on HotJobs.com, or download a job application and take it to your local store.

So, I can go through the Rube Goldberg world of visiting a local store, being told to go to the website, then being told to take a job app form from there back to a local store?

Well, if B&N goes under, either to Borders or to nothingness, we’ve already got one example of its corporate “brilliance.”

Example No. 2, of “brilliance,” in a combination of cheapness, stupidity and more is in the same sentence above. If you do want to look for B&N jobs online, they don’t even list them at their own website. (HotJobs is a Yahoo service.)

Update: Per a friend of mine, commenting here, B&N is supposed to have applications available locally. (Honestly, I would have thought so, but in the Internet world of today, you never know.) So, a lazy, or whatever, employee gets the company a black eye, at least a bit of one.

This is not your father’s Radio Shack?

Radio Shack is trying to rebrand itself as … wait for it … The Shack.

Other than being about as irrelevant to modern electronics as The Shaq is to modern center-playing skills in the NBA, you have to actually have new products and services, if the old ones haven’t been drawing customers.

Unlike the former Federal Express officially becoming FedEx, as an already good company, half of Radio The Shack’s stuff on its wall pegs is already at Wally World, isn’t it?

So, I agree with this:

“Radio Shack is in a desperate battle to remain relevant,” said Drew Neisser, chief executive of Renegade, a New York-based brand marketing agency.

“The name Radio Shack is a quaint artifact in a rapidly evolving marketplace in which mobile devices have become the CE [consumer electronics] portal. Using The Shack as a nickname is a bid to update its image and represent the passion loyalists have for the brand,” he said.

Next — has the TRS-80 been rebranded as the TRS?