“Customer is King” Can Put Toxic Patrons in Charge

Back in the day, “the customer is king” was a rallying cry for better service. Today, it’s a management mantra “gone feral,” notes a recent article on Fast Company.com

“What began as good business sense, touted by historic retail magnates like Marshall Field and Harry Selfridge, has curdled into a corporate servitude that treats employees as expendable shock absorbers for awful behavior and diva demands,” writes FC’s Megan Carnegie.

With the holiday rush looming, customer-facing workers are bracing themselves to smile through every client’s tantrum—no matter how absurd.

“The ‘customer is king’ mantra has become a free pass for people to act however they want, with impunity,” Gordon Sayre, a professor at France’s Emlyon Business School told Carnegie. “It breeds entitlement—and that entitlement gets abused, leaving workers with almost no room to push back.”

Adding to the pressure on workers: online reviews, which makes every unhappy patron a one-person marketing department, ready to dash a company’s rep. To avoid bad publicity, businesses are trading profit for peace.

How to counter this problem?

Rose Hackman, author of “Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power,” interviewed service workers across the industries for her book and found a resounding answer: What counts isn’t the service, it’s the smile.

Note: this Fast Company.com article is behind a paywall.