Personal Injury Law

What is a Customer?

By Bill Marler, Esq.

A commenter on an earlier post said: "do you think companies want to make people sick and lose millions of dollars???"  I think the easy answer is to say of course not.  But, in my experience, few of the food companies that I have sued in the last 18 years viewed their customer like this:

A Customer is the most important person ever in this office … in person or by mail.

A Customer is not dependent on us … we are dependent on him.

A Customer is not an interruption of our work … he is the purpose of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him … he is doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.

A Customer is not an outsider to our business … he is a part of it.

A Customer is not a cold statistic … he is a flesh-and-blood human being with feelings and emotions like your own, and with biases and prejudices.

A Customer is not someone to argue or match wits with. Nobody ever won an argument with a customer.

A Customer is a person who brings us his wants. It is our job to handle them profitably to him and to ourselves.

Author Unknown

By the way,  I found the above on the wall of the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) factory in Blakely, Georgia after getting a court ordered inspection.  Clearly, the management of PCA, whose Salmonella-tainted peanuts sickened over 700 and killed nine, cared little about their customers.

And, remind me why Stewart Parnell, President of PCA, is not in jail?

Full post as published by Marler Blog on January 05, 2011 (boomark / email).