There is an old saying in retail, “The customer is always right”. The only issue is that, as anyone like me who has ever worked in a shop will tell you, “Some customers are idiots!”

If working in a store teaches you anything is that, in the course of your day-to-day life away from that environment, you tend to meet a very small cross-section of what one would broadly term “people”.

In much the same way that people tend to assume that they like a wide selection of music, we like to think we know people from all walks of life. But just as your musical taste is usually a by-product of the same social context as everyone else, and quite possibly as narrow as everyone else’s, so the cross-section of society you encounter is defined to a large extent by the things you do. we tend to meet people who are more similar to us rather than less.

But not if you work in a shop (or anywhere else where you encounter “the general public”). Most people are great. But some….

You meet people who have ideas about products that seem crazy to you. People who have expectations about what a shop should do for them that are totally unreasonable. And people who think that they have bought products from you that not only have you never sold, but that as far as you can tell, never existed.

Like the women I used to serve in a sports shop who wouldn’t buy a Speedo swimming costume in a size above the one they normally wore for other clothing; the swimsuits were designed for racing and were, therefore, designed to be extremely tight-fitting. Great if you’re trying to shave off a couple of tenths in the race; less good if you want to feel comfortable splashing about with the kids. But there was no telling someone who had “never been a size 12 in her life” that the 10 would probably feel too tight and she should try both. Instead, she would try on the size 10 and then not buy it because it didn’t fit.

And just because a customer thinks a product hasn’t lasted well, doesn’t mean you will replace it if you know they’ve used it in a way that it was never designed to cope with: “I’m sorry your football boots have disintegrated, but you shouldn’t have baked them in the oven to try them out” – that’s why there aren’t cooking instructions on the box!

Of course, the customer is important, vital to the shop. So it’s understandable that, despite these occasional encounters with nuttiness, it’s often said that the default position is that “the customer is always right”.

Often this is applied primarily in a sales sense: if a customer comes in and says that product X is awful but product Y is great the likelihood is that, even if your broader experience shows the reverse to be true, you won’t be able to persuade the customer that his convictions are wrong.

But I suspect that what really matters isn’t whether you agree or disagree with a customer, but how the customer feels about the interaction with staff and, more specifically, whether he feels like he is in control.

After all, it’s his money, his decision, he really does have the power to buy or not to buy.

A study published this month has shown that whether a consumer feels powerful or not can have a dramatic effect on how much he chooses to spend.

Researchers from Northwestern University conducted several studies where they manipulated participants feelings of power by assigning them roles (such as making them the boss or employee, getting them to recall times when they had felt powerful or weak, or showing them adverts that were designed to influence their feeling of power). They then took part in an auction to buy an everyday item like a mug or t-shirt.

In each case people spent more if they were buying the product for themselves; on average 46% more!

However, when people were bidding on an item for someone else they bid less if they were in the group primed to feel powerful than those primed to feel weaker; on average 34% less.

In addition to showing how basic psychological drives influence the way in which consumers behave (something y0u can read more about in my eBook, The Secret of Selling) this study also reveals that these drives influence how we think about our relationship with others; it makes sense that, if we’re feeling powerful, we have less concern about pleasing others.

So whilst the customer is certainly not always right, helping ensure that he feels like the one with the power is likely to be worthwhile (provided he’s buying something for himself). Of course, if it’s a gift he’s buying, asserting your greater knowledge of the products available may prove to be advantageous.

Source: Derek D. Rucker, David Dubois, and Adam D. Galinsky. Generous Paupers and Stingy Princes: Power Drives Consumer Spending on Self versus Others. Journal of Consumer Research, 2010

Image courtesy: hindesite