The Customer Is Always Wrong
Aside from being shortchanged or overcharged, or engaging in shoplifting, moral issues don't usually come up when we're out buying a radio or set of towels. But something new is on the rise that raises questions about morality generally and business ethics in particular. I call this phenomenon "targeted explanation."
What I have in mind is how sales-clerks seem to be trained to deal with customers who've purchased something and aren't happy with it. I've no experience on the sales side of targeted explanation, but I've gotten my share of it, so from experience I've reconstructed how managers must be thinking. I believe it goes something like this: Train sales-clerks to size up complaining customers as to how knowledgeable they are about the product, then to deal with complaints and questions by responding a notch higher than the customer's knowledge level.
What this amounts to is lying by omission, by answering a different question than the one asked, or telling half-truths, and it's a very dubious business practice. But it's very effective. It works by intimidating customers and making them feel it's their own fault that they're not happy with what they bought. In most cases, complainers meekly go home with the inferior or defective product and live with its failings or stash it in a closet.
If you take back a radio because it has an annoying hum, you're likely to back off when told that, after all, it has an internal power supply and you can't do anything about a sixty cycle hum if you're using alternating current to power the radio. You might not press the point that there are radios out there that run on AC and don't hum. I took some towels back because they kept shedding after many washes. I got a lecture about how the terry-cloth loops were 100% cotton, as advertised, but that the base the loops attach to was 50% polyester, hence the shedding. When I said all the sign on the towels said was "100% Cotton," which is what I was looking for, I was told I should have read the little labels on the individual towels, because I obviously didn't know enough about what I bought.
Targeted explanation means that if just one out of two unhappy customers goes quietly away, stores get away with flogging inferior products and, in effect, cheating their customers.
