It doesn't matter if the customer is right or not.

This is a quote from a post in The Escapist Magazine Forum:

The Customer is Always Wrong

I had a customer come in all angry-like. He comes up to the counter and puts a movie he had bought on the counter and said "This movie is gay!" So I take a quick look at the movie and see it is Brokeback Mountain. I had to restrain my laughs, but anyways some of the other customers started to chuckle. I told him "We can't refund movies if they are not defective." So he then says "Well it does have a small scratch on it." And I promtly told him "The movie DID work when you put it in the DVD player, or else you wouldn't know that this movie is in fact about 2 gay men."

The post is meant to provide a semi-humorous take on the idiocy of customers, in particular that one. The thing is, the repugnance of that one person aside, there are a couple of things wrong with this picture.

First, the customer's expectations were not met. They wanted a cowboy movie, and they got a gay cowboy movie. Let's be honest, there is a pretty big difference. Whose fault is it they didn't know what they were getting? Not everyone is plugged into movies the way geeks like myself and the sort that work at Blockbuster are.

Second, in this case, Blockbuster's 'no refund' policy seems to have resulted not in the savings of a couple of bucks, but instead a pissed off customer and a (possibly) vandalized DVD.

Customers are people. Flawed, irrational people. People make mistakes all the time. How those mistakes are dealt with is frequently the difference between those people staying customers and those people becoming somebody else's flawed, irrational customer.

-Adam!!!