An Examination of "The Customer Is Always Right" in Light of the Golden Rule, Pt. 1

Just how noble is it, really, to always put the customer first?

I just happened today to watch this fascinating 1999 interview with Jeff Bezos. There are many remarkable things about it, from the sheer intensity with which Bezos listens in conversation, to the obviously overflowing levels of cultural excitement about the internet in ‘99, to the slightly stodgy attitude voiced by the interviewer about the permanence of established businesses and their resistance to Amazon’s coming intrusion.

But nothing stands out more than Bezos’s unrelenting conviction that what his company must do, the thing about which its success and failure will hinge, towards which every fibre of its being must be oriented by whatever means necessary, this absolute key and north star is the service of its customers. When the interviewer brings up the concern that some of its investors might not like Amazon’s divergence from “a pure internet play” as it begins to build physical distribution centers, Bezos responds with absolute confidence that “in the long term there is never any misalignment between shareholder interests and customer interests.”

With the benefit of 20+ years of hindsight and a spectacular stock chart showing more than 50x return from 1999, it seems that Bezos was absolutely correct on that last point, at least in the particular case of his company.

So, clearly his was a winning strategy economically, at least given his particular time and place. But thinking a little more deeply, and perhaps even more long term, is it also a winning strategy spiritually, culturally, and and for the person? What is fundamentally right, or wrong, about this attitude?

At first glance the idea of serving one’s customers seems a lot like a nearly universal idea of what it means to be a good person, re-articulated on a corporate scale. Insofar as a corporation (a word which literally means something like “made into one body”) can be thought of as analogous to a single person, a phrase like “do everything for the customer” could be taken as the corporate version of “Love your neighbor as yourself” or perhaps even more dramatically, “no man has greater to love this, to lay down his life for his friends.” Which would seem to make service of customer a sort of universally righteous way to run a company, perhaps even the corporate fulfillment of our culture’s inherited Judeo-Christian value system, to the extent that service of customers involves the figurative “laying down the life” of the company, thus conforming to Jesus’s Biblical call which actually exceeds merely meeting the golden rule of treating others as you would be treated.

The almost reckless commitment Bezos shows to his customers even further appears to exhibit something like a kind of reliance on Providence, a magnanimity, a setting aside of oneself, a confidence that in pouring one’s own existence out in the service of others, all earthly means will be given in their due time.

All this seems very good, almost transcendent. If there is truly never any misalignment between stockholder interest and customer interest, it seems that free market capitalism really is deeply open to what we all feel in our bones to be righteous morality, a type of morality which puts selflessness ahead of corporate profit seeking, doing so in an almost childlike faith that “all other things will be given to you besides.” Right?

Not so fast. Something here is wrong, or at least missing. If your mind hasn’t already been screaming that, the delivery workers who have been forced to pee in bottles, or the “disposable” warehouse level workers at Amazon will readily do all they can to change your mind. Must generosity be miserable for the generous, or should these workers complaints be dismissed in order to hold to the belief that “customer first” culture truly is a righteous way to run a company, with the success of Amazon as proof? We’ll look into this in the next article.