such instructions is a menace to
self-respecting business. America does not want a serving class with a
"king-can-do-no-wrong" attitude toward the public. Business is service,
not servility, and courtesy works both ways. There is no more sense in
business proclaiming that the customer is always right than there would
be in a customer declaring that business is always right, and no more
truth.

No good business man will argue with a customer, or anybody else, not
only because it is bad policy to do so, but because his self-respect
will not allow it. He will give and require from his employees
courteous treatment toward his customers, and when doubt arises he will
give them (the customers) the benefit of it. And he will always remember
that he is dealing with an intelligent human being. The customer has a
right to expect a firm to supply him with reliable commodities and to do
it pleasantly, but he has no right to expect it to prostrate itself at
his feet in order to retain his trade, however large that trade may be.

Too little has been said about courtesy on the part of the customer and
the public--that great headless mass of unrelated particles. Business is
service, we say, and the master is the public, the hardest one in the
world to serve. Each one of us speaks with more or less pitying contempt
of the public, forgetting that we ourselves are the public and that the
sum total of the good breeding, intelligence, and character of the
public can be no greater than that of the individuals who make it up.

"Sid," of the _American Magazine_, says that he once asked the manager
of a circus which group of his employees he had most trouble keeping.
Quite unexpectedly the man replied, "The attendants. They get
'sucker-sore' and after that they are no good." This is how it happens.
The wild man from Borneo is placed in a cage with a placard attached
bearing in big letters the legend "The Wild Man from Borneo." An old
farmer comes to the circus, looks at the wild man from Borneo in his
cage, reads the placard, looks at the attendant, "Is this the wild man
from Borneo?" he asks. No human being can stand an unlimited amount of
this sort of thing, and the attendant, after he has explained some
hundred thousand or so times that this really is the wild man from
Borneo begins to lose his zest for it and to answer snappishly and
sarcastically. An infinite supply of courtesy would, of course, be a
priceless asset to him, but does not