Welcome to my blog and another wonderful edition of the Hive Learners' featured post. Customers are not always right, in fact. I used to say and believe this until my mom owned a shop of her own where she sold food items.
I never believed there could be elderly people who are so annoying and would want to treat you as trash just because you sell food items at the market. My experience with this elderly woman would have been recorded as an attempted murder if not for self-control.
Sometimes we are asked to go to the shop whenever she travels in order to restock, and this is when I realized it is at the market that you will come across the most annoying beings on earth. These annoying beings made it obvious that customers are not always right; they exhibit characters that contradict the saying.
It is true that every business owner needs customers for business to flourish, but these days, the customers are just bent on giving you that feeling that without them you are nothing, and they as well forget that without you as the seller, they'd die of hunger and starvation. The truth is that both the buyer and the seller need each other.
At first, I was kind of shy to follow my mom to the shop because we never had such an experience from childhood, and all of a sudden she wants to introduce us to it. It took time before I could overcome my shyness and start following her to the market willingly and happily.
Each time I see how some customers treat her, it always pisses me off, but she, who's at the receiving end of the treatment, does not get angry at all. She always says that's the only way to deal with these people—you act like you don't see anything.
One faithful day I was there alone, and an elderly woman who is old enough to be my mother came to buy crayfish. Crayfish was very expensive then, so my mom had to reduce the quantity that goes in the nylon bag. Without reducing the quantity, it is impossible to recover your capital, not to mention make a profit.
This woman picked one up and asked for the price. I told her it was sold for 50 naira ($0.11). The next thing she could do was throw my crayfish away because it was too small. Where the crayfish landed got it condemned; it fell inside a jar of red oil. If not for self-control, I almost uttered words to the woman.
If I had done or said anything, my mom would have disapproved, and she'd be disappointed, but this does not mean that what she did was right. Customers are not always right; they just get nice treatment from sellers so as to ensure continued patronage.
Thanks for reading my post.
