Retail 101: Re-read Rule #1

Yogi Berra is supposed to have said, “That restaurant’s so crowded nobody goes there anymore.” I thought of that the other day after I’d finally found a parking spot a mile and three-quarters from my local Walmart superstore, battled the mob for a shopping cart, nodded at the overwhelmed greeter who couldn’t turn his poor head fast enough to keep up with the flow of people into the store, squeezed through the crowded aisles, found the lawn seed and hedge clippers I was looking for and stood in a 22-minute line to check out.

I thought we were in a recession! I thought people had stopped shopping. I thought nobody goes there anymore.

Walmart vice chairman Eduardo Castro-Wright recently told The New York Times, “Retailing . . . is not as complicated as we would like to make it.”

Maybe sometimes it’s no more complicated than, “the customer is always right.” It’s not clear whether it was Britain’s George Selfridge or Chicago’s Marshall Field who originated the phrase, but it has become the first commandment of retailing. (My favorite variation on that is Stew Leonard’s motto, writ large on a rock at the store entrance in Connecticut: “Rule #1 – The Customer is Always Right. Rule #2 – If the Customer is Ever Wrong, Re-Read Rule #1.”)

The credo is sometimes misinterpreted as being soft-headed and overly compliant in the face of an irate shopper. It means more than that, though. It means understanding that the customer is the reason you open your doors, turn on the lights, conduct business, cash your paycheck and pay back your stockholders.

“The customer is always right” could be evidenced in Saks Fifth Avenue’s (and others’) willingness to take nearly anything back, almost regardless of condition or date of sale or lack of receipt. Or it could be Nordstrom’s large, well-trained staff of smiling, knowledgeable people on the floor who are not on break every time you need to ask something. Or it could be Best Buy anticipating the complexity of new consumer electronics products and having an in-store Geek Squad to answer questions, install products and resolve service issues.

Or it could be Walmart addressing today’s needs of a population that has limited credit, shaky employment and rocky retirement savings but still has to feed and clothe a family, repair the house, send the kids off to school, afford a clean shirt for the next job interview, give birthday presents, keep the car running and still feel prideful about all of that.

At a time when huge U.S. companies are going bust, how reassuring to see this huge U.S. company thriving. Size isn’t everything, after all.

There’s nothing soft-headed about Walmart. Ask the union organizer, the product vendor, the local alderman. The workers don’t smile all over you in the store. (Ironic for a company with a smiley-face icon.) And the crew behind the returns desk was trained by Simon Cowell.

But the stores are everywhere, they have what you need and it’s cheaper than most other places. Simple.