The customer is always right

[2] Variations of the phrase include le client n'a jamais tort ('the customer is never wrong'), which was the slogan of hotelier César Ritz, first recorded in 1908.

[citation needed] American department store entrepreneur Marshall Field is sometimes credited with coining the phrase, as is his one-time employee Harry Gordon Selfridge, and the marketing pioneer John Wanamaker.

[4] The earliest known printed mention of the phrase is a September 1905 article in the Boston Globe about Field, which describes him as "broadly speaking" adhering to the theory that "the customer is always right".

[5][6] A November 1905 edition of Corbett's Herald describes one of the country's "most successful merchants", an unnamed multimillionaire who may have been Field, as summing up his business policy with the phrase.

[4][11] In 1909, a representative of an unnamed New York company said that their policy of "regarding the customer as always right, no matter how wrong she may be in any transaction in the store" was "the principle that builds up the trade", and that the cost of any delays and unfairly taken liberties were "covered, like other expenses, in the price of the goods".