Success Quote by Marshall Field

A mantra like this isn’t customer worship; it’s retail strategy disguised as moral principle. Marshall Field wasn’t writing scripture for polite society, he was building a machine for trust in an era when shopping was still a gamble. In the late 19th century, many stores haggled, return policies were murky, and clerks could treat buyers like nuisances. “Right or wrong” is the tell: Field is conceding that the customer may be mistaken, petty, even unreasonable. The point is to make that irrelevance feel radical.

The subtext is about shifting power without actually surrendering it. By promising deference, the store wins something far more valuable than any single sale: repeat business, word-of-mouth legitimacy, and a reputation sturdy enough to scale. It’s a preemptive strike against the friction that kills commerce - suspicion, embarrassment, the dread of being talked down to. Field turns the customer’s ego into infrastructure.

There’s also an implied audience: employees. This isn’t a love letter to patrons so much as a management directive that standardizes behavior. It trims the discretion of clerks and middle managers who might otherwise “win” arguments at the register and lose the market. The genius is rhetorical: it frames service as righteousness, making compliance feel principled rather than enforced.

Read now, the line has been flattened into entitlement culture and corporate appeasement. In Field’s context, it was a confidence scheme in the best sense - a way to industrialize dignity so people would keep coming back.