Customer Ideal Archives - understand-culture

Not Gandhi

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him.” The words are widely attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. The earliest Gandhi attribution that Quote Investigator found is in a 1970 issue of the Indian trade magazine Foreign Trade of India.

Gandhi died in 1948. The Gandhi research site mkgandhi.org states: “But there is no source anywhere in his writing in 100 volumes of collected works.” Quote Investigator points instead to a 1941 interview in Printers’ Ink with Kenneth B. Elliott, the vice president in charge of sales at the American carmaker Studebaker.

Goods Once Sold

Bills in many Indian shops carry the line “Goods once sold will not be taken back or exchanged.” In 2013 DNA reported a circular of the Union consumer affairs ministry saying “such clauses do not have any validity in law.”

The line stayed on the bills. In 2024 the District Consumer Commission in Ernakulam, Kerala, held that it was an unfair trade practice under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, and told the shop to remove it.

Service Charge

On July 4, 2022, the Central Consumer Protection Authority told hotels and restaurants that they could not add a service charge to bills automatically. Restaurant associations challenged the guidelines in the Delhi High Court, which stayed them that month.

In March 2025 the court upheld them. Justice Prathiba M. Singh held that “service charge and tips are voluntary payments by consumers.”

A Ten-Year Wait

For decades, buyers of the Bajaj Chetak scooter had to book and wait. “The wait for a Chetak stretched into years,” Autocar Professional recalls. A Chetak on the open market fetched almost double its showroom price. Buyers who paid in foreign exchange could move ahead in the queue.

Rahul Bajaj, the company’s chairman, once said: “A 10-year delivery period is not a joke.” In 1990 Bajaj ran a newspaper advertisement with two words: “NO WAITING.”

The Waiting List

For decades, a telephone connection in India had to be applied for and waited for. In April 1997 Business Standard reported that MTNL, the state telephone company, had cleared the waiting list in Delhi except in one exchange.

“Delhi had a waiting list of 56,864 at the beginning of this year in the general non-OYT (own your telephone) category,” the paper noted. “MTNL had earlier said that telephones would be available on demand in 1997-98.”

The Heroes of the Taj

On November 26, 2008, terrorists attacked the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai. Many of its employees stayed to help the guests. “The chefs formed a human barrier around the guests and took the bullets,” said Rohit Deshpande of Harvard Business School, who studied the attack.

“Staff members had no training in security measures,” he added. Deshpande traced their conduct to the way the Taj recruited its staff, “recruiting for character.”