The High Cost of Being Right

I have been a loyal, weekly customer of a local dry cleaner for several years. When it comes to my shirts, I learned some time ago to check them for spots and if found, to spray and wash them before taking them in, because dry-cleaners will permanently “tattoo” them into clothing otherwise. At any rate, I recently I had a shirt come back from the cleaners with a spot on it that I was sure had not been there prior to being cleaned, as I had checked it myself. The woman employee that I do business with there didn’t initially believe that the spot came from them, and said so, which was fine. I asked her to try re-cleaning it, which she agreed to do, and the spot was gone when I picked it up.

The following week, on a Monday morning, I took eight shirts in for cleaning; that afternoon, the woman called me on my cell phone to inform me that she had personally examined my shirts herself that morning after I left and had found spots on two of them.

Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt, through a clear and overwhelming preponderance of the evidence, that all along it was I, and not the dry-cleaner, who had been guilty of placing the previously disputed stain upon my button-down. Case closed.

I am not sure what she was thinking when she called to tell me this; as the comedian Ron White says, “you can’t fix stupid.” I suppose that it was important to her to be right. At any rate, I thanked her for her bringing it to my attention, and since that day, I have never been back, nor will I ever be back. Not because I minded what she did – in her mind, she was being helpful – but simply because I would rather not be pruned over and hassled each week by the dry-cleaning lady about spots on my shirts. My new dry cleaner doesn’t do that, which is the reason why I now swear my unwavering loyalty to them. Until they hassle me about spots on my shirts.

In this case, the cost of being right cost the dry cleaner about $1600 a year in lost business. For them, that is a good customer. I hope the cost of being right was worth it.

You also have situations where it isn’t worth the cost of being right to be right. Case in point: this past week one of my clients ran into a tough situation. Dad had brought the child in for the initial exam; Dad paid a down-payment at that first meeting, and now both parents came in with the child for the braces appointment. To make a long story short, at the second meeting the parents, who had been in for a consultation the previous year, now claimed that the fees presented were significantly higher than those presented previously (this was not an issue when Dad came in alone). They did not have paperwork with them to support this claim. They refused to sign the paperwork at the consultation. To make matters worse, the child was already in the chair for braces when this scenario unfolded, and left the practice with braces on, the paperwork unsigned, and the fee issue unresolved. The staff person was understandably frustrated. The fee issue now needs to be resolved one way or the other.

What would you do?

You have all heard the phrase “the customer is always right”; it is especially true in your business, because even when the customer is right, the cost to you is small – as one doctor put it recently in my training class, “we are out some tin foil and some time.” The point being that it just is not worth the collateral damage to be right in a situation like this, not to mention the issue of punishing the child involved. So I advised her to do whatever is necessary to make it right for the family, which likely will be to honor whatever lower number the father says is the right fee, paperwork or no paperwork.

Some will disagree, and will point out that you are within your rights to charge the higher fee if the paperwork cannot be found. Sure you are, but so what? Consider what you gain by getting a ‘win’ – it isn’t much at all, and it certainly isn’t worth the hassle. In fact, it almost never is.

Sometimes it is better to work proactively with a stain – human or shirt-related – than to be right. If this dad is making the fee issue up, have pity on him; he has integrity problems that are far greater than your fee will ever be. Pick your battles wisely and keep them very few and very far between. It’s usually best to let it go.