A free market means the customer is always right

I’ve always been a fan of the phrase “the customer is always right” as long as you put the caveat “…in matters of taste” at the end of it. I certainly give no credit to rude or forceful people that use “the customer is always right” to try to get their way, but people can vote with their wallets and those votes are never wrong.

In his classic book “Homo Deus“, author Yuval Noah Harari shares this:

“In a free market the customer is always right. If customers don’t want it, it means that the car is no good. It doesn’t matter if all the university professors and all the priests and mullahs cry out from every lectern and pulpit that this is a wonderful car – if the customers reject it, it’s a bad car. Nobody has the authority to tell customers that they are wrong, and heaven forbid that a government would try to force its citizens to buy a particular car against their will.”

I’ve shared before about how I want the web to be. I’ll fight for that, but I shouldn’t expect everyone to follow along. This is why people like Gary Vaynerchuk are so popular, because they go where the people are going and they worry less about what people “should” be doing.

A prime example of this was Google Stadia. Pretty much everyone who tried it found it to be amazing, myself included. It was clearly the best of the streaming video game services, but “best” is subjective. To paraphrase Harari, the customers rejected it so therefore it was a bad platform. No amount of pushing and sharing and fact-sharing from me could make a difference. I thought it was a great product, but the customer is always right and Google killed it.

I love that we have a free market to choose any good or service that we want. We might make bad choices from time to time, but we’ll always be right.