Content area
Full Text
In a recent article in this journal entitled "The Customer Is Not Always Right," Sorell (1994) tells us at the outset that
. . the conclusion toward which the discussion (in the article) will head is that the pro-consumer drift of the familiar types of rhetoric is sometimes overdone. There are occasions when consumers are overdeferred to for the sake of more business or overprotected at the expense of business. To recognize this . . . does mean thinking twice about how much is justified by the bare fact that a lot of consumers want a thing or the fact that someone who asks for something has the status of a consumer (pp. 913-914).
Sorell than proceeds to devote the remaining few pages of this brief article to further explication of his thesis with examples cited in such diverse areas as pornography, residential architectual design, gourmet cooking, and airline overbooking of seats. In developing this thesis he also examines its moral implications, and concludes that too often the consumer has claimed the high moral ground even when the outcome of such claims has been business failure or significant loss of profitability.
In this brief note I would like to make...