Is the customer always right?

     We have all heard the saying, 'The customer is always right,' but is that true? If we observe customer and employee interactions we can come to the conclusion that this is not. Earlier this week I was in a customer service line waiting to get a gift wrapped. As I was waiting I overheard the lady next to me talking to the employee about a problem she had with one of her purchases. She had bought a pair of shoes and after wearing them once she noticed that the front strap on the right shoe was starting to become unattached. She had returned those shoes at a previous time and was now on her second pair. She was having the same problem with the second pair of shoes and that is what brought her back to the store. She explained all this to the employee and asked to see the manager. The manager came out and listened to her story, apologized for the problem she was having with her shoe and offered to exchange the shoes, refund her money, or send the shoes off to the company to see if they could be repaired. The store no longer had that certain style of shoe so if she exchanged the shoe it would have to be for a different shoe style. The customer was not happy with any of the options. She wanted the shoe to be fixed in-store so that it could be taken home that day. The manger explained that the store could make no shoe repairs and that they would have to be sent to the shoe company but the customer argued that since the shoe was sold in their store they should be able to fix it.
     In this situation, the employees tried to satisfy the customer the best they could, but the customer still thought that they should have done more. I think that in this certain situation the employees were right in how they handled it, they offered her several options trying to resolve the issue. In the end the customer left the store with the broken shoe since she refused to let the employees help.