Nobody wants a customer who knows what he wants

Posted on: 22 June 2026

It was not an expedition, it was a stopgap. I was flying to London the next day after a weekend in Switzerland, the weather had turned unreasonably hot and the shirt I had packed was the wrong call, too warm and certain to arrive creased. What I wanted was a polo, something light to put on and forget about. I had just done the supermarket shop, the sports chain sat directly next door, and I went in to solve a small practical problem as quickly as a small practical problem allows. I wanted an ordinary Lacoste, since the Sunspel I would have preferred is not stocked in that part of the world, I knew the model and the colour, and while I was there I thought I might pick up a pair of plain canvas Converse in the same shade, the cheap kind you throw away without a second thought once they are scuffed. Nothing aspirational, about as sober a purchase as it is possible to make. For that shop I was nonetheless the best customer of the afternoon: decided, in a hurry, wallet open before the threshold, arrived by pure accident and ready to spend without fuss. While the assistant went to find my size she left me with her suggestion, that I should have a look at the Champion rail, because if I bought one item from it I would get thirty per cent off the entire basket. I said the discount did not interest me and neither did buying things I had not come for. She looked at me the way you look at an ingrate.

There was a complete diagnosis in those two sentences and she did not attempt to read it. To say a discount does not interest you is to declare a high willingness to pay and a low sensitivity to price. To say you want nothing else is to declare a closed basket, settled before you walked in. The script she recited assumes the precise opposite of both: it is addressed to someone who feels the price and happily widens the basket. The thirty per cent was fired at the customer who is its perfect negative, with the serene confidence of someone applying a procedure to anyone who breathes, because the procedure has come to replace judgement rather than to guide it.

This is the thing that organised mediocrity cannot quite see. The customer who knows what he wants and has the means to take it is the most profitable customer there is, because he pays full price, needs no convincing and costs nothing to serve, and yet, precisely because he asks for nothing, he receives nothing. Nobody builds anything around him, because building requires attention and attention is tiring, and all the energy of mass retail, the threshold promotions, the cross-selling, the loyalty cards, the so-called staff training, is an apparatus designed for the persuadable, for the waverer who can be nudged by a few pounds. It is easier to chase the person who does not know what he wants than to recognise the one who knows perfectly well, and so the high spender gets the script calibrated for the ditherer, and the script runs him down the way a car runs down a pedestrian standing still, guilty only of being there.

Someone will reach at this point for rudeness, the shop that looks down on its better customers. It is the comfortable reading and the wrong one. This is not bad manners, it is something worse, because bad manners are at least active and this is inertia. The high spender, when he can, is the first to flee the friction: he does not stand there fighting the security tags over the one medium size left on the rail, he goes to the boutique, he buys direct from the brand's own site, he has things set aside by someone who knows his name, he removes himself from the mass channel under his own steam. And the channel, no longer seeing him, stops building for him, and each turn of that spiral trims the offer a little further down, until all that remains is the public content to be processed. Mediocrity is not the starting point, it is the destination of a system that selected its customers downward and then adjusted itself to them.

It is the same mechanism the Financial Conduct Authority documented in insurance and savings, where it goes by the name of the loyalty penalty. For years the loyal customer, the one who renewed without a murmur, paid more than the newcomer, because the discount went to whoever threatened to leave and never to whoever stayed. The regulator put the cost of that penalty in home and motor insurance alone at well over a billion pounds a year, borne by the people who failed to switch, and in 2021 it forced insurers to stop charging existing customers more at renewal than they would charge a new one, a rule that took effect at the start of 2022. Rewarding the one who threatens and fleecing the one who stays was not a distortion of the model, it was the model, to the point that it took a supervisory authority to dismantle it. The sports chain, with its unrequested thirty per cent, was running the over-the-counter version of the same thing, ignoring my willingness to pay in full in order to chase a marginal sale that did not exist.

There is a variant of the same clumsiness that sets me off even earlier, which is having the price of something I have just asked for pointed out to me. If I want it, I already know the price, or I do not care what it is, and either way the warning is misplaced. I take it almost as an insult, and I have stopped feeling guilty about the reaction, because there is precise information inside it. If the person selling feels obliged to warn me, one of two things is true. Either his idea of expensive differs from mine, in which case he is the one in the wrong place, because a shop ought to hire people who share the value threshold of the clientele it claims to serve, or I am the one who has wandered into the wrong place, and the warning is the polite signal that the shop is not calibrated for me. In a well-positioned establishment there is an implicit shared threshold of what counts as dear, and nobody names it because it is obvious to everyone present. The moment somebody names it, that shared threshold has already broken, and the warning is not courtesy, it is the confession of a mismatch.

There is, finally, a subtler injury, and it is the one that genuinely irritates me. Every time the word discount is recited to a customer like me at the wrong moment, even when he refuses it, he is being taught that price is negotiable here. You take the best part of your clientele and patiently instruct it, with diligent courtesy, in how to behave like the worst. It is self-harm dressed up as service, and nobody in the chain of command notices, because everyone is watching the little tally of Champion units sold and nobody is watching me.

The assistant was following instructions. But following an idiotic script without noticing it is idiotic is a choice, not an excuse. I bought the shoes anyway, in white, because there was nothing left in my size. That too, on reflection, was an answer.