Is A Customer Always Right?

That is truly a toughie and a re-wording of a pretty common phrase. Let me explain.

A part of any painters day is picking up materials. Conversations in any paint department are always worth noting. What the other customers are painting, what products they are using and sometimes the complaints all prove informative and/or entertaining.

On this day the customer was giving the ever-so-patient paint department dude a real going over. The paint was going on differently than past paint, the surface was rough after painting, there was foreign matter in the dried paint surface. This customer put the full blame on the paint they had purchased and even more so on the guy who sold it to him.

Paint dude stood and took the complaint with a commitment to customer service the store would be proud of. For me the questions as to what could have happened were an easy opportunity to strike up a conversation and also back-up a product we use that is exceptional.

I first asked him what type of material he was painting: the first ones were hardwood cabinet doors the problematic ones were C-D grade plywood.

Secondly, how was he painting them: he was spraying them in his barn then setting them outside to dry. First set was inside a heated garage.

Thirdly, what type of strainer did you use to filter the paint? I probably shouldn't have ended on that one. I can go in to great detail as to why the answers to the preceding questions yielded different results but this last one put the responsibility squarely on the home owner.

This stuff was filtered from a fresh can of Polyurethane used for a stair package.

Of course you don't need to strain the paint you are using on your ceiling, walls, fences or siding.  But when the surface in question is a set of cabinets you have a very smooth surface and you are applying a coating that should also be very smooth.

The customer had not used any type of strainer(!) to filter out foreign matter, nor had he considered that plywood naturally has a surface texture far different than that of hardwood and lastly drying them outside opened the surfaces up to no end of airborn contaminates.

Are there more questions? Sure, like were the doors sanded to begin with or even after the first coat was applied, what type of sprayer he used.....

So the question is: Is the customer always right?

In this case, no. But this wasn't our customer.