A commenter on an earlier post said: “do you think companies want to make people sick and lose millions of dollars???”  I think the easy answer is to say of course not.  But, in my experience, few of the food companies that I have sued in the last 18 years viewed their customer like this:

A Customer is the most important person ever in this office … in person or by mail.

A Customer is not dependent on us … we are dependent on him.

A Customer is not an interruption of our work … he is the purpose of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him … he is doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.

A Customer is not an outsider to our business … he is a part of it.

A Customer is not a cold statistic … he is a flesh-and-blood human being with feelings and emotions like your own, and with biases and prejudices.

A Customer is not someone to argue or match wits with. Nobody ever won an argument with a customer.

A Customer is a person who brings us his wants. It is our job to handle them profitably to him and to ourselves.

Author Unknown

By the way,  I found the above on the wall of the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) factory in Blakely, Georgia after getting a court ordered inspection.  Clearly, the management of PCA, whose Salmonella-tainted peanuts sickened over 700 and killed nine, cared little about their customers.

And, remind me why Stewart Parnell, President of PCA, is not in jail?