Courteous treatment of a customer is necessary under every
conceivable circumstance. It may be a busybody has come in to worry you,
who never bought a cent's worth of you or anybody else whom you know;
nevertheless her tongue is an advertisement. If you can gain her good
will, even comparatively, as weighed by her estimate of other clerks, it
is better than a column advertisement in the local papers. When
Zachariah Fox, a great merchant of Liverpool, was asked by what means he
contrived to amass so large a fortune as he possessed, his reply was:
"Friend, by one article alone, and in which thou mayest deal too, if
thou pleasest,--it is civility." "Hail! ye small sweet courtesies of
life, for smooth do ye make the road of it, like grace and beauty, which
beget inclinations to love at first sight; it is ye who open the door
and let the stranger in."
"We must be as courteous," says
RALPH WALDO EMERSON,
"to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the
advantage of a good light." There is more natural courtesy in the
country than in the city, just as there are more privileges where three
clerks are at work than where there are a hundred.
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