{"id":96823,"date":"2016-04-11T15:20:44","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T19:20:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=96823"},"modified":"2016-04-11T15:31:36","modified_gmt":"2016-04-11T19:31:36","slug":"always-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/04\/11\/always-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Always Right"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

New York City subway, May 1973.<\/p><\/div>\n

The other day I noticed something for the first time. \u201cPlease allow all customers off the train,\u201d said the recorded voice over the subway sound system.\u00a0Customers.<\/em>\u00a0Not passengers, not riders: customers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What did it mean? Something bureaucratic, obviously\u2014but philosophically? Had the transaction at last been stripped of all artifice? Had the civic connotations of public transit been cast off in favor of naked commercialism? Or was this a simple acknowledgment that we\u2019re paying for the ride\u2014and that, in the way of all American customers, we are always right?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course, questions of nomenclature have been troubling retailers for years. At some point, someone in corporate clearly decided that the word customer<\/em> smelled too much of filthy lucre, and thus began a search for ever more cumbersome substitutes. Now when you go into most chain stores it\u2019s to hear a teenager bellowing \u201cNEXT GUEST!\u201d in a way unlikely to suggest hospitality.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Shopper<\/em> has always seemed most appropriate for the mundanity of grocery stores, while the grandeur of patron<\/em> is reserved, it seems, for top brass and other varieties of officialdom. I remember taking all sorts of cowardly cheats when I worked in retail, saying ungrammatical, self-abnegating things like, \u201cCan I help who\u2019s next?\u201d or just looking at people hopefully like a sad puppy farm dog on a pile of shredded newspaper.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Personally, I have no problem with anyone who dodges the question of a noun: I\u2019ll respond to a brusque \u201cNEXT\u201d or \u201cNEXT ON LINE\u201d or even a peremptory \u201cWHO\u2019S NEXT?\u201d The best of all, though, is when one of the systems is down and clerks yell things like \u201cPAYING WITH A CREDIT CARD?\u201d or the glorious \u201cCASH ONLY!\u201d Ultimately, I\u2019d like to get to a point where people just scream \u201cMONEY.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It does seem, though, as though public transit is one of the few cases where the solution was kind of built in. We may never be passengers again.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other day I noticed something for the first time. \u201cPlease allow all customers off the train,\u201d said the recorded voice over the subway sound system.\u00a0Customers.\u00a0Not passengers, not riders: customers.\u00a0 What did it mean? Something bureaucratic, obviously\u2014but philosophically? Had the transaction at last been stripped of all artifice? Had the civic connotations of public transit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[12511,14255,687,125,21908,21910,10359,21911,21909,6664,607,3203,2393],"class_list":["post-96823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-city-life","tag-customers","tag-language","tag-new-york-city","tag-nomenclature","tag-patrons","tag-retail","tag-riders","tag-shoppers","tag-shopping","tag-subway","tag-vocabulary","tag-words"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAttention Shoppers\u2014Or Customers, Patrons, Whoever You Are\u2026<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein on the corporate search for the correct noun.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" 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