A few years ago (quite a few years, now) I belonged to a weaving group and a discussion of colour gamps came up with much gnashing of teeth about having to buy so many different tubes of colour in order to get just a few yards of each to weave a gamp.
Hmm, I thought, I have lots of cotton in 2/8 size in all sorts of colours, I could design a colour gamp kit and sell those?
So I set about making colour gamp kits and selling them. I wound the warp, then wound quills with the weft colours.
When I ran out of stash yarn, I standardized the 'kit' with 9 colours and then designed others using colours other than saturated 'rainbow' ones. IOW, I bought 36 half pound tubes of colours I set aside specifically for the colour gamps. I sent out kits with instructions and charged what I felt was an appropriate price, given they were getting a pre-wound warp and pre-wound quills, plus, of course, international shipping when sending to the US. They were not 'cheap' but neither did they have to buy half-pound tubes to get just a few yards of each colour.
They sold well enough and most people seemed content - apart from a few who let me know they were completely dissatisfied with them.
In my documentation *and all of my marketing efforts* I made it clear that the warps were 3 meters long, and that there was enough weft yarn to make two 'squares'. They could weave one gamp in plain weave, cut off, re-sley and then weave one 'square' in twill.
A small group of people began to complain that the warps were 'too short' to weave four napkins. And made a point of letting everyone in the group know about their displeasure.
I responded publicly (because they posted publicly) and pointed out that nowhere had I ever promised they could do 4 napkins, only 2 colour gamps.
And then I stopped making the kits.
Because even when the customer is NOT 'right', sometimes it's just not worthwhile to continue to provide a product which isn't really profitable - it was more of a 'service' to the weaving community which some people chose to publicly complain about.
Another 'not right' customer gambit is trying to get 'discounts' by complaining a price is 'too high'.
It bothered me for a long time until I finally realized that someone else's 'tight' budget was not *my* problem to solve. I had my own financial woes, thankyouverymuch, and giving a discount because someone was trying to 'shame' me was not going to work with me.
I stopped doing special commissions because I had several customers request very particular items, which I did my best to produce, then renege on the sale, demanding I refund their money. Never mind the yarn I purchased to make their very specific requests. One person specifically wanted all white table runners, very specific in size, then when I delivered them was very cool. Two weeks later she phoned wanting to return them because her friends all said that the solid white was 'boring' - even though I had questioned her about the solid white and she insisted that was what she wanted.
In the end I returned her money and eventually the runners sold, but it took a long time in part due to the very specific sizes of the runners which had been custom made for the original customers end/coffee tables. There were other orders that ended in a similar fashion, leaving me in the lurch.
Instead of taking 'commissions' I began to tell a customer I would make 'something' and they could have first refusal, but no more did I take specific 'orders' for things. If I was going to make something, it would be what *I* wanted to make, not what someone *thought* they wanted - until they saw it in real life.
There are lots of examples of customers *not* being right. That's not to say that businesses are always 'right', either. But if you are going to be in business, you need to be clear about what you are selling, stick to your guns when it comes to price, figure out a way to proceed that allows for customer satisfaction as well as your own requirements.
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