Abstract

"The Customer Isn’t Always Right at the Statler Hotel"

Daniel Levinson Wilk, SUNY-Fashion Institute of Technology (danlw@fitnyc.edu)

E.M. Statler was the Henry Ford of the hotel industry. At the turn of the twentieth century, he found economies of scale in hotel architecture, engineering, and labor design and passed on the savings to customers, opening up a vast middle-class market of travelers and vacationers.

Like Ford, Statler saw himself as a champion of the public good. He saw his business as a profit-making venture, but also a transformational product that would bring vast benefits to humanity. His hotels allowed the masses to travel comfortably and see more of the nation. His hotels pioneered technologies and labor systems that would be borrowed and modified in other places, especially upper- and middle-class homes. Statler believed that his responsibility transcended shareholder value.

Statler’s most important public service was the style of customer service he enforced at his hotels. His corporation’s famous slogan “the guest is always right” concealed key aspects of his service philosophy. Turning away from the nineteenth-century style of personalized service that had been inspired by slavery and servitude, Statler asked workers to be polite, cheerful, and standard in their responses to customers. They should not tailor their work too closely to the specific desires of particular guests. Everyone should get the same treatment, and everyone should get less attention. Technology and design can be used to decrease the necessary amount of face-to-face customer service.

Statler’s style of customer service helped bring profits, but it was also a less-servile model that was soon picked up by other hotels and other industries. It taught customers to treat workers a little bit better, and workers to expect better treatment.