A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is a part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.

Not found in Gandhi’s writings, and the attribution is late. Quote Investigator (2012, updated 2025) finds the earliest form in Printers’ Ink on 2 May 1941, in an interview with Kenneth B. Elliott, vice-president in charge of sales of the Studebaker Corporation, who gave five principles on what the customer is not (‘The customer is not an interruption of our work, he is the purpose of it’); Elliott may have written them or repeated older ones. They were reprinted without a name by a Virginia bank (The Bankers Magazine, April 1943) and a coal company (an advertisement in the Spokane Daily Chronicle, 28 June 1943), credited to Ray Noyes (Chicago Tribune, 16 June 1944), to Paul T. Babson (Forbes, 15 January 1946), turned into a ‘taxpayer’ card for city departments (Hartford Courant, 18 April 1950) and credited to L. L. Bean from 1955 (Tom Mahoney, The Great Merchants). The earliest credit to Gandhi that Quote Investigator found is a freestanding quotation on an advertising page in Foreign Trade of India, no. 75 (1970), signed ‘MAHATMA GANDHI’. Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier (2006), p. 76, lists it among sayings given to Gandhi on inadequate evidence, and Wikiquote lists a hospital version (‘A patient is the most important person in our hospital’) as misattributed to him since the 1970s. Quote Investigator calls the Gandhi credit unconvincing and Elliott the earliest known crafter, tentatively; this entry is therefore apocryphal rather than misattributed. None of the dated items could be seen here directly: the trail rests on Quote Investigator’s and Wikiquote’s citations. Gandhi’s Collected Works are in copyright and not in the atlas’s sources, so no full-text search was run; Quote Investigator and Wikiquote report no match there.

1. 2 May 1941Earliest found · credited to Kenneth B. ElliottThe earliest known form: five principles on what the customer is not, given at the end of an interview with a Studebaker sales vice-president.The customer is not an interruption of our work—he is the purpose of it.’Complaints as an asset’, based on an interview by P. H. Erbes, Jr. with Kenneth B. Elliott, Printers’ Ink: A Journal for Advertisers, 2 May 1941, start p. 17, quote p. 83. Checked on another researcher’s citation, not seen first-hand. Source
2. April 1943Spread · credited to no oneThe Bankers Magazine prints the principles, which the Morris Plan Bank of Virginia had put on plaques at every teller’s window; no name is given.’The Customer’, The Bankers Magazine (Bankers’ Magazine), vol. 146 no. 4, April 1943, Advertising and Public Relations, start p. 357, quote p. 360, col. 2. Checked on another researcher’s citation, not seen first-hand. Source
3. 28 June 1943Spread · credited to no oneA coal company’s newspaper advertisement prints the principles with no name.Advertisement of the Great Western Fuel Co., Spokane Daily Chronicle, 28 June 1943, p. 9. Checked on another researcher’s citation, not seen first-hand. Source
4. 15 January 1946Credited to Paul T. BabsonForbes credits a longer version to Paul T. Babson of Standard & Poor’s; the Chicago Tribune had credited one to Ray Noyes in 1944.’What Is a Customer?’, Forbes, 15 January 1946, p. 33. Checked on another researcher’s citation, not seen first-hand. Source
5. 1955Credited to L. L. BeanA history of retailing prints it as ‘What Is a Customer?’ from the L. L. Bean catalogue.Tom Mahoney, The Great Merchants (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955), section on L. L. Bean Inc, start p. 294, quote p. 301. Checked on another researcher’s citation, not seen first-hand. Source
6. 1970Credited to Mahatma GandhiThe earliest credit to Gandhi that Quote Investigator found: the passage, signed with his name, on a page advertising Indian films in a government trade journal.A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption on our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider on our business. He is a part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us an opportunity to do so.Foreign Trade of India, issue no. 75, ‘Accent on Indian Cinema’ (New Delhi: Directorate of Commercial Publicity), unnumbered page, unnumbered page (about p. 94). Checked on another researcher’s citation, not seen first-hand. Source

Framed on the walls of shops, banks and call centres, in management books and training slides, usually signed ‘Mahatma Gandhi’, sometimes ‘L. L. Bean’. A hospital version replaces ‘customer’ with ‘patient’. Gandhi, a lawyer and political leader, never ran a business that served customers in this sense, and the passage is a list of rules for a sales department.

Service staff should treat the person they serve as the reason the work exists, and not as a nuisance or a favour-seeker.

A business motto of the 1940s, signed ‘Gandhi’ only since 1970.

• ShortenedA patient is the most important person in our hospital. He is not an interruption to our work, he is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our hospital. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us an opportunity to do so. The hospital version, attributed to Gandhi since the 1970s according to Wikiquote (Mahatma Gandhi, Misattributed). Where it was seen
• ShortenedA 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. ‘What Is a Customer?’ as quoted from L. L. Bean’s catalogue in Tom Mahoney, The Great Merchants (1955), p. 301, according to Quote Investigator. Where it was seen

Kindness, Work

• Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less. (misattributed) C. S. Lewis
• We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak. (misattributed) Epictetus
• Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Steve Jobs
• The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them. (not found) Mark Twain
• Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it. (paraphrase) Epictetus

• quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/02/gandhi-customer (Quote Investigator, ‘The Customer is Not an Interruption in Our Work; He Is the Purpose of It’, 2 August 2012, updated 2025)
• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi (Misattributed: ‘A patient is the most important person in our hospital’)
• Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier (2006), p. 76, via Quote Investigator

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is a part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.” Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. No. It is not in Gandhi’s works, and who first wrote it is not known. Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/a-customer-is-not-an-interruption-of-our-work/ (checked 27 October 2026).

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