A Good Sign That This Manager Has Seen Some S***

Back in the 1990s, I used to buy spare auto parts from a scrap yard service in a suburb of Cape Town. It was one of those places where you could walk in and find a carburetor for a 1974 Renault DS, or a distributor for an old Ford, perfect if you were a broke student forced to drive busted-up jalopies.

The owner was a real character — deeply knowledgeable and extremely kind. There was a massive sign over the sales desk that read:

Sign: “Prices will be adjusted according to customer attitude.”

When I asked the owner about it, he smiled and said:

Owner: “You’ve got to let the boneheads know up front that you won’t take their s*** so that they can’t start crying when you call them on it.”

I was always impeccably polite to him and always got a fair deal, but when I heard people complain about his prices, I knew exactly what had happened.