Whoever is not the customer

A hair salon in Salmiya is warm to every client who walks in. Someone takes your bag, offers you water, remembers how you like your fringe. Someone asks after your children by name.

Then a supplier's driver comes in with a delivery, and he is left to wait by the back door for twenty minutes without a word. The woman who cleans between appointments is spoken to sharply in front of clients. The young stylist in her first month is paid late and nobody apologises.

It is worth asking how a business treats the people who are not buying from it. The person who unloads the boxes. The freelancer chasing an invoice. The new junior. The answer says more about the place than the welcome at the front.

The difference in treatment is not usually cruelty. It is a calculation about power. The client chooses, and can choose somewhere else, and can tell her friends why. The driver, the cleaner and the junior seem to have neither the choice nor the voice, so the courtesy stops before it reaches them.

That calculation is a mistake, and an expensive one. The care given to the client belongs to the people who carry the business too, and the other way round. The simplest discipline is to behave as though everyone you deal with could walk out and talk about it, because over time most of them can.

A business run that way does not cut corners when nobody important is watching. And so it ends up trusted by the people who are.