Your customers hear everything you’ve stopped noticing.
I stopped into a Best Buy recently to have my iPhone screen repaired. Simple errand. In and out, or so I thought.
I wasn’t through the door two minutes before it hit me: a loud, sharp, high-pitched alarm. Then silence. Then, about thirty seconds later, the exact same sound from a different direction. Then silence again. Then a third one. Three emergency exit doors, all running on backup battery power after a recent power outage, all screaming their low-battery warnings on staggered intervals. One would go off, then quiet; then another, then quiet. The timing almost made it worse—just long enough between alarms to let you exhale before the next one.
I turned to a nearby employee and asked what was going on. He explained it calmly, almost casually, like he was telling me the store hours. Power had been out for a few days, he said, and the doors had been running on backup batteries ever since. I asked how long the store had had power back at this point.
Close to a week, he told me.
And then he said the thing I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: “I don’t even hear it anymore.”
He wasn’t being defensive or dismissive. He genuinely meant it. His brain had filtered it out the same way you eventually stop hearing the highway after you move in next door. Adaptation is remarkable. But in a leadership context, the ability to tune out what’s broken is one of the most dangerous things that can happen to a business.
Because here’s what I know for certain: Every single customer in that store still heard it. Every one of them. I watched their faces. People flinched. People looked around. A few made eye contact with total strangers in that “Is this really happening?” kind of way. Nobody missed it. Nobody had tuned it out. That was a privilege reserved for the people who worked there.
And here’s the detail that really drove it home for me: Best Buy sells nine-volt batteries. Right there in the store. The fix was a three-minute walk, a five-minute job, and probably a $2 investment. But nobody had done it—not in a week.
At some point, the people running that store made a collective, unspoken decision that this disruption was just part of the environment now. They normalized it. And in doing so, they chose their own comfort over their customers’ experiences. I don’t think anyone made that decision consciously. That’s actually the whole point. The most damaging decisions in an organization are rarely the ones people make on purpose.
Here’s the truth that I think applies to all of us, myself included:
Every business has an alarm going off somewhere—a friction point in the customer experience that your team has explained away so many times that they’ve stopped seeing it as a problem.
It could be a complaint that your front-line people hear so often that it’s become background noise—a gap between what you believe your customers feel when they interact with you and what they actually feel.
You are not your customer. You have history with your business. You have context, institutional memory, and grace for the rough edges because you know what it took to build them. Your customer has none of that. They have only their experience. And their experience is the only scorecard that actually matters.
The alarm doesn’t disappear because you stopped reacting to it. It goes somewhere far more costly. It shows up in the customer who quietly decides not to come back—the one who doesn’t leave a bad review because they don’t even care enough to bother. They just leave. And they don’t tell you why. That is the version of feedback that is almost impossible to recover from because you never even knew you had a problem.
The challenge for this week is simple, but I’ll warn you, it’s uncomfortable. Walk your business as a first-time customer—not as the founder, not as the operator, not as the person who knows what you meant to build. Walk it as someone who has never walked through your door before, has no loyalty keeping them in the room, and who has plenty of other options.
Listen for what you’ve stopped hearing.
I promise you, it’s there.
Your customers hear everything you’ve stopped noticing.