I have a number of opinions and none are stronger than those connected to things I spend money on. I have an obsession with getting the most value for my hard earn money. This obsession has manifested into frustration with the evolution of the consumer buyers role in purchase transactions. It is my belief that retailers have evolved to a point where they now over-powers their own customers. This is my attempt to not reverse the retail evolution, but stimulate buyer evolution to rebalance value in everyday household purchases.

Once upon a time retailers were small and every customer and every sale was important to that reseller. If the transaction experience did not satisfy a customer, future purchases were in jeopardy and retailers depend on future purchases. Personal recommendations wee also critical. Most retailers could not afford to put future business in jeopardy. Therefore they only carried quality products that reflected well on them as a retailer. They sold products to customers that were the right product and they backed up their products with service. That was then.

Enter the "chain" or the "superstore." Thanks to national advertising and the ability to sell to large amounts of customers retailers are able to generate new customers quickly and cheaply. That means that every customer’s value to a retailer is marginalized to a negligible level. The customer has become valuable only as a group and valueless as an individual.

In other words a retailer can afford to lose your business. A retailer can survive and most of the time not even notice the bad P.R. you disseminate through your social network of family and friends. The term “buyer beware” has never been more true. Not in the aspect of “safety” but in the aspect of  “value.” The only way for buyers to protect themselves is to do their own primary research. Buyers can no longer rely on a seller to know about their products or care about the buyers needs. The individual buyer is valueless. Sites like Amazon.com and InsiderPages.com have made great strides in supplying buyers with the information they need to make the right purchases, but there needs to be more.