Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
As regards the customer. It has not been clearly settled sho actually is the customer. In Amazon's case, the consumer is the customer -- after all, that is the purpose of retail businesses, to purchase product at wholesale from a manufacturer and resell it at retail to the consumer. In the case of the BPHs, their customer has always been the retailer, not the consumer. That may be changing in today's Internet world, but even today, most, if not nearly all, of the sales the BPHs make are wholesale sales, not retail sales, so their customer is still the retailer, not the consumer.
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I think the word I'm looking for here is disingenuous.
What happens to all those sales the BPH makes to the retailer if they don't sell to the consumer? What generates all those returns and bundles of ripped off paperback covers? How are they going to account for them in their financial records? Are they still sales?
If you think that the retailers are the BPH's customers then why are they able to return the "sales" if they're not bought by the retailers customers in turn? That's not part of the BPH sales chain is it? And the consumer doesn't affect the end calculation of what the net sales to the retailers are, do they?
And none of this happened before the Internet world arrived, did it?
Yup, disingenuous. The BPH's customers have always been the consumer. The retailers are just the middlemen.