Picture the customer in a farm store parking lot in western Oregon.
You are imagining a rancher in a dusty truck.
Try again.
It is a retired software manager with four acres, six chickens, two goats and a tractor he bought last spring. He has watched eleven hours of videos about goat hooves.
He is not a farmer. He is not pretending to be one either.
He is something new, and he is now one of the most valuable customers in American retail.
Stores like Coastal figured this out years before anybody wrote about it.
And the reason he is so valuable tells you something uncomfortable and useful about how people spend money.
Let me explain.