Not knowing is now a choice

For most of the history of selling things, not knowing your customer was a fact of life. You made the product, it went to a distributor, it sat on a shelf, and someone you would never meet took it home. Finding out what they thought meant paying for research, waiting months, and trusting a small sample.

That excuse has mostly gone. Today the people who buy from a small brand in the region leave their opinions everywhere. In the reviews. In the comments under a post. In the messages asking whether the size runs small. In the returns, each with a reason attached. In the friend you could simply call and ask why she stopped ordering.

So when a seller says they do not know why repeat orders dropped, or which product people actually give as a gift, or what the complaint is that nobody bothers to make out loud, the honest version of the sentence is different. The answer is not unavailable. Nobody has gone to get it.

That is allowed. Nobody can know everything, and choosing what to ignore is part of running anything. But it is a choice now, and it helps to call it one. "We cannot know" lets us off the hook. "We decided not to look" puts the decision back where it belongs.

Said that way, the uncomfortable admissions follow quickly. The last fifty reviews have gone unread. The customers who left were never asked. Nobody has sat and watched someone use the product.

Each of those was an unlocked door the whole time. The question worth asking, every so often, is which other doors we have walked past on purpose.