> Every time I buy a product as an ordinary consumer I marvel at how much worse my huge employer is at buying products than I am.
It's the size of the deal that matters. Most of the consumer goods you buy are sold on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. No individual sale is worth the vendor forming a "relationship" with that customer or promising bespoke features. B2B sales are often large deals that require months of negotiation and may be worth millions. Bullshitting in order to land the deal is incentivized on both sides, to the point where both only have a fuzzy idea of what exactly is being bought and sold.
But consumers get this experience as well when they make larger purchases. When I buy a car, maybe I fail to mention the unreported fender bender my trade-in was in, and maybe the salesman tries to charge me $1200 to etch "anti-theft tracking numbers" on the new car's windows, citing some dubious statistics about vehicle recovery rates.
> consumers get this experience as well when they make larger purchases
Or as I like to do, buying random things on AliExpress and Temu knowing full well that some of the things will not meet the expectations you’d have from the product listings.
Sometimes I’m lucky and the stuff is good. Sometimes I’m a little unlucky and it’s worse quality than I’d like.
At least I quickly learned to read carefully what was said to realize that what’s depicted is not exactly what’s being sold. Some sellers do this misleading trick where they have some amazing photo up front but there are either multiple variations of it or the thing being sold is only some component for that thing. I still sometimes see product reviews from other buyers that were upset that they didn’t get what they thought they were buying and I don’t blame them because it can be pretty misleading at times, but if you read carefully and look at all the pictures and check what the “color” or similar option dropdown says etc you will usually spot it when they are selling something different than what it might look like at first. So I haven’t had that kind of misfortune for years now. But sometimes you still get products that are lower quality than you were hoping for, even when the product listing was pretty accurate. Some kinds of bad quality is just not possible to judge unless you see the product in person.