One of the first maxims of our modern enterprise culture was "the customer is king.
" I was taught this during my early working days at Cadbury's and saw it put into practice in every department of our business.
It seemed obvious.
As long as you look after your customers, they will continue to look after you.
One of the problems with the modern evolution of our free market culture is that people seemed to have forgotten this all important law.
Perhaps it is because the growth of huge conglomerates has brought with it an arrogance.
Or perhaps we arrived at a point where it was easier to make money from mergers and acquisitions, or on the money markets, than in being generous to consumers.
Whatever the reason, we started to take that leader of all market indicators "consumer confidence" for granted.
When you lose consumer confidence you lose everything, because everything depends on the little man spending his weekly wage.
Everything else is a paper house ready to come tumbling down at the slightest nudge.
Despite the boom in equities we have seen since the crash of 2008, economists have been frustrated by the simple truth that the ordinary consumer is refusing to come back to the market in any significant number.
Yes, there are rock solid reasons for this: the tightening of credit, the fall of house prices, the unemployment situation.
But in the past these things were put right by people shopping.
When people stop shopping, the basis on which our market hopes are founded disappears.
The reason for the collapse of consumer confidence is a loss of trust.
People no longer trust the banks who lend them money and they no longer trust the companies that make their products.
Cheap Chinese imports have a part to play in this.
The Chinese have undercut every price band going.
And as the quality of Chinese goods improves, so western manufacturers are made to look even more like they've been conning us all these years.
The subprime mortgage debacle was the ultimate consumer con, and if you can't trust some of the biggest names in the industry, blue-chip companies, who can you trust? In some ways this has led to the riots we have seen in western capital cities.
These are an angry expression of the betrayal felt by consumers.
We bought in to your dreams, they say, and this is how you treat us.
The breakdown of trust between supplier and customer may still prove fatal.
Consumers will not subsidise scandalously high boardroom pay through overpriced products while their own futures, their jobs and pensions, are in doubt.
Greed, that rallying cry of Wall Street in the 80s, has been its own downfall.
It has led to the disaster which is the world economy today.
The consumer is still king, and he waits while his servants, the purveyors of products, put their houses in order, show some humility and return with offers that are better than ever.