Nikki’s article this week attacks pricing – and what happens when it’s all we care about – in a meaningful way. But what else matters to both consumers and retailers the moment price stops being the only thing, or is that really all there is?

We asked a couple thousand consumers that very question, particularly as it relates to stores. More to the point: we asked them, in no uncertain terms: what’s wrong with stores? This data hasn’t been shared anywhere else yet, and just to make it more interesting, I’ve compared it here with the responses retailers have just given us to that very same question.

Even the retailer data you see above hasn’t been released yet, so this is pretty special information. What does it mean?

For starters, it means that, as consumers, we can say whatever we want about retailers’ flaws, gaffs, or inability to really “get ” us a personalized customer. In my best new agey voice: “that they don’t really understand the depths of who we really are, you know… in our complete individuality and the subsequent needs of our lives. ” But the first thing we care about is price. At a nearly 2-1 ratio over almost every other concern, it’s really just that simple. Price is the only thing. Until, as Nikki points out, it isn’t.

So only after a competitive (if not outright lowest) price has been established do consumers turn their attention to anything else. And that only other thing is service.

While retailers worry over the details of that service – whether employees are educated enough, or productive enough, whether stores are as easy to shop as online, whether competitors have a leg up, how likely people are to use a store as just a showroom for their online purchases – this doesn’t matter to consumers.

As retailers, we know all of these are components to exactly what they are demanding, but that’s just not the lens they are looking through any more. To them, it’s all summed up in one word: service. They have completely stopped caring what goes into that or how you bring it to them. They do not empathize with you in any way – you just have to do what they want. There is no common man’s understanding of how you make a living or caring for whether you live or die. It’s become increasingly rare you’ll hear the words that were once so commonplace during a transaction: “Listen… I understand that you have to make a living, too… “

In short: today’s consumer has become an awful lot like a teenager. Their world is the only one that matters, regardless of what that means in any measure of a larger picture. “Wait… there’s a larger picture? “

We’ll have a lot more data from both of these studies coming in the following weeks.