Among the primary outcomes of this seismic transition is customer empowerment. Armed with expanded supplier choice and increased leverage over sellers battling for their business, customers are exercising more control over buyer-seller relationships. Companies accepting this new balance of power and adapting business models accordingly are reaping handsome rewards. However, those resisting change are paying steeper and steeper prices by the year—occasionally the ultimate price.

But creating marketplace winners and losers represents only a portion of the impact of the supply-demand cross-over. In fact, the entire hullabaloo about buyers’ markets, increased customer power and customers holding company fates in their hands has masked an even greater change affecting business and customers alike. Today, economists estimate that consumer spending drives an unprecedented 70% of U.S. economic growth—a direct outgrowth of switching from a supply-side to customer-side economy.

But just as consumers drive economic growth, they also drive economic slow downs or outright contraction—as we see in vitro today in the aftermath of the financial harm to consumers caused by customer-unfriendly mortgage lenders and nefarious other mortgage market participants. Now, I’m not forgetting caveat emptor. But when business plays the pied piper leading customers off a cliff, it does need to own up and accept responsibility.

When individual companies hurt consumers, they actually hurt the economy as a whole—if only by an imperceptible, infinitesimal amount. But when a whole industry hurts whole classes of consumers sufficiently, the economic damage starts showing.  And when business inflicts egregious financial pain on a broad swath of consumers, the resulting economic damage nicks almost all of us. As we’re experiencing today.

Considering this dynamic, I would argue that a very symbiotic relationship has evolved between treatment of consumers and the state of the economy. When business offers consumers true value and helps them make appropriate decisions, consumers flourish—and then spend. When they spend, they not only boost the retail sector, but they help pump money up-line as well, right up to makers of machinery that makes the goods and to raw material suppliers. And I would argue the very same point on the B2B side. When sellers help their customers succeed, customers have more money to buy and more reason to, which similarly pumps money all the way up the supply chain.

So, if my argument is valid, how did we ever get to “trickle down” economics in the 1980s? Politics aside, in a sellers’ market with an overall imbalance of demand over supply, one could craft an economic rationale for trickle down. Building up the supply side helped increase production of goods that met waiting demand, which would create economic growth—in theory, at least. But today, our economy doesn’t need more supply. It needs cash-in-hand demand, which is especially lacking because the mortgage mess has left consumers with reduced discretionary income, which means much less money is trickling up. Without in any way discounting the importance of oil prices and monetary policy, a robust, “trickle up” economy is a must for repairing the damage done by customer-unfriendly lending practices and the resulting credit crunch. And that brings us right back to putting customers first.

Customer-centricity does feed individual seller bottom lines. But just as importantly, it creates upstream revenue flow that continues recirculating—and strengthening our economy. We just have to get used to thinking “trickle up”—with customers now the primary driver of a healthy economy.