{
  "id": "customer.economic",
  "term": "customer",
  "sense": "economic",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 18,
  "arena": "customer",
  "domain": "common",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "a person who gets a product or service by paying",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "people.social",
      "products.goods",
      "services.economic",
      "pay.economic",
      "get.acquisition"
    ],
    "interaction": "a person gets a product or service through an exchange involving payment",
    "novel_properties": [
      "acquired possession through exchange",
      "economic role of recipient",
      "mutual obligation in transaction"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "In 2023, a customer paid $1,299 for an Apple iPhone 15 at a Manhattan store.",
      "domain": "economics"
    },
    {
      "text": "A patient paid the clinic fee to receive a flu shot at Kaiser Permanente in 2022.",
      "domain": "services"
    },
    {
      "text": "Someone bought a $99 Adobe Creative Cloud annual subscription in 2021.",
      "domain": "computing"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "people.social",
      "note": "is-a",
      "type": "is-a"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [
    "sale.commercial"
  ],
  "forms": [
    "customer",
    "customers"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6,
    "reconciled": {
      "by": "openrouter:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
      "date": "2026-07-31",
      "changed": "components",
      "note": "Added 'get.acquisition' to components to align with definition. Payment is already covered by 'pay.economic', so 'payment.economic' is redundant and not added."
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-customer.economic"
}