But it could be. Some small corner store operators buy stuff in bulk at costco or sams club for resale. Kind of like retail traders.
I did that in my retail establishments - tax exempt license. But think they were talking about the money spent by consumers, not taken in, at the grocery store.
Yes, but supermarket operators who do it for profit they don't do it randomly but with the goal to increase profits. In contradiction to your original thesis that the market players know nothing. This is true even for small shop owners. They would not buy unprofitable stuff for resale.
My orginal thesis is that it's a market. The players try to make a profit. Buying and selling a product. It doesn't know anything. No different than a used car market.
When people try to make profits they want to have an edge over other players and as a result they constantly look for new information.
"Knowing" infers consciousness which seems a little anthropomorphic to me but ok. Wykoff wrote about the "composite man" which can be a pretty good tool. Not insofar that "he" knows where the market is going but trying to figure out where he thinks the market is going to go is a pretty good starting point. A little like Keynes beauty contest where he realizes that the object of the game isn't to pick the most attractive contestant but the one who the most other people will find the most attractive. You could always just test things and see how it worked out in the past. It's not necessarily strategy building but more like getting to know the market. Download some time frames data (I recommend the 15 minute if your intra-day trading) and calculate a returns table from the close of each bar 100 bars out. Then you can start looking at things like if the high of 1 bar is higher than the previous bar what is the average return or if a bars range is 2x ATR(14) what are the average returns. You can also create a MAE and MFE tables from which you can make an MAE/MFE which gives you the implied risk:reward at the close of each bar. It's a start anyway. It's like people say above, in the end it's just people buying and selling and the imbalances therein so there's really no knowing but it can be good to have an idea what's happened before.