[dheera]

Personally I use the word "retail" to refer to restaurants, stores, malls, and other soulless things that occupy commercial real estate.

I use "customers" to refer to souls that occupy residential real estate.

[dbish]

You can use that, but there are pretty well understood terms in finance already (like retail investors), and probably best to use the standard if you want to be well understood.

[patmorgan23]

They retail investors, just like the people who patronize all of those businesses are retail customers.

[sclarisse]

Lewis Carroll wrote a gag about people using words like this.

[NavinF]

I find that obnoxious