With a focus on consumer goods rather than services, toxic customers is not as relevant a concern in the context of the article as it would be say for a consulting business. Likewise repeat customers are more of an unambiguous signal for a service business.
Toxic customers are a fault of a business model--not the customers. eg. some biz models are not robust enough to be "indifferent" to the customer--they have exteranalities that are not compensated for--customer support, say. Commodity products typically lack such externalities, and/or are compensated for by other tactics at the industry-structure level.
