It would probably be less shocking if you were thinking of expanding your toilet seat factory, and you needed a reference for the financial projections you were proposing to the bank in support of an expansion loan.

I've, more than once, spent several hundred dollars on "reports" from "well-established analyst firms," that happened to be the only source of up-to-date, relevant data. Most of those, upon receipt, could have easily been automatically generated from the dataset, and the value of the human was difficult to ascertain.