I'm not sure I follow this, or buy into the suggestion of the post.<p>First, I don't see how it's true that data with a relatively large amount of variance will tend to be power law distributed. Defining what a "large amount" of variance is is tough (it depends on your intuition and choice of variance metric) but there are lots of distributions with considerable variance that are, for example, normally distributed (many more than are power law distributed, as far as I can tell).<p>Second, if you find that this is misleading your projections, why not just use a different kind of average? For example, if you just want to know, "How much is the next customer likely to spend?", you might use the mode. Or, if you want a more robust average (i.e., less likely to be seriously thrown off by outliers), why not use the median? You can even complement these with confidence intervals if you want to get a sense of their precision.<p>Like twic already said, you need some indicator to understand what's going on with your business. I think that in many cases, this will be the mean. But if you want something more robust or more practical, perhaps the median or mode might suit you better.