Building on the notion that cognitive processes vary across social classes, we predict that social class shapes thinking style, which in turn affects consumer judgments. In doing so, we employ service failure domains as a way to understand social class effects. Across four studies, we show that, when faced with a failure incident occurring in one service dimension (e.g., rude employees), consumers in the low social class, relative to those in the high social class, carry over to influence their evaluations of the other service dimensions (e.g., food quality) that are unrelated to the failure incident. We further show that low‐class consumers favor a holistic style of thinking, whereas high‐class consumers favor an analytic style of thinking and that these differences in thinking style account for the carryover effects on evaluations. The pattern of the effects exists when the service failure is perceived to be severe rather than minor.

A positive shopping experience provides retailers with a competitive advantage. However, retail environments pose numerous hassles that may negatively affect consumer experiences. Integrating perspectives from attribution theory and expectation theory, we examine the concept of shopping hassle and how it differs from that of retail service failure. Furthermore, we utilize qualitative approaches to explore what shopping episodes consumers perceive as hassles. Conducting semi‐structured in‐depth interviews in Study 1, we develop a classification framework of in‐store shopping hassles. In Study 2, we use a critical incident technique approach to gain a further understanding of types of shopping hassle.

The sunk‐cost fallacy is a well‐documented cognitive bias in the decision‐making literature. Although the emerging literature on childhood socioeconomic status suggests that early‐life environments shape individuals' decision strategies and have a long‐lasting impact on their decisions, little is known about the impact of childhood socioeconomic status on the sunk‐cost fallacy. Using two different scenarios and an actual choice task, we provide converging evidence that individuals who grew up in resource‐scarce environments (those with lower childhood socioeconomic status) are reluctant to abandon inferior choices merely because they have already invested substantial resources in them, resulting in the sunk‐cost fallacy. This fallacy occurs because individuals with lower childhood socioeconomic status tend to perceive the loss of their prior investments as more wasteful than those with higher childhood socioeconomic status.

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