This paper examines the drivers of local grocery retail patronage. Drawing on institutional and social network theory literature, we develop a framework to investigate how consumers' personal values and engagement with local communities affect their satisfaction and local store patronage. We test our model with survey data on 1504 Finnish consumers. Our results show that the relationship between customer local engagement and local retail patronage is indirect rather than direct, and it is mediated by the vitality of local services, social interaction, and consumer satisfaction.

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified several psychosocial risks and problem behaviors among vulnerable individuals. Given that gambling has high addictive potential, it is important to consider the underlying mechanisms of problem gambling. This study examined psychosocial factors associated with pandemic-time problem gambling.Cross-sectional data were gathered via an online survey of 18–75-year-old Finnish, Swedish, and British respondents (n = 2,022) who reported having gambled at least occasionally during the pandemic. Measures included problem gambling, loneliness, COVID-19 worry, social support, and psychological resilience. Control variables included gender, age, and education. Structural equation modeling was used as an analytical technique.Loneliness was found to be associated with problem gambling. While COVID-19 worry was not directly associated with problem gambling, it predicted higher loneliness, which in turn was associated with problem gambling. Evidence was not found regarding the protective role of resilience or social support in problem gambling. However, social support was found to be associated with higher problem gambling severity. Male gender and younger age were associated with problem gambling.The results bring insight into underlying vulnerabilities regarding problem gambling during the pandemic. More focus should be placed on the quality and sources of social support, as well as on how psychosocial risk and protective factors might work differently among different populations of gamblers.

Online shopping addiction can be defined as an Internet‐based behavioural addiction which may lead to economic problems. Even though shopping is increasingly common through mobile devices, the effects of smartphone use on online shopping addiction are underexamined. Following a survey of 1000 18 to 29‐year‐olds in Finland, we examined young adults' online shopping addiction and economic problems from the perspective of self‐regulation and problems in regulating smartphone use. The results indicated that low self‐regulation in an online environment facilitates online shopping addiction, which further leads to dissatisfaction toward personal money management through indebtedness. Moreover, we illustrated how distractive stimuli of digital environments can act as primers for addiction by showing how problems in regulating smartphone use facilitates online shopping addiction for young adults with generally low self‐regulation. We conclude our article by offering guidance on how the teaching of self‐regulatory strategies as well as financial and information communications technology skills may decrease the tendency for online shopping addiction.

This article examines different kinds of consumption desires of Finnish consumers by asking how they would change their consumption habits if they had more money at their disposal. As previous research on consumption desires has been mainly based on the essence of desires and the cycle of fulfilling hedonistic desires and creating new ones, this study analyses the desires in the context of the ages of both consumers and consumer society. The focus was differences in consumption desires between age groups and changes across 20 years. The data were derived from three repeated surveys collected in 1999, 2009 and 2019 in Finland (N = 5,459), which were analysed with principal-axis factor analysis and ANCOVA. The factor analysis extracted three types of consumption desires: hedonistic, charitable-cultural and materialistic. Saving-oriented desires were analysed as a single item. Hedonistic consumption desires were the most typical for the youngest age group (18–25), and materialistic desires were the highest for young adults aged 26–35 across all three years of measurement. Older people had the most charitably and culturally oriented desires in 1999, but older age groups’ orientation to saving and charitable giving and culture decreased across 20 years. Hedonistic consumption desires generally decreased over 20 years, particularly in young age groups. Conversely, young people’s desire to save increased significantly, whereas the oldest age groups saved less. The research shows that both changes in consumer values and economic circumstances are manifested in people’s consumption desires.

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