Retail Karma: How Our Shopping Sins Influence Evaluation of Service Failures.

The article investigates how consumers' prior wrongdoing toward one company influences their evaluation of another unrelated company when experiencing a service failure, focusing on the role of "karmic belief"—the intuitive notion that bad (good) actions lead to bad (good) outcomes. Across eight experiments, the research consistently finds that consumers who have recently engaged in wrongdoing (including merely thinking about wrongdoing) evaluate subsequent service failures by other companies more favorably, attributing the failure to karmic payback and blaming themselves rather than the company. This effect is mediated by consumers' karmic causal inference and self-blame, and is diminished when karmic belief is temporarily reduced or when an intermediate misfortune is perceived as karmic punishment. The findings distinguish karmic belief from alternative explanations such as moral balancing and immanent justice reasoning, highlighting karmic belief as a mechanistic, impersonal worldview influencing consumer responses to service failures.