Patronage Reduction Intention Scale

1. Abstract

The Patronage Reduction Intention Scale (often abbreviated as PATRONR or conceptualized as the Customer Abandonment Scale) is a concise, psychometrically validated three-item self-report instrument designed to measure a consumer's post-encounter regret and behavioral intention to decrease or entirely terminate their commercial patronage following an adverse service interaction. Originally developed and empirically validated by Christy Ashley and Stephanie M. Noble (2014) across three multi-method experimental studies published in the Journal of Retailing, the instrument draws its primary theoretical and operational foundation from earlier scholarship on customer retaliation and relationship dissolution by Yany Grégoire and Robert J. Fisher (2006). Designed with structural flexibility, the scale features contextual placeholders allowing researchers to specify the targeted consumer activity (e.g., shopping, dining, exercising) and commercial facility (e.g., store, restaurant, athletic club). Across the empirical investigations reported by Ashley and Noble (2014), the scale demonstrated exceptional psychometric properties. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) established robust unidimensionality and clean model fit across diverse retail scenarios. Internal consistency reliability was demonstrated by Cronbach's alpha coefficients of .87 (Study 2), .78 (Study 3), and .90 (Study 4). Convergent validity was established with average variance extracted (AVE) estimates ranging from .54 to .75, while discriminant validity was verified against conceptually adjacent constructs, including customer territorial responses, negative word-of-mouth, and active retaliation. Operating on a standard five-point Likert scale, the PATRONR provides marketing scientists, service management scholars, and consumer psychologists with a reliable, parsimonious metric for capturing customer exit intentions and cognitive regret triggered by frontline employee behaviors and service failures.

2. Keywords

Patronage Reduction Intention Scale, PATRONR, Customer Abandonment, Service Failure, Customer Churn, Retail Territoriality, Exit-Voice-Loyalty, Frontline Employees, Post-Purchase Regret, Consumer Behavior, Psychometrics, Scale Validation

3. Authors

The Patronage Reduction Intention Scale was authored and operationalized by:

• Christy Ashley, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, College of Business, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, Rhode Island, USA. Her research focuses on customer relationship management, customer engagement, consumer territoriality, and services marketing strategy.
• Stephanie M. Noble, Ph.D. — Proffitt's Professor of Marketing and William B. Stokely Faculty Research Fellow, Haslam College of Business, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. Her scholarly expertise spans retail management, frontline employee-customer dynamics, services marketing, and consumer psychology.

The scale was formally introduced in their seminal paper: “It's closing time: Territorial behaviors from customers in response to front line employees,” published in the Journal of Retailing (Volume 90, Issue 1, 2014, pages 74–92). The authors formulated the PATRONR measure building upon earlier foundational work on online and offline customer betrayal and abandonment conduct by Yany Grégoire (HEC Montréal) and Robert J. Fisher (University of Alberta).

4. Purpose

In retail and service management, customer retention represents a primary determinant of long-term commercial viability. When customer service experiences sour—whether due to overt service failures, interpersonal indifference, or perceived boundary infringements such as employee territorial behaviors—consumers process negative affect through cognitive evaluation and formulate behavioral coping strategies. The primary purpose of the Patronage Reduction Intention Scale is to provide a standardized, rigorous, and highly parsimonious metric that captures the severity of a customer's calculated withdrawal from a commercial establishment.

Traditional customer feedback mechanisms frequently suffer from non-response bias and a disproportionate focus on extreme, vocal expressions of dissatisfaction, such as direct complaining or litigation. However, a significant proportion of dissatisfied patrons exhibit what Albert O. Hirschman (1970) conceptualized as silent “Exit.” Rather than engaging frontline personnel to seek service recovery, alienated customers often quietly resolve never to return, or to systematically diminish their frequency of interaction. The PATRONR operationalizes this withdrawal continuum, capturing both the emotional precursor of decision regret and the behavioral intent to scale back or permanently terminate patronage.

From an applied research perspective, the scale fulfills several critical functions:

• Service Failure Impact Modeling: It allows researchers to quantify the exact behavioral penalty imposed by consumers when frontline employees engage in negative or boundary-violating behaviors (such as territorial signals, rush behaviors near closing time, or aloofness).
• Service Recovery Diagnostics: By administering the scale in pre- and post-intervention designs, retail managers can test whether specific service recovery initiatives successfully attenuate customer abandonment tendencies.
• Predictive Churn Analytics: In longitudinal customer satisfaction tracking, the scale serves as an early indicator of relationship dissolution, capturing the transition from latent dissatisfaction to behavioral churn before transaction histories reflect absolute disengagement.
• Cross-Industry Adaptability: Because the scale utilizes open syntactic templates (allowing insertion of distinct activity verbs such as “shop,” “dine,” or “workout,” and facility nouns such as “store,” “branch,” or “clinic”), it standardizes the evaluation of customer abandonment across varied B2C and B2B service domains.

5. Psychological Construct

The Patronage Reduction Intention Scale reflects a unidimensional yet multi-faceted psychological construct known in the services marketing literature as customer abandonment or patronage reduction intention. At its core, the construct captures the consumer's psychological detachment from a retail provider following an encounter characterized by unfavorable psychological outcomes, specifically focusing on the intention to withdraw relational and transactional capital.

The construct encompasses three primary interrelated cognitive-behavioral facets:

1. Decision-Related Regret (Affective Evaluation)

Item 1 (“I regret that I chose to [shop at/patronize] this [store/retailer]”) taps into post-choice cognitive regret. In psychological decision theory, regret emerges when an individual realizes or imagines that their present outcome would have been significantly better had they selected a different behavioral alternative (Zeelenberg & Pieters, 2004). In a service context, regret is distinct from simple cognitive dissatisfaction; it represents an internally attributed, self-blaming counterfactual realization: the customer acknowledges their agency in selecting the offending establishment and laments that choice. When consumers regret patronizing a retailer, the emotional salience of the negative interaction crystallizes, acting as an internal catalyst for future behavioral modification.

2. Graduated Patronage Curtailment (Behavioral Downscaling)

Item 2 (“I will [shop/visit] less often at this [store/retailer] in the future”) measures incremental withdrawal. Rather than making an immediate, total severance, consumers often respond to suboptimal experiences by demoting the retailer within their consideration set. Customers reallocate a portion of their share of wallet to competitors while maintaining occasional visits for convenience or geographic proximity. Measuring this graduated reduction is critical because partial defection frequently goes unnoticed in gross customer account metrics, yet represents substantial long-term revenue attrition.

3. Absolute Patronage Termination (Complete Relationship Dissolution)

Item 3 (“I will stop [shopping/patronizing] at this [store/retailer]”) captures the absolute endpoint of the exit continuum: definitive relationship termination. This item reflects total abandonment, where the perceived switching costs, search efforts, and brand attachment thresholds are entirely overwhelmed by the aversion created by the negative service experience. It operationalizes a firm behavioral commitment to permanently sever all economic ties with the service entity.

Together, these three items form a coherent reflective latent construct where post-choice regret naturally co-occurs with intentions of partial and total patronage withdrawal. Ashley and Noble (2014) established that while consumers may manifest aggressive coping mechanisms (such as vindictive retaliation or negative word-of-mouth), the abandonment construct represents an avoidant coping mechanism aimed at self-protection and emotional equilibrium.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual infrastructure of the Patronage Reduction Intention Scale is anchored in three primary theoretical paradigms within consumer psychology and behavioral sociology:

1. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty Theory

Albert O. Hirschman's (1970) classic treatise, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, posits that when organizational quality deteriorates, constituents exercise one of two compensatory mechanisms: Voice (articulating discontent to effect internal correction) or Exit (withdrawing from the relationship entirely), moderated by latent Loyalty. The PATRONR operationalizes the pure “Exit” dimension. Building on expanded EVLN frameworks (Rusbult et al., 1988), customer abandonment is classified as an active, destructive response to relational decline: it is active because it requires purposeful behavioral reallocation, and destructive because it severs the economic vitality of the service relationship without affording the firm an immediate opportunity for remediation through dialogue.

2. Cognitive Appraisal Theory of Emotion and Coping

Developed by Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman (1984), Cognitive Appraisal Theory dictates that individuals continuously evaluate environmental stimuli relative to their personal well-being. When an encounter is appraised as goal-incongruent or threatening (such as experiencing frontline employee incivility or territorial gatekeeping), negative emotions (anger, frustration, regret) are triggered. These appraisals precipitate coping responses that fall broadly into two modalities: problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping. Patronage reduction operates as an avoidant, emotion-focused coping mechanism: by removing oneself from the toxic environment and eliminating future exposure to the retailer, the consumer eliminates the stimulus responsible for psychological discomfort.

3. Customer Territoriality and Boundary Violation Theory

In the specific context for which Ashley and Noble (2014) validated the scale, the framework is grounded in theories of human territoriality (Brown et al., 2005). When frontline service employees display territorial behaviors—such as guarding store sections, cleaning floors around customers prior to closing time, or policing merchandise access—customers perceive an illegitimate encroachment on space that they consider shared or temporarily their own. This perceived territorial violation generates psychological distress and power asymmetry. In response, customers re-establish agency and dignity by penalizing the retailer through economic abandonment, validating the conceptual link between employee territorial signaling and elevated scores on the PATRONR scale.

7. Validity

The construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the Patronage Reduction Intention Scale have been substantiated across multiple empirical studies.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Convergent validity evaluates whether the items representing a latent construct share a high proportion of common variance. In Ashley and Noble (2014), convergent validity was demonstrated using Confirmatory Factor Analysis across three independent empirical studies involving diverse consumer retail scenarios:

• Study 2: The scale exhibited an Average Variance Extracted (AVE) of .69, well above the conventional benchmark of .50 established by Fornell and Larcker (1981).
• Study 3: The AVE was calculated at .54, demonstrating that the variance captured by the construct exceeded the variance attributable to measurement error.
• Study 4: The AVE reached .75, indicating that 75% of the total variance in the indicator items was accounted for by the underlying patronage reduction latent factor.

Factor loadings across all three investigations were uniformly positive, statistically significant (p < .001), and substantial (> .70), demonstrating robust convergent validity.

Discriminant Validity

To establish that patronage reduction intention is theoretically and empirically distinct from related consumer outcomes, Ashley and Noble (2014) tested discriminant validity against several adjacent constructs in their structural equation models, including:

• Customer Territorial Behaviors (e.g., lingering, marking space, asserting domain).
• Negative Word-of-Mouth (NWOM) (e.g., actively warning friends and family against visiting).
• Retaliatory Beliefs / Direct Retaliation (e.g., intentional efforts to cause financial or operational inconvenience to the retailer, adapted from Grégoire & Fisher, 2006).

Using the Fornell-Larcker criterion, the square root of the AVE for PATRONR in each study exceeded all inter-construct correlations with other reflective latent factors in the measurement models. Furthermore, maximum shared variance (MSV) and average shared variance (ASV) metrics were consistently lower than the corresponding AVE values, demonstrating that PATRONR captures a distinct psychological phenomenon—passive avoidant exit—rather than conflating it with active aggression or general dissatisfaction.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Nomological validity was verified through structural paths aligning with theoretical expectations. In Ashley and Noble (2014), perceived employee territoriality significantly and positively predicted customer abandonment intentions across experimental conditions. Manipulations simulating closing-time employee boundary enforcement (e.g., sweeping around customer feet, dimming lights, hovering) generated statistically significant increases in PATRONR scores, confirming the scale's sensitivity to environmental and interpersonal service stressors.

8. Reliability

The Patronage Reduction Intention Scale displays high internal consistency reliability across varied sample demographics and service delivery settings. In psychometric testing, reliability evaluates the degree to which scale items yield consistent and stable measurements of the underlying latent construct.

Internal Consistency Metrics

In the scale validation studies reported by Ashley and Noble (2014), Cronbach's alpha (α) was computed across three consecutive empirical studies:

• Study 2 (Experimental retail simulation): α = .87
• Study 3 (Field-based scenario replication): α = .78
• Study 4 (Multi-scenario behavioral experiment): α = .90

All values comfortably surpass the standard threshold of .70 recommended by Nunnally and Bernstein (1994) for social science research, with Studies 2 and 4 meeting the stringent .85+ criteria required for high-stakes diagnostic testing. The variation in alpha across studies reflects differences in context, scenario intensity, and sample compositions, yet consistently affirms that the three items function harmoniously.

Composite Reliability

Because Cronbach's alpha may underestimate reliability in scales with small item counts due to its assumption of tau-equivalence, composite reliability (CR) was evaluated within the CFA frameworks. Across all three studies, composite reliability values closely paralleled the alpha coefficients (> .80), indicating high internal consistency and demonstrating that the three items reliably reflect the construct without redundant item bloat.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the Patronage Reduction Intention Scale was rigorously examined through structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) techniques using covariance-based estimation methods.

Model Fit and Latent Structure

Ashley and Noble (2014) specified the scale as a first-order, unidimensional reflective measurement model. CFA results confirmed that a single latent factor accounts for the observed covariance among the three items across all tested conditions. Key fit indices confirmed that the hypothesized measurement model fit the data well across all experimental cohorts:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Consistently exceeded the conventional .95 cutoff for exceptional model fit.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Maintained values > .94, confirming model parsimony.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Exhibited acceptable values at or below .06, supporting close approximation in the population.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Remained below the .05 benchmark, indicating minimal residual discrepancy between observed and implied covariance matrices.

Factor Loadings and Parameter Estimates

Individual standardized factor loadings (λ) for the three items were uniformly strong across all studies:

• Item 1 (Regret choice): λ values typically ranged between .72 and .88.
• Item 2 (Visit less often): λ values typically ranged between .75 and .89.
• Item 3 (Stop patronizing): λ values typically ranged between .80 and .93.

Because the scale comprises exactly three indicators, a standalone CFA of the scale in isolation is just-identified (zero degrees of freedom). However, its factor structure was validated in multi-construct measurement models where degrees of freedom were positive, confirming over-identifying restrictions and establishing that the items load onto a dedicated latent construct distinct from retaliation, dissatisfaction, and customer territoriality.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The structural characteristics, administration protocols, and scoring procedures for the Patronage Reduction Intention Scale are detailed below:

• Instrument Name: Patronage Reduction Intention Scale
• Common Acronym: PATRONR (also referenced as the Customer Abandonment Scale)
• Target Population: Consumers, retail shoppers, service establishment patrons, and hospitality clients
• Administration Mode: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized/online survey instrument
• Estimated Completion Time: Under 1 minute (approximately 30 to 45 seconds)
• Item Count: 3 items
• Item Syntax: Contextually flexible template containing customizable brackets: [activity] (e.g., shop, eat, workout) and [facility] (e.g., store, restaurant, gym)
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree, 5 = Strongly Agree)
• Dimensionality: Unidimensional (single composite score)
• Scoring Procedure: Calculate the arithmetic mean across all three items. No items are reverse-coded. Higher aggregate scores reflect stronger customer intentions to decrease visit frequency or permanently abandon the establishment.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Patronage Reduction Intention Scale was published in 2014 by Christy Ashley and Stephanie M. Noble. The copyright for the academic publication is held by the Journal of Retailing and published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of New York University.

Under standard academic conventions, the instrument may be utilized free of charge by academic researchers, doctoral students, and non-commercial investigators for non-profit scholarly research and educational evaluation, provided that appropriate bibliographic credit is attributed to the original authors (Ashley & Noble, 2014) and foundational inspiration (Grégoire & Fisher, 2006). Commercial applications, integration into proprietary customer satisfaction software suites, or corporate consulting deployment may require formal written permission or licensing agreements through Elsevier or the corresponding copyright holders.

12. References

• Ashley, C., & Noble, S. M. (2014). It's closing time: Territorial behaviors from customers in response to front line employees. Journal of Retailing, 90(1), 74–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2013.11.002
• Bagozzi, R. P., & Yi, Y. (1988). On the evaluation of structural equation models. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 16(1), 74–94. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02723327
• Brown, G., Lawrence, T. B., & Robinson, S. L. (2005). Territoriality in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 30(3), 577–594. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2005.17293710
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Grégoire, Y., & Fisher, R. J. (2006). The effects of relationship quality on customer retaliation. Marketing Letters, 17(1), 31–46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-006-4211-0
• Grégoire, Y., & Fisher, R. J. (2008). Customer betrayal and retaliation: When your best customers become your worst enemies. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36(2), 247–261. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-007-0054-0
• Hirschman, A. O. (1970). Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Harvard University Press.
• Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer Publishing Company.
• Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric theory (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.
• Rusbult, C. E., Farrell, D., Rogers, G., & Mainous, A. G. (1988). Impact of exchange variables on exit, voice, loyalty, and neglect: An integrative model of responses to declining job satisfaction. Academy of Management Journal, 31(3), 599–627. https://doi.org/10.2307/255985
• Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2004). Beyond valence in customer dissatisfaction: A review and new findings on behavioral responses to regret and disappointment in failed services. Journal of Business Research, 57(4), 445–455. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0148-2963(02)00278-3
• Zeithaml, V. A., Berry, L. L., & Parasuraman, A. (1996). The behavioral consequences of service quality. Journal of Marketing, 60(2), 31–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299606000203

13. Items of the Scale