YOUTH 2020 - The position of young people in Slovenia

Consumer behaviour and consumer activities  299 RUDI KLANJŠEK, TOMAŽ DEŽELAN, MATJAŽ URŠIČ, AND NINA VOMBERGAR 9. CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR AND CONSUMER ACTIVITIES 9.1 YOUTH CONSUMPTION Some authors (cf. Batat, 2010) argue that today’s young people have on averagemoremoney available to spend according to their “needs”, which leads them to form their own purchasing habits at an earlier age. Shop- ping and consumption are therefore becoming part of their everyday lives. The rise of new technologies, which have made browsing and buy- ing products extremely easy, together with tailored and aggressive ad- vertising, is also contributing to extensive consumption. The fact that the location of this shopping is increasingly moving online is also confirmed by the data in this study. The results show that only 11.5% of young people do not shop online or are not informed a priori about the products they want to buy. There were almost half (46.1%) of such young people in 2010. Eurostat data covering a slightly different group in 2019 (young people aged 16-29) show a similar picture. In that study, 18% of respondents did not use the internet for shopping and product information in 2019, which is a slightly lower percentage than the EU-28 average (23%). For the majority of Slovenian young people, the time spent shopping on- line ranges from 15 minutes to 1 hour per day (79.5%) and has increased compared to 2010. It bears mentioning that people tend to have a rather poor idea of the amount of time they spend in front of screens (cf. An- drews et al., 2015), which means that self-estimates are likely to be un- derestimates. On average, young women spend more time shopping on- line (p < 0.05) than their male counterparts.