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As consumer is a countable noun, is consumer or consumers the right word in this sentence and why?

The final delivery service is one work aspect that is needed to be completed partially through consumer effort.

The final delivery service is one work aspect that is needed to be completed partially through consumers effort.

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    Your first version is correct (it's using "consumer" as a "noun adjunct" to adjectivally modify "effort"). Your second version is incorrectly punctuated, because it should include the possessive apostrophe consumers' effort = effort made by / associated with consumers. But although it's "syntactically valid", that "corrected" second version isn't normally used in your exact context here. Not that you can tell whether there's a possessive apostrophe in the spoken version of #2, but we don't usually use plurals in such "noun adjunct" constructions.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Nov 7, 2021 at 14:34
  • Can you please explain what you mean in that sentence? Thanks.
    – Lambie
    Commented Nov 7, 2021 at 15:36
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    Consumer effort is a less common collocation than, say, customer satisfaction. But idiomatically / syntactically, they're exactly the same - singular nouns representing multiple / plural real-world consumers / customers, used adjectivally to modify the "head" noun (effort, satisfaction).
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Nov 7, 2021 at 16:13

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With some exceptions, nouns used as adjectives - to modify other nouns - are mostly singular. For example, 'customer service'. In your specific example, 'consumer effort' would be understood to be the effort made by consumers in general, and there is no need to pluralise it. Remember that 'consumer effort' doesn't necessarily mean more than one consumer, anyway.

There are other contexts where you could use the same words in a different way and this may not apply. For example, in UK schools, it is common to have a "parents association". It would seem unusual to say "parent" when most children have two parents, and could sound exlusionary. Likewise, in similar contexts, you could refer to "consumers' effort" if you wanted to emphasise that the effort was made by a specific, countable number of consumers, rather than just consumers in general.

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Nouns used as adjectives are nearly always used in the singular, even if the meaning is of several of that noun. Consider the many compound nouns you're familiar with where the first noun suggests many of those things, but are all singular: classroom, computer store, car wash, card holder, costume designer, and so forth. A "computer store" is a store for computers, not for just one computer, but "computer" is singular because it's not the root noun.

In your example, "consumer" is used as an adjective to modify "effort", so it should be singular.

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  • What about 'parents association' or 'arms race'?
    – Astralbee
    Commented Nov 8, 2021 at 9:11
  • @Astralbee Good point with "parents association". I'll adjust my answer and undo my downvote on your answer, if you wouldn't mind doing a trivial edit to it. "Arms" is always a plural word when it means weapons.
    – gotube ♦
    Commented Nov 8, 2021 at 16:13

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