The Impacts of Perceived Retail Crowding on Store Satisfaction and Patronage Intention: The Moderating Effects of Tolerance for Crowding and Shopping Motivation

Most research on crowding has focused on the negative aspects of crowding in a retail setting. This paper provides a conceptual model that gives insight in the effects of perceived retail crowding on consumer store patronage intension through mediation of emotions (i.e., pleasure, arousal and dominance) and store satisfaction in supermarket. For the purpose of achieving these research objectives, mall intercept interview was conducted on 205 supermarket consumers in J city, Korea. The proposed structural relationship among perceived retail crowding, emotions, store satisfaction and patronage intention were analyzed by using structural equation modeling with SmartPLS 3.0 Also, we explored the underlying moderating effects of tolerance level for crowding and shopping motivation on store patronage intention. The results of this study demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed model in the relationship of perceived retail crowding-emotions-store satisfaction-patronage intention under actual retail setting. The study found that the effect of perceived retail crowding on store satisfaction is mediated by the emotional dimension of arousal, and emotions (i.e., pleasure, arousal and dominance) on patronage intention mediated by store satisfaction. Significant moderating effects of utilitarian shopping motivation on patronage intention was found for pleasure, also hedonic shopping motivation on patronage intention was found for arousal and dominance. Moderating effect of tolerance level for crowding doesn't exist between perceived crowding and emotions.