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The purpose of this paper is to examine the key sources of poor urban households’ relative success (or failure) in reducing poverty by income generation activities. It specifically investigates the conditions of informal employment in order to understand how and to what extent they affect households’ chances of success.

The data were drawn from interviews with 17 low-income households randomly selected from an informal gecekondu settlement based in the capital city of Turkey.

The research challenges the dominant viewpoint, which attributes success to having fewer dependants or more resources. It shows that success depends more on the benefit delivery capacity of resources and this depends largely on wider structural factors. Informal employment is found to constitute one key structural factor, which limits households’ chances of success to a greater extent than formal employment not only through condemning them to low pay but also through imposing more restrictions upon their access to state welfare.

The case study has significant implications for poverty research and measurement since it reinforces the idea that an improved understanding of poverty and its causes requires a multi-dimensional approach that takes into account the conditions of work extending beyond pay.

The study shows that substantial improvement upon the lives of poor households requires changes at the macro-level, and the adoption of an employment-centred approach where the priority is given to the creation of jobs with decent working conditions, tighter labour market regulation and effective enforcement of these regulations.

Through a qualitative as well as quantitative exploration of low-income households living in the periphery of the Turkish capital, the study empirically challenges the conventional wisdom about urban survival which overemphasises the resilience of poor people. It also contributes to the less developed parts of the research literature on informal employment through demonstrating its poverty-inducing effects. Furthermore, the study makes a theoretical contribution by developing a new conceptual framework that places informal employment within the wider context of household resources, livelihoods and poverty.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the effect of store messiness and human crowding on shoppers' competitive behaviours, in-store hoarding and in-store hiding, through the mediating effect of perceived scarcity and perceived competition.

2 (store messiness: messy × tidy) × 2 (human crowding: high × low) between-subject factorial experiment was conducted online to manipulate retail store atmospheric factors. A total of 154 responses were collected through Amazon MTurk. The hypotheses were analysed using ANOVA and PROCESS (Hayes, 2013) procedure.

Results suggest that store messiness and human crowding within a fast-fashion store lead to perception of scarcity and competition that further affects competitive behaviours. When consumers experience store messiness, they are likely to hide merchandise in store, thus making it inaccessible for other consumers. Further, when they experience human crowding in the store, they feel that the products will be gone immediately so they have a tendency to hoard them.

This study examined the effects of scarcity perception by studying the case of fast-fashion retailers; generalizability needs to be established across different contexts.

Retailers by manipulating human crowding and store messiness can create a perception of scarcity in their stores, thus enhancing sales. However, they should also pay attention to deviant behaviours such as in-store hoarding and in-store hiding as these behaviours may decrease the store sales.

This research contributed to the retailing literature by finding a significant relationship between human crowding, store messiness and competitive behaviours through perceived scarcity and competition.