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Determining the right number of customers inside a store (i.e. human or customer density) plays a crucial role in retail management strategies. On the one hand, retailers want to maximize the number of visitors they attract in order to optimize returns and profits. On the other hand, ensuring a pleasurable, efficient and COVID-19-proof shopping experience, would go against an excessive concentration of shoppers. Fulfilling both retailer and consumer perspectives requires a delicate balance to be struck. This chapter aims at supporting retailers in making informed decisions, by clarifying the extent to which store layouts influence (perceived) consumer density. Specifically, the chapter illustrates how new technologies and methodologies (i.e. agent-based simulation) can help in predicting a store layout's ability to reduce consumers' perceived in-store spatial density and related perceptions of human crowding, while also ensuring a certain retailers' profitability.

This replication and extension of Hirsch and Gruss examines the impact of spatial density and ambient scent on consumers' spatial perception and anxiety. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A 2 (spatial density: high, low)×3 (ambient scent: no scent, scent associated with spaciousness, scent associated with enclosed spaces) between-participants experimental design was implemented in a laboratory setting. A pretest determined scent selection and manipulation checks were successful.

Spatial perception was influenced by spatial density, but not ambient scent. Ambient scent and spatial density interacted, such that consumers' anxiety levels significantly increased under conditions of low spatial density combined with an ambient scent associated with spaciousness, and directionally increased under conditions of high spatial density combined with ambient scent associated with enclosed space.

This research was conducted in a laboratory setting in order to increase experimental control. An exploration of the strength of the observed effects in a field (retail) setting would be insightful.

Results of this study suggest that retailers need to consider both spatial density and choice of ambient scent carefully in order to reduce consumers' anxiety levels.

This research is one of the few to consider the impact of spatial density and ambient scent on consumers' anxiety levels. The use of a between-participants design and the experimental manipulation of both spatial density and ambient scent results in a more rigorous test of the scent – anxiety relation observed in previous research.

A common tactic employed by retailers to enhance shoppers' purchase intentions is to promote a special offer product for purchase only at certain selected stores. This research aimed to identify the specific processes by which restricting the outlets drives intention to buy.

Three between-subjects experiments examined the effect on purchasing intention of outlet selectivity, as mediated by participants' perceptions of temporal accessibility and geographic accessibility (study 1), and investigated the extent to which decisions to buy might be moderated by the limited number of stores where the item would be available (study 2) and by “limited market,” in which the right to buy a product is restricted to a limited set of consumers (study 3).

The study findings are that joint consideration of the perceived temporal and geographic accessibility of a product generates two possible ways in which availability limited to certain stores makes the product seem hard to get and motivates consumer purchase decisions. However, such effect is confined to conditions in which the distribution of those outlets is low-density. When there was no change in those scores if restrictions were lower, participants' responsiveness to decreased availability was significantly raised by announcing that the chance to buy the product is further limited to “eligible” customers.

This research focused on consumer responses to outlet selectivity, a branch of inquiry that treats an overlooked facet of limited availability and provides useful assistance for developing methods to stimulate consumers' desire to purchase.

This study aims to investigate how density conditions caused by multiple kiosks in shopping mall walkways affect shoppers' shopping outcomes based on psychological reactance theory and behavioural constraint theory.

The experiment uses a one‐factor between‐subjects design with two levels of density conditions (high vs low). A total of 382 respondents participated.

The findings of this paper indicate that respondents perceive the environment with kiosks as crowded and this perception of crowdedness negatively affects their approach behaviour, leading to lower intentions to patronise.

Findings provide practical information to mall managers by indicating that kiosks within a shopping mall negatively affect shopper patronage and approach intentions. Thus, mall managers need to pay more attention to the environmental atmospherics of the mall itself.

The paper is the first empirical research which examines how kiosks within a mall affect shopper shopping responses. The findings of this study add to the existing literature by examining how kiosks within a mall impact shoppers' psychological states and subsequently their approach/avoidance behaviours towards the shopping mall and patronage intention.

Though many conceptual and empirical studies have been conducted on the servicescape, limited research has focused on how the COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped factors influencing the servicescape. This paper aims to propose an extension of Bitner’s original conceptualization, including pandemic-induced physical and social constraints on servicescape in the form of crowding, consumer risk perception during the crisis and their impact on consumers' and employees’ behavioral changes in retail and hospitality sectors.

This paper critically reviewed the past and emerging servicescape and risk literature. It then examines and delineates the concepts of crowding, density and associated risk perceptions to offer an extended servicescape framework. Alongside, scales were proposed to measure the constructs and guidelines given to conduct future empirical studies.

This paper discussed the major impact on servicescape during a pandemic situation, to what extent risk is perceived during consumption and the impact of crowding and store density on employee and customer behavioral responses.

This paper principally contributes by explicitly including specific risk dimensions and crowding and proposes the scales to measure consumers’ understanding of pandemic-induced perceptions of risk, crowding and density within servicescapes for further empirical testing. Alongside this, the identification and concretization of different types of perceived risks under COVID-19 provide critical and useful marketing implications.

This study identifies relevant risk dimensions, proposes crowding as an independent construct apart from servicescape physicality and proposes relevant measures for empirical verification.

A person's optimum stimulation level (OSL) reflects one's desired level of environmental stimulation and predisposition to act in the presence of environments. The purpose of this paper is to propose a comprehensive model, which illustrates that consumers with different levels of OSL have differing evaluations of retail store elements, shopping value and subsequent shopping behaviours.

To examine the relationship between OSL and consumer perceptions and behaviours, interviews were conducted with retail shoppers in Taiwan (n=147).

Taiwanese shoppers with a high OSL were found to have more favourable evaluations of a store's ambient, design, layout and density elements than did consumers with a low OSL. Additionally, the high OSL shoppers reported higher hedonic and utilitarian values from their shopping. Most importantly, the shoppers with a high OSL spent more time and money in stores.

With this research, hopefully retailers will pay even more attention to the ambient, design and layout elements of their stores. In doing so, they might be able to attract more consumers with a high OSL and entice them to spend more money.

The paper contributes to the growing body of international retailing research by examining the effects of shoppers' optimum stimulation levels on their perceptions toward store elements, perceived shopping value, and purchase behaviours. Moreover, a comprehensive framework is put forth to assist future research.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of the body of literature concerning human factors in retail environments and their influence on consumers. Additionally, the authors identify the research gaps in the literature and suggest directions for future research.

This study uses qualitative approaches to provide a comprehensive review of human factors in retail environments.

The review is synthesised based on two main categories: the effects of other customers and the effects of sales associates. The influence of other customers, including the number of customers and social relations, is a significant source of human‐related environmental cues. In addition, existing studies support the importance of the number of sales associates, sales associates' physical attributes, and their behavioural characteristics observed in stores.

This study suggests that retailers need to effectively manage, control and manipulate human‐related environmental factors in order to generate a positive influence on consumers' perceptions towards stores and their behaviours.

This study provides a conceptual framework that integrates various human‐related factors in retail environments and their significant insights in the effective management of these factors identified for researchers and retailers.

Mixed emotions (i.e. consumer ambivalence) play a central role in approach‐avoidance conflicts in retailing. In order to assess how consumer ambivalence impacts shopping behaviour, this paper seeks to conceptualize and investigate the multi‐dimensional antecedents of approach‐avoidance conflicts, experienced by shoppers in changing retail environments, and the importance of approach‐avoidance conflicts for consumers' decision to stay and complete their purchase in that particular shopping channel.

Using a cross‐country study, which compared online and offline consumers, the paper tested the influence of the situation, product, and reference group on shoppers' intentions; and identified how consumers' mixed emotions influenced approach‐avoidance conflicts in different retail settings.

Whereas some distinctions could be drawn between online and offline contexts when examining the impact of market‐related, product‐related and social factors on consumers' decision to shop (H1, H2, H3 and H4), no clear distinction could be drawn between online and offline channels in terms of mediating effects of mixed emotions (H5, H6 and H7). Mixed emotions (ambivalence) did mediate the impact of certain product‐related, market‐related and personal factors on consumers' intention to purchase.

Retailers need to reduce the impact of consumers' emotional responses to the retail setting where mixed emotions are likely to lead to consumers leaving the stores. For online shops, those retailers are successful who are able to induce behavioural reactions that make consumers return and explore the web site and not use it for search only.

Responding to calls for further research on mixed emotions and their consequences, the paper captures the complex impact of consumers' mixed emotions on approach‐avoidance conflicts, and thereby extends earlier work on consumer ambivalence.