How do consumers define retail centre convenience?

The 1980s and 1990s have been labelled the ‘decades of convenience’. In spite of this, retail research has often indicated that when compared with other shopping motives, consumers assign relatively less importance to the convenience of a retail centre when deciding where to shop. Such counter-intuitive findings could be due to the way in which academics have defined retail centre convenience. This study develops and tests an alternative definition. Comprising 16 attributes, it represents a fourfold increase over any existing definition. Subsequent empirical analysis provides strong support for the alternative definition, with respondents indicating that 14 of the test attributes serve as convenience attributes. The failure of existing definitions to incorporate so many of these attributes is a likely explanation behind the counter-intuitive proposition that convenience often serves as a less-than-salient determinant of retail centre patronage.