Revisiting the supermarket in-store customer shopping experience

Marketing academics and practitioners agree on customer experience as a means for differentiation. The customer experience is challenging for retailers because it is influenced by elements which the retailer can control and elements which are beyond their control. This paper deals with the in-store customer shopping experience of a supermarket and found that merchandise assortment, interaction with staff and the internal shop environment and customers' in-shop emotions have a strong positive and significant relationship with cumulative customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction has a strong positive relationship with repatronage intentions. A comparison of the current study's findings with those of two similar earlier studies yielded considerable differences. The major contributions of this study are firstly the identification of differences over time of the elements of an in-store customer shopping experience in a supermarket and the role of positive emotions that are caused by supermarket shopping environments.