Attitude Toward Shopping at the Store

1. Abstract

The Attitude Toward Shopping at the Store (ATSTS) scale is a concise, psychometrically validated three-item self-report instrument engineered to assess a consumer’s experiential, hedonic, and exploratory orientation toward a brick-and-mortar retail environment. Introduced by Mathias C. Streicher, Zachary Estes, and Oliver B. Büttner (2021) in the Journal of Retailing, the scale was operationalized to evaluate how physical store interventions—specifically haptic affordances and tactile blocking mechanisms—modulate consumer attitudes and in-store navigation behaviors. The scale captures the degree to which an individual perceives shopping within a designated commercial space as playful, engaging, and conducive to unconstrained browsing. Measured along a 7-point Likert response continuum ranging from 1 (Strongly disagree) to 7 (Strongly agree), the instrument yields a single composite index computed by averaging all items. Despite its brevity, the ATSTS demonstrates robust psychometric properties, including high internal consistency reliability (α ≥ .85), stable unidimensional factor structure confirmed via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and strong construct validity evidenced by its convergence with prolonged in-store dwell time, tactile engagement, basket size, and unplanned purchasing. The instrument serves as a parsimonious, non-intrusive metric for retail researchers, consumer psychologists, and visual merchandisers investigating store atmospheres, customer experience (CX) design, and the psychological mechanisms mediating sensory marketing stimuli and shopping trajectories.

2. Keywords

Attitude Toward Shopping at the Store, Hedonic Shopping, Exploratory Browsing, Consumer Behavior, Store Atmosphere, Haptic Marketing, Retail Psychology, Customer Experience, In-Store Decision Making, Psychometrics

3. Authors

The Attitude Toward Shopping at the Store scale was developed and validated by:

• Mathias C. Streicher — Department of Strategic Management, Marketing and Tourism, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria. (Email: [email protected]).
• Zachary Estes — Department of Marketing, EDHEC Business School, Lille/Nice, France. (Email: [email protected]).
• Oliver B. Büttner — Department of Psychology, Organizational and Social Psychology, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany. (Email: [email protected]).

4. Purpose

The primary objective of the Attitude Toward Shopping at the Store (ATSTS) scale is to quantify consumer affective and exploratory valuations of physical store environments. Traditional retail evaluation scales have predominantly privileged utilitarian metrics—such as functional efficiency, pricing perception, checkout speed, and product availability—often failing to isolate the intrinsic, hedonic pleasure elicited by the shopping environment itself. Grounded in the reality that modern retailing operates as an experience economy, the ATSTS was formulated to measure how physical interactions, visual layouts, and atmospheric designs cultivate an exploratory shopping mindset.

In empirical and applied research settings, the ATSTS resolves a long-standing methodological challenge: measuring store-level affective responses without overburdening shoppers. In real-world retail field experiments, deploying lengthy diagnostic inventories often induces respondent fatigue, distorts naturalistic shopping behavior, and increases attrition rates. By condensing the core facets of hedonic engagement and browsing receptivity into three carefully calibrated items, the ATSTS facilitates rapid field administration while retaining the psychometric rigor required to detect subtle experimental manipulations.

The theoretical and practical applications of the ATSTS include:

• Sensory Marketing and Embodied Cognition: Quantifying how sensory interventions—such as haptic enablers (e.g., open product displays) or sensory inhibitors (e.g., shopping baskets that occupy shoppers’ hands)—alter cognitive and affective appraisals of the store.
• Store Atmosphere and Retail Design: Assessing consumer responses to alterations in ambient factors, including background music, olfactory cues, lighting design, aisle width, and architectural navigability.
• Prediction of In-Store Behavioral Metrics: Serving as a robust mediating or moderating variable between environmental atmospheric cues and concrete behavioral outcomes, such as unplanned purchasing, in-store dwell time, interaction frequency with merchandise, and total expenditure.
• Retail Diagnostics and Auditing: Providing commercial practitioners with a continuous benchmark to diagnose whether retail spaces are perceived as dry, utilitarian transactions centers versus engaging, recreational destinations.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the ATSTS is a unidimensional affective-exploratory state labeled Hedonic and Exploratory Store Attitude. This construct reflects the consumer’s appraisal of the store environment as a source of intrinsic sensory gratification, diversion, and playful exploration. The construct synthesizes two complementary paradigms within consumer psychology: hedonic shopping value and exploratory consumer behavior.

1. Hedonic Playfulness and Fun

The first dimension of this construct pertains to the perception of shopping as an intrinsically rewarding activity characterized by amusement, positive affect, and entertainment. In classic psychological terms, hedonic consumption entails facets of consumer behavior relating to multisensory, fantasy, and emotive aspects of product and store engagement (Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982). When individuals experience a store as fun and entertaining, their cognitive focus shifts away from cost-benefit calculations, task completion, and time pressure toward immediate experiential pleasure. The ATSTS evaluates this experiential state directly through items probing whether shopping in the environment is “fun” and “entertaining.”

2. Exploratory Browsing Orientation

The second dimension targets the environmental affordance for exploratory browsing. Browsing represents in-store examination of merchandise without an immediate or explicit intent to purchase (Bloch & Richins, 1983). Within retail environments, browsing behavior is deeply intertwined with visual search, tactile inspection, and serendipitous discovery. When consumers perceive a store as “a great place to browse,” the environment effectively signals psychological safety, low pressure, and high stimulus variety, encouraging open-ended movement and sensory exploration.

Together, these facets constitute an integrated cognitive-affective schema: shoppers do not merely process the retail environment as a depot for acquiring goods, but as an engaging experiential landscape that facilitates curiosity, stimulation, and leisure. In contrast to utilitarian shopping attitudes, a high score on the ATSTS reflects elevated state curiosity, receptivity to ambient stimuli, and greater tolerance for leisurely navigation.

6. Theoretical Framework

The ATSTS is anchored at the intersection of several foundational frameworks within environmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and consumer research.

1. The Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) Model

The overarching architecture of the scale is situated within the classic Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) paradigm formulated by Mehrabian and Russell (1974) and adapted to retail environments by Donovan and Rossiter (1982). In this model, environmental stimuli (S; e.g., retail store architecture, lighting, product accessibility, haptic opportunities) influence the internal emotional and cognitive state of the organism (O), which in turn drives behavioral responses (R; approach vs. avoidance behaviors, such as time spent, money spent, and exploratory movement). The ATSTS operationalizes the organismic state (O)—specifically the affective pleasure and arousal induced by the store—which acts as the proximal driver of approach behaviors, including touch, prolonged browsing, and basket expansion.

2. Hedonic Consumption Theory

Grounded in the seminal work of Holbrook and Hirschman (1982) and later psychometric operationalizations by Babin, Darden, and Griffin (1994), retail interactions are characterized along a continuum between utilitarian (functional, task-related, rational) and hedonic (emotional, experiential, recreational) values. The ATSTS directly isolates the hedonic appraisal, capturing the experiential wealth derived from in-store engagement, entertainment value, and diversion from mundane routines.

3. Grounded Cognition and Haptic Affordance Theory

In the specific context of Streicher, Estes, and Büttner (2021), the ATSTS is integrated with theories of grounded cognition and tactile exploration (Peck & Childers, 2003). When retail environments provide haptic affordances (i.e., allowing the hands to be free to touch, grasp, and physically interact with merchandise), consumers experience heightened feelings of psychological ownership, sensory gratification, and spontaneous exploration. Conversely, when consumers carry handheld shopping baskets or have their hands physically occupied (haptic blocking), tactile interaction is constrained, dampening hedonic pleasure and exploratory browsing. The ATSTS serves as the primary psychometric gauge of this experiential fluctuation.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the ATSTS has been rigorously evaluated across both controlled laboratory simulations and high-fidelity field experiments conducted in active retail environments.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by the scale’s strong and consistent alignment with theoretically related constructs. Across validation studies, the ATSTS correlates positively and significantly with:

• Overall Store Satisfaction: Shoppers reporting higher ATSTS scores exhibit significantly higher global evaluations of store quality and satisfaction (typically r > .60, p < .001).
• Product Interaction and Touch Frequency: Observational data confirm that individuals with elevated ATSTS scores engage in significantly more physical contact with displayed merchandise.
• In-Store Browsing Duration: Objective tracking of shopper trajectories demonstrates that higher ATSTS ratings correspond to longer in-store dwell times and broader aisle coverage.
• Unplanned Purchasing: Experiential store attitudes captured by the ATSTS mediate the relationship between retail sensory interventions and spontaneous purchases.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been demonstrated by showing that the ATSTS measures a construct distinct from purely utilitarian or economic store evaluations. When tested against scales evaluating price fairness, functional layout convenience, or brand equity, the ATSTS exhibits moderate to low correlations (typically r < .35), confirming that it isolates affective-exploratory attitudes rather than cognitive appraisals of functional utility. Furthermore, average variance extracted (AVE) analyses demonstrate that the variance captured by the construct exceeds the square of its correlations with competing retail attitude dimensions, adhering strictly to the Fornell and Larcker (1981) criteria.

Predictive and Ecological Validity

The ecological validity of the scale is exceptionally high because its psychometric validation was executed directly within active brick-and-mortar stores (such as grocery stores and lifestyle retail spaces). In Streicher et al. (2021), experimental manipulations involving shopping equipment (e.g., carrying a handheld basket vs. pushing a wheeled cart) exerted statistically significant downstream effects on consumer spending and item count; the ATSTS successfully captured the underlying shift in store attitude, demonstrating its predictive utility for real economic outcomes.

8. Reliability

The Attitude Toward Shopping at the Store scale demonstrates outstanding internal consistency reliability across diverse demographic samples, retail environments, and experimental conditions.

Internal Consistency

• Cronbach’s Alpha (α): Across the empirical studies reported by Streicher, Estes, and Büttner (2021), the three-item instrument consistently yielded Cronbach’s alpha coefficients well in excess of the standard .70 and .80 psychometric benchmarks. In the primary field investigations, Cronbach’s α ranged between .85 and .91, indicating very high internal coherence among the three indicators.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling and CFA assessments report composite reliability indices exceeding .88, further confirming that the three items reliably reflect the underlying latent hedonic construct.
• Inter-Item Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations across all three items consistently exceed .65, demonstrating that each individual item contributes substantially to the overall measurement without creating redundancy or multicollinearity issues.

Measurement Stability

Given the brief nature of the instrument, item-level variance remains stable across both post-shopping retrospective evaluations and immediate exit surveys. Although retail attitudes are naturally subject to state-level fluctuations based on environmental manipulations, test-retest assessments under stable, unmanipulated conditions confirm satisfactory stability across short-term evaluation intervals.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the ATSTS has been substantiated through rigorous Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Factor Structure and Model Fit

Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirm a strictly unidimensional factor structure. In exploratory factor analyses using principal axis factoring with promax or varimax rotation, all three items load onto a single dominant factor with an eigenvalue significantly greater than 1 (accounting for over 75% of the total item variance).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) conducted in structural equation modeling environments (e.g., AMOS, Mplus, lavaan) reveals that the one-factor model exhibits exemplary fit to empirical data:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): > .98
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): > .97
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): < .05 (with 90% confidence intervals spanning .000 to .075)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): < .03

Factor Loadings

Standardized factor loadings (λ) across the three items are uniformly high, typically falling between .80 and .93. The table below illustrates representative CFA parameters observed in empirical retail research:

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Attitude Toward Shopping at the Store (ATSTS)
• Instrument Classification: Self-report psychometric rating scale
• Target Population: Retail shoppers, consumers, adult retail store visitors
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil exit questionnaire, mobile intercept survey, or computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI)
• Administration Time: Approximately 30 to 60 seconds
• Item Count: 3 items
• Dimensionality: Single-factor (unidimensional: hedonic and exploratory store attitude)
• Authentic Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (e.g., 1 = Strongly disagree, 7 = Strongly agree)
• Scoring Rules: All three items are positively keyed. There are no reverse-coded items. The overall index is calculated by computing the unweighted arithmetic mean of the three items:
  ATSTS Index = (Item 1 + Item 2 + Item 3) / 3

  Possible composite scores range from 1.00 to 7.00, where higher scores signify a more positive, entertaining, hedonic, and exploration-oriented attitude toward shopping at the store.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

Publication Year: 2021

Original Publication: Journal of Retailing, Volume 97, Issue 1, Pages 50–65.

Copyright and Usage Permissions: The scale is copyrighted by the authors (Mathias C. Streicher, Zachary Estes, and Oliver B. Büttner) and the publisher (Elsevier Inc. on behalf of New York University). The instrument was published as part of an original empirical research paper in an academic journal. Under standard academic research conventions and fair-use guidelines, the scale may be utilized free of charge for non-commercial, scholarly research, teaching, and scientific investigation, provided that full bibliographic credit is attributed to the original authors and the source publication. Commercial retail auditing, enterprise customer experience benchmarking, or integration into proprietary commercial diagnostic software platforms may require permission from the copyright holders or Elsevier.

12. References

• Babin, B. J., Darden, W. R., & Griffin, M. (1994). Work and/or fun: Measuring hedonic and utilitarian shopping value. Journal of Consumer Research, 20(4), 644–656. https://doi.org/10.1086/209376
• Batra, R., & Ahtola, O. T. (1991). Measuring the hedonic and utilitarian sources of consumer attitudes. Marketing Letters, 2(2), 159–170. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00436035
• Bloch, P. H., & Richins, M. L. (1983). Shopping without purchase: An investigation of consumer browsing behavior. In R. P. Bagozzi & A. M. Tybout (Eds.), NA – Advances in Consumer Research (Vol. 10, pp. 389–393). Association for Consumer Research. https://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/6134
• Donovan, R. J., & Rossiter, J. R. (1982). Store atmosphere: An environmental psychology approach. Journal of Retailing, 58(1), 34–57.
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Holbrook, M. B., & Hirschman, E. C. (1982). The experiential aspects of consumption: Consumer fantasies, feelings, and fun. Journal of Consumer Research, 9(2), 132–140. https://doi.org/10.1086/208906
• Mehrabian, A., & Russell, J. A. (1974). An approach to environmental psychology. MIT Press.
• Peck, J., & Childers, T. L. (2003). To have and to hold: The influence of haptic information on product judgments. Journal of Marketing, 67(2), 35–48. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.67.2.35.18612
• Streicher, M. C., & Estes, Z. (2016). Touch and go: Merely grasping a product increases purchase desire. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 26(4), 550–559. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2016.01.002
• Streicher, M. C., Estes, Z., & Büttner, O. B. (2021). Preventing or supporting consumer touch in retail stores: Effects of haptic blocking and enabling on shopping behavior. Journal of Retailing, 97(1), 50–65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2020.01.003

13. Items of the Scale