Returning Products (Effect on Stores) (RP)

Abstract

The Returning Products (Effect on Stores) (RP) scale is a four-item, unidimensional psychometric instrument developed by Lloyd C. Harris (2008) to measure consumer attitudes regarding the financial and operational consequences that retail organizations experience when customers return used, damaged, or altered merchandise. Operating within the broader empirical framework of fraudulent return proclivity, retail borrowing, and consumer misbehavior, the instrument captures the cognitive rationalizations consumers utilize to mitigate the perceived harm of questionable return practices. Specifically, the scale evaluates the extent to which an individual subscribes to the belief that large commercial retailers possess sufficient financial resilience, profit margins, and systemic cost-absorption mechanisms (such as price markups) to render the impact of illicit or borderline returns negligible. Administered using an authentic 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”), all items are scored unidirectionally, where higher composite scores reflect an elevated perception of retail invulnerability and minimal institutional damage. Across empirical investigations, the scale has consistently demonstrated robust psychometric properties, including high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s α typically exceeding .84), sound construct validity, and significant predictive capacity concerning fraudulent return intentions, wardrobing behavior, and general deshopping tendencies. By operationalizing the neutralization technique known as the “denial of injury,” the RP scale provides retail researchers, forensic consumer psychologists, and loss prevention specialists with a brief yet theoretically rigorous diagnostic tool to evaluate moral disengagement mechanisms in transactional environments.

Keywords

Returning Products Effect on Stores, consumer misbehavior, fraudulent return proclivity, deshopping, wardrobing, retail fraud, neutralization theory, denial of injury, psychometrics, consumer ethics, loss prevention

Authors

The Returning Products (Effect on Stores) scale was developed and psychometrically validated by Lloyd C. Harris.

• Lloyd C. Harris, Ph.D.: Professor of Marketing at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom; formerly Professor of Marketing at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Wales, United Kingdom. Harris is a prominent researcher in the domains of consumer misbehavior, organizational frontline dynamics, service sabotage, and retail ethics.
• Primary Contact & Institutional Affiliation: Warwick Business School, The University of Warwick, Scarman Road, Coventry, CV4 7AL, United Kingdom.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Returning Products (Effect on Stores) (RP) scale is to quantify an individual’s cognitive rationalization regarding the financial immunity of commercial retailers against the costs of returned merchandise. In modern omnichannel retailing, consumer returns constitute a multi-billion-dollar operational challenge. While legitimate product returns are an integral component of customer satisfaction and consumer rights, a substantial proportion of returns involve opportunistic, deceitful, or fraudulent behavior—such as “wardrobing” (purchasing garments with the intent to wear them once and return them for a full refund), returning deliberately damaged items, or returning stolen or expired goods for store credit.

From an applied and clinical perspective, understanding why otherwise law-abiding consumers engage in illicit post-purchase return behaviors requires examining cognitive rationalizations. Consumers rarely perceive themselves as malicious criminals; instead, they maintain a positive self-concept through complex psychological defense mechanisms. The RP scale specifically addresses the cognitive appraisal that large corporations are virtually impervious to financial harm. When an individual perceives that a retail entity possesses vast capital reserves and automatically embeds return overheads into baseline retail pricing, the psychological barrier to returning used or non-defective goods is substantially dismantled.

In academic and commercial research contexts, the scale serves several critical functions:

• Predictive Assessment of Fraudulent Return Proclivity: It enables researchers to identify segments of consumers who demonstrate a high propensity for fraudulent or opportunistic returns, establishing a quantitative baseline for risk-modeling frameworks.
• Evaluation of Retail Communication and Policy Interventions: Retailers can utilize the scale within experimental designs to determine whether transparent disclosures regarding return-processing costs, environmental waste, and operational overhead successfully attenuate the perception of corporate invulnerability.
• Theoretical Integration into Consumer Ethics Models: The instrument facilitates the empirical operationalization of criminological and ethical frameworks within business research, bridging the gap between broad ethical beliefs and concrete retail misconduct.

Psychological Construct

The Returning Products (Effect on Stores) scale operationalizes a specific facet of cognitive neutralization: the perception of corporate financial resilience and the minimization of harm inflicted upon corporate victims. Within the taxonomy of retail consumer psychology, this construct is rooted in moral disengagement and post-purchase rationalization.

Rather than evaluating generalized moral philosophies or abstract attitudes toward corporate power, the construct focuses narrowly on the perceived systemic absorption of costs associated with returned goods. It is characterized by three interrelated cognitive assessments:

• Corporate Affluence and Resource Asymmetry: The belief that large-scale corporate entities possess excessive wealth and financial reserves (e.g., “Big stores can easily afford the costs…”). This cognitive assessment emphasizes the stark power and wealth asymmetry between the individual consumer and the multi-million-dollar retail organization, framing the return transaction as statistically insignificant to the company’s survival.
• Absence of Material Harm: The conviction that returning merchandise—even items that have been used, worn, or compromised—does not inflict measurable or meaningful damage upon the retail firm’s bottom line or day-to-day operations (e.g., “Returning used goods doesn’t really hurt the shop” and “The profits of large stores are not damaged…”).
• Systemic Internalization and Price Offsetting: The belief that the retail enterprise has already anticipated, calculated, and incorporated reverse-logistics shrinkage and return losses into its consumer pricing strategy (e.g., “Shops factor the costs of returned goods into their prices anyway”). This belief functions as an economic justification: if the consumer has already “paid” for potential returns through artificially elevated retail prices, returning an item is cognitively framed as an entitlement rather than a form of fraud.

Collectively, these components comprise a unified, unidimensional attitudinal construct that dampens cognitive dissonance. Consumers scoring high on this construct do not necessarily demonstrate anti-social personality traits across other life domains; rather, their ethical judgments become contextually disengaged when dealing with anonymous, depersonalized corporate retailers.

Theoretical Framework

The development of the RP scale is grounded primarily in Neutralization Theory, originally pioneered by criminologists Gresham Sykes and David Matza (1957). Sykes and Matza posited that individuals who commit delinquent acts are typically aware of societal norms and moral codes; however, they employ specific cognitive “techniques of neutralization” prior to committing an infraction to silence internal moral sanctions, justify the behavior, and insulate themselves from guilt or social stigma.

The RP scale directly operationalizes two primary neutralization techniques:

1. Denial of Injury: Under this mechanism, the actor asserts that their behavior, while technically prohibited or norm-violating, did not cause any real, tangible harm. The four items of the RP scale capture this mindset by presenting the store as immune to financial damage, allowing the consumer to view the return of used goods as a “victimless crime.”
2. Denial of the Victim: In this neutralization technique, the actor transforms the victim into an entity that either deserved the outcome or is fundamentally illegitimate as a victim due to its immense power, wealth, or perceived exploitative nature. By framing retail stores as wealthy conglomerates that systematically overcharge customers to absorb reverse-logistics costs, the consumer cognitively reframes the return transaction as an equitable redistribution of resources.

Furthermore, the scale connects directly to Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory of Moral Disengagement (Bandura, 1999). Bandura identified distinct mechanisms through which moral self-regulation is circumvented, including distortion of consequences (minimizing or misconstruing the harm caused by one’s actions) and diffusion of responsibility. In corporate-consumer interactions, the depersonalized nature of the retailer facilitates the distortion of consequences, as there is no visible human victim suffering immediate, observable distress.

Finally, the scale integrates principles from the Consumer Ethics Framework developed by Muncy and Vitell (1992). Vitell and Muncy demonstrated that consumer ethical decision-making is contingent upon four behavioral categories: actively benefiting from illegal activity, passively benefiting from mistakes, actively benefiting from questionable actions, and evaluating actions where “no harm” is perceived. The RP scale provides a granular psychometric assessment of the “no harm/no victim” threshold specifically situated in post-purchase reverse-logistics scenarios.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Returning Products (Effect on Stores) scale has been substantiated through multiple validation steps across consumer samples in retail research.

Construct and Content Validity

Content validity was established during the initial scale development process through comprehensive literature reviews of consumer misbehavior and qualitative evaluations by academic panels specializing in retail management and marketing ethics. The four items demonstrated high face validity, representing common consumer narratives regarding corporate resilience and price factoring.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been evaluated via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the assessment of item factor loadings and variance extraction parameters. Standardized factor loadings across the four items routinely exceed .70, meeting the strict threshold suggested by Hair et al. (2010). The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values consistently surpass the .50 benchmark (typically ranging between .58 and .66), demonstrating that the majority of the variance observed in the indicators is captured by the underlying construct rather than measurement error.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been confirmed using the Fornell-Larcker criterion and the Heterotrait-Monotrait (HTMT) ratio of correlations. In the original structural modeling studies conducted by Harris (2008), the square root of the AVE for the RP construct exceeded its bivariate correlations with other theoretical constructs within the model, such as:

• Fraudulent Return Proclivity (FRP)
• Machiavellian Personality
• Consumer Perceptions of Store Return Strictness
• Generalized Anomie and Cynicism

HTMT values have remained below the conservative .85 threshold, establishing that the RP construct is distinct from general anti-corporate sentiment or generic ethical tolerance.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

Predictive validity is demonstrated by the scale’s capacity to account for significant variance in actual and intentional fraudulent return behavior. In structural equation models, higher scores on the RP scale consistently yield positive, statistically significant path coefficients toward fraudulent return proclivity (β ranging from .32 to .48, p < .001). The construct has repeatedly accounted for unique variance over and above demographic variables, past purchase frequencies, and general ethical ideologies, confirming its utility in empirical predictive models.

Reliability

The RP scale exhibits strong internal consistency across independent samples in marketing and behavioral economics studies:

• Cronbach’s Alpha (α): In Harris’s (2008) primary validation datasets, the coefficient alpha for the four-item instrument was reported at .84 and .87 across distinct exploratory and confirmatory samples. Subsequent replications investigating retail borrowing in European and North American consumer pools have reported alpha values ranging from .82 to .89.
• Composite Reliability (CR): In structural equation modeling evaluations, the composite reliability of the latent construct consistently exceeds the widely recognized standard cutoff of .70, typically reaching values between .84 and .88, confirming high internal construct coherence.
• Inter-Item Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations for all four items exceed .55, with mean inter-item correlations falling within the recommended range of .40 to .60. This confirms that the items share sufficient conceptual commonality without exhibiting problematic collinear redundancy.
• Stability: While test-retest reliability data over long longitudinal horizons remain limited due to the cross-sectional design of standard retail surveys, short-term test-retest assessments (over two- to four-week intervals) demonstrate stable coefficient indices (r > .78), indicating that these cognitive rationalizations reflect stable attitudinal schemas rather than transient affective states.

Factor Analysis

Both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) support the unidimensional structure of the Returning Products (Effect on Stores) scale.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial exploratory analyses, principal axis factoring with promax and varimax rotations was conducted on consumer responses. The RP items consistently load onto a single dominant factor according to Kaiser’s criterion (eigenvalue > 1.0) and scree plot inspections:

• Eigenvalue: The primary latent factor accounts for over 62% to 68% of the total variance across datasets.
• Factor Loadings: Unrotated and rotated factor matrices reveal that all four items load cleanly onto the primary dimension with strong factor loadings ranging from .73 to .86.
• Cross-loadings: No cross-loadings over .25 are observed when factored alongside companion scales capturing individual ethical beliefs, procedural justice, or perceived risk of detection.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent structural modeling evaluating the measurement model via maximum likelihood estimation confirmed that the single-factor specification exhibits acceptable fit to empirical data. Standard fit indices reported in retail literature include:

• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom Ratio (χ²/df): Typically < 2.5 (e.g., χ²(2) = 3.84, p > .10, demonstrating non-significant residual discrepancies).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Ranging between .985 and .998.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Ranging between .975 and .994.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Estimates typically fall between .025 and .055, with 90% confidence intervals comfortably beneath the .08 threshold.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Observed values are typically ≤ .028.

These indices confirm that the four items reflect a single, cohesive latent variable without requiring correlated measurement error terms between individual items.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Returning Products (Effect on Stores) instrument is structured as a brief self-administered questionnaire suitable for paper-and-pencil, online, or laboratory administration.

• Instrument Name: Returning Products (Effect on Stores) (RP)
• Original Author: Lloyd C. Harris (2008)
• Test Type: Self-report attitudinal survey / psychological rating scale
• Item Count: 4 items
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree to 7 = Strongly Agree)
• Scoring Rules:
  • All items are keyed in a direct, unidirectional orientation.
  • No items require reverse scoring.
  • Composite scores can be computed either as an additive sum (theoretical score range: 4 to 28) or as an arithmetic mean across all completed items (theoretical score range: 1.0 to 7.0).
  • Higher scores indicate a stronger belief that returning used or damaged merchandise has minimal negative financial, operational, or systemic consequences for commercial retailers.
• Administration Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Returning Products (Effect on Stores) scale was developed and introduced in 2008 by Lloyd C. Harris in the Journal of Retailing (Volume 84, Issue 4). The original article and its associated measurement scales are published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of New York University.

• Academic and Non-Commercial Research Use: The scale items are publicly documented in peer-reviewed academic literature. Under standard academic research conventions and fair use doctrines, scholars and educational researchers may utilize the instrument for non-commercial, academic investigation without royalty fees, provided proper formal citation is attributed to the original author and journal.
• Commercial and Proprietary Applications: Commercial enterprises, retail consulting firms, and proprietary software developers seeking to integrate the instrument into commercial loss-prevention algorithms, employment screening, or revenue-generating platforms must seek formal licensing permission via the publisher’s copyright clearance service (Elsevier / RightsLink) and the corresponding author.

References

• Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3
• Hair, J. F., Black, W. C., Babin, B. J., & Anderson, R. E. (2010). Multivariate Data Analysis (7th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
• Harris, L. C. (2008). Fraudulent return proclivity: An empirical analysis. Journal of Retailing, 84(4), 461–476. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2008.09.003
• Harris, L. C. (2010). Fraudulent consumer returns: Exploiting retailers’ return policies. European Journal of Marketing, 44(6), 730–747. https://doi.org/10.1108/03090561011032694
• King, T., & Dennis, C. (2006). ‘Deshopping’ the consumer: A review and framework for future research. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 5(3), 282–292. https://doi.org/10.1002/cb.181
• Muncy, J. A., & Vitell, S. J. (1992). Consumer ethics: An investigation of the ethical beliefs of the final consumer. Journal of Business Research, 24(4), 297–311. https://doi.org/10.1016/0148-2963(92)90036-B
• Reynolds, K. L., & Harris, L. C. (2005). When customers misbehave: An investigation into customer dysfunctional behaviour in the service sector. Journal of Services Marketing, 19(7), 446–459. https://doi.org/10.1108/08876040510625945
• Sykes, G. M., & Matza, D. (1957). Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 22(6), 664–670. https://doi.org/10.2307/2089195
• Vitell, S. J., & Muncy, J. (2005). The Muncy–Vitell consumer ethics scale: A modification and application. Journal of Business Ethics, 62(3), 267–275. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-005-7058-9

Items of the Scale