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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.

The paper examines coping strategies that consumers use within crowded retail stores. Specifically, this study explores and identifies coping strategies that consumers use, investigates whether the Folkman or Duhachek coping frameworks adequately capture all of the ways consumers cope, and looks at the implications these coping strategies may have on consumers and retailers.

A three‐stage qualitative study was conducted. Stage One consisted of informal interviews with customers. Stage Two was a pilot study of airport passengers. Stage Three was an online qualitative survey.

Many of Duhachek's and Folkman's coping strategies were operative within a crowded retail setting. The coping strategies that were frequently used were distancing, avoidance, social support, rational thinking, action, escape, positive thinking, emotional venting, and confrontive. The study also found that further refinement of coping strategies and scales is needed.

An understanding of consumer coping strategies can help retailers to promote beneficial consumer coping strategies and avoid or limit detrimental coping strategies. The limitation of the study is that it is exploratory in nature.

The paper provides a rich and vivid understanding of how consumers cope in a crowded environment, and demonstrates the importance of crowds and consumer coping and how these variables affect retailers. The study identifies new coping strategies, relabels existing coping strategies with more descriptive and comprehensive titles, and confirms established coping strategies.

Much of the research on crowding in a service context has focused on customer reaction to crowding in a retail setting. This paper seeks to examine the effect of consumer goals on consumers' reactions to crowding for extended service encounters.

The authors used a 2 (Crowding: crowded or not crowded) × 2 (Goal: utilitarian or hedonic) × 2 (Service level: bad or good) factorial, between‐subjects design to test hypotheses. Service level and tolerance for crowding were entered as control variables. A service encounter in a casual restaurant was used as the service setting in the study. Subjects were randomly assigned to a written scenario describing an experience in a restaurant. They were then shown a photograph depicting the interior of the restaurant.

Consumption goal moderates the effect of perceived crowding on satisfaction. Significantly lower satisfaction ratings are associated with a crowded service environment when the primary consumption goal for the service experience is utilitarian, rather than hedonic, in nature. Furthermore, regardless of the consumption goal, crowding negatively impacts positive in‐store behaviors (i.e. desire to spend more money and time at the restaurant).

The study was limited to one extended service setting. Future research across other extended service settings is needed establish the generalizability of the findings.

The study has implications for the design of the service facility and the application of demand‐shifting revenue management strategies.

The paper extends the literature on shopping motivations to extended service settings by examining the effect of consumer goals on consumers' reactions to crowding, specifically consumer satisfaction with, and consumer behaviors within, the extended service encounter.

The aim of this paper is to examine the effects of the disconfirmation of expectations of crowding and mall accessibility, on stress and two marketing outcomes, satisfaction and promoter scoring.

Data were obtained through two face-to-face surveys from mall shoppers that answered them at two different moments of their shopping experience, before entering the mall and before leaving it. Results are obtained from 230 customers that answered the two questionnaires.

The findings suggest that stress indirectly influences customer promoter scoring through satisfaction, while disconfirmation of expectations influences it directly and indirectly.

These results also suggest that stress and disconfirmation of expectations about crowding and accessibility are important in determining promoter scoring. To reduce stress and increase satisfaction and promoter scoring, managers should focus on exceeding customers' expectations about mall accessibility and on ensuring that customers experience a lower level of crowding than they expected.

The article examines Net Promoter Scoring, an outcome that has attracted managers' attention but little is known about its antecedents. The paper provides evidence of the effect of disconfirmation of expectations and negative emotions on promoter scoring.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of perceived usefulness of online reviews and crowd cues on restaurant selection. In addition, the authors also examine the moderating role of perceived crowding and gender in this process.

The proposed hypotheses were tested with survey data (N = 200) collected from customers visiting full-service restaurants in Malaysia. The data were analyzed using SEM through Smart PLS.

The findings supported that the perceived usefulness of online reviews and perceived crowding have a positive effect on a consumer's purchase intentions, i.e. their decision of restaurant selection. Besides, a higher level of perceived crowding strengthens the relationship between the perceived usefulness of online reviews and their purchase intentions. This finding delineates that consumers prefer to dine in a crowded place with useful online reviews in an unfamiliar place. Finally, the results show that the effect of the usefulness of online reviews on purchase intentions does not vary with respect to gender (no significant contingent effect). However, the effect of perceived crowding varies with respect to gender – male customers have higher intentions to join crowded restaurants as compared to females.

Limitation of this study is its cross-sectional research design; data were collected in a single time frame. Longitudinal research design can be used to get in-depth knowledge of this phenomenon. Secondly, a non-probability sampling technique was used in this study, future research can used probability sampling technique to enhance generalizability of the study. Moreover, this study focused on the human crowding aspect, future studies can cover both aspects of crowding (human crowding and spatial crowding) in retailing or other service sectors (Blut and Iyer, 2020).

This study has multiple practical implications.

This study extends the current research on usefulness of online reviews and perceived crowding by investigating its direct and conditional effects. Specifically, the authors contribute in extant research by explaining its differential effects for male and female customers, when they select which restaurants to dine.

Crowding in service environments is a constant concern for many firms due to the negative consequences it has on consumers and companies alike. Yet, scant empirical research exists on firm-generated initiatives aimed at improving customer service experiences in crowded situations. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how information, a managerially actionable variable, influences social interactions (in the form of customer social withdrawal and citizenship behavior) and service experience.

Two experimental studies were conducted using an extended service context.

This research demonstrates that receiving information about crowds in advance results in heightened social withdrawal, which improves customer service experience. However, providing consumers with a platform to share crowding information increases customers’ citizenship behavior toward service employees and other customers, which, in turn, improves customer service experience.

For extended service encounters (e.g. air travel) where social interactions are inevitable, companies should encourage customers to share their real-time experiences with other customers in hopes of creating more positive social interactions (e.g. citizenship behavior) within the crowded environment.

Existing investigations of crowding stem from an overemphasis on the physical and atmospheric aspects of the environment by treating crowds as a “fixture” in the servicescape, rather than as “active participants” involved in the crowding environment. While the mere presence of crowds alone has negative effects, this research takes it a step further by examining interactions among and between customers and service employees within the crowded service environment.

This study aims to understand customer’s assessments of neighborhood stores during the COVID-19 pandemic through the influence of in-store environmental factors on patronage intention.

Online survey with 528 participants about the last shopping trip in neighborhood retail. The authors performed data analysis using structural equation modeling techniques.

High-perceived spatial crowding negatively influences shopping experience value perceptions, while human crowding influences patronage intentions through increased perceived hedonic value.

Results suggest that purchase experience at well-known neighborhood stores during a sanitary crisis is becoming less convenience-oriented and a substitute for leisure activities due to social distancing.

The findings elucidate the social function of neighborhood convenience retailing during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results emphasize that a pleasant shopping experience arising from a good relationship with shopkeepers and other customers is more influential on patronage intention than a good product assortment and store layout.

This paper contributes to the survival of small neighborhood businesses during the financial crisis installed due to Covid-19 by helping businesses become more attractive to their consumers and competitive in the new context.

The combined context of the health crisis due to COVID-19 and neighborhood retail of an emerging country raises the need for tests to better understand established marketing theories. Based on this rationale, this work intends to replicate and extend selected previous findings to the new environment dictated by the pandemic.

Cruising is one of the industries most susceptible to the current COVID-19 health crisis, due to the closed environment and the contacts between cruisers and crewmembers. This study aims to understand if the perceived crowding and the health risk perception related to the pandemic situation might threaten passengers’ intentions to cruise. The study also examines corporate reputation and trust, as well as social motivation and self-confidence, as possible predictors of consumers’ intention to cruise.

The study is based on the development of a structured questionnaire submitted online via social media. Overall, 553 individuals’ responses were used for understanding the factors that can affect consumers’ intention to cruise by performing several regression models.

The results show that the perceived crowding related to the pandemic does not seem to influence people’s intention to cruise. On the contrary, trust in the cruise company, corporate reputation, cruisers’ self-confidence and research of social motivation are positive predictors of intention to cruise, thus reducing the perceived risk’s deterring impact. The importance of such factors differs in respect of repeat and not repeat cruisers.

The study presents several managerial implications as it analyses the variables that could help cruise management cope better with COVID-19’s negative impact.

Despite the severity of COVID-19’s impact on the cruise industry, no studies have yet focussed on how the current pandemic situation may influence customers’ intention to cruise in the future.

Recognizing that crowding in a restaurant waiting area forms a first impression of service and sets service expectations, the purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of crowding in the effective control of the waiting environment. The study seeks to examine the impact of crowding on customers' emotions and approach‐avoidance responses and to examine the mediating role of emotion and the moderating role of desired privacy in the relationship between crowding and approach‐avoidance responses.

Using real‐scale, interactive virtual reality (VR) technology that allows high‐fidelity representations of real environments, the authors created a navigable, photo‐realistic three‐dimensional model of a restaurant waiting area. Through an experimental study which manipulated crowding levels in the VR restaurant, they surveyed the subjects' responses toward crowding conditions.

The study found significant effects of crowding on emotions including arousal and dominance, but not pleasure, and on approach‐avoidance responses. The impact of crowding on approach‐avoidance responses was more direct than indirect, without having emotion as a mediator. It was also found that the desire for privacy as a psychological trait moderated the relationship between crowding and affiliation.

The findings of this study offer restaurant managers insights toward the effective management of the pre‐process service environment during the waiting state that minimizes the negative consequences of waiting/crowding. This study provides three courses of management actions that can make unavoidable crowding in the restaurant waiting situation more enjoyable and comfortable.

By using VR simulation, this study adds a new approach for crowding studies. Theoretically, this study broadened the scope of crowding studies by adding a potential mediating variable, emotions, and a moderating variable, desired privacy, in examining the relationship between crowding and approach‐avoidance responses. Also, by focusing on a restaurant waiting area, the authors were able to explore the pre‐process service expectations.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the direct impact of shopping experience of tourists on their satisfaction with shopping, while perceived crowding is used as a moderator in this relationship.

The proposed conceptual model was tested by an empirical study where the data were collected from 411 German tourists, visiting Kaleiçi, Antalya-Turkey.

The study results revealed that tourist shopping experience (consisting of education, esthetic, entertainment and escapism dimensions) significantly determines satisfaction with shopping. Moreover, crowding perception has a two-dimensional structure, as human and spatial crowding. Human crowding, which reflects high human density, is found to negatively moderate the effect of shopping experience on satisfaction, where spatial crowding, which is related to high space density, does not influence this relationship.

This study exceptionally shows that crowding perceptions of German tourists in shopping are affected by both human and spatial crowding. In addition, the moderating role of perceived crowding is clarified in the relationship between shopping experience and satisfaction.