Shopping with Companions : Implications on In-Store Checkout Experiences

Shopping in retail stores is essentially a social experience. Prior research has focused extensively on the retail shopping experience, impulse buying tendency and shopper satisfaction. There exists a dearth of literature on companion shoppers and their influence on customers' overall shopping experience. Waiting is a pervading constituent of various purchase circumstances.Waiting attributes to encounter wide-ranging displeasing implications such as boredom, frustration, nervousness, stress, helplessness and occasionally even embarrassment. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of a shopping companion on customers' impulse buying tendency and time perception at the retail checkout. The study follows a descriptive research design and surveyed 385 respondents accompanied by shopping companions visiting the selected retail outlets in Mangaluru district, Karnataka. The findings of the study show that there exists a positive association between the presence of companion shoppers, indicators of impulse buying tendency and perceived wait duration at the retail checkout. The paper highlights the social influences in an in-store purchase situation