Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jretconser Revisiting the supermarket in-store customer shopping experience Nic S. Terblanche Department of Business Management, University of Stellenbosch, Private Bag ×1, Matieland, 7602 Stellenbosch, South Africa ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Customer In-store shopping experience Supermarket ABSTRACT Marketing academics and practitioners agree on customer experience as a means for differentiation. The cus- tomer 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. 1. Introduction Various diverse and innovative retailing formats emerged as com- petitors for supermarkets (PWC, 2012). To compete with these new arrivals, supermarkets had to reconsider their offerings and implement strategies that are challenging and difficult for competitors to emulate. In this respect, Levy and Weitz (2012) found that traditional super- markets use strategies to compete successfully by differentiating their products and services from other competitors. This they do by em- phasising the freshness of perishables; focusing on the needs and wants of health-conscious and multi-cultural consumers; offering superior value with reduced cost private-label merchandise; and providing cus- tomers a shopping experience better than those of competitors. A positive in-store customer shopping experience provides a com- petitive advantage that enhances the value that a customer gets from a visit to a supermarket. Unfamiliar and complex competitive environ- ments, and well-informed customers who continuously demand value are major forces that require the development and offering of a pleasant in-store customer shopping experiences to ensure that customers pa- tronise a supermarket again in the future (Sánchez-Fernández et al., 2009). To provide a pleasant in-store customer shopping experience for their customers, supermarkets initially focused on offering more ser- vices to customers. The arrival of new food retailing formats later ne- cessitated supermarkets to expand their services to compete success- fully with these newcomers. Examples of newer competitors are convenience stores such as Kwikspar, PicknPay Express and Foodstops - located in neighbourhoods and at service stations - and specialised shops such as Fruit and Veg City and Food Lovers’ Market that offer a wide selection of food produce. Many established traditional super- markets have lost business to these newer store formats. To summarise, the major new competitors for supermarkets can be grouped into three phenomena. Firstly, there are Makro and Game that sell food and groceries and which benefit from Walmart's bargaining power that enable them to be more price competitive. Secondly there are shops specialising in food. The essence of the competition that the new food formats bring is that they do not carry as much stock keeping units (SKU's) as supermarkets and focus on fewer food SKU's with a higher turnover for profit. In the third instance, we find convenience stores that offer an extended merchandise mix of frequently consumed prof- itable items. Most supermarkets offer their customers, apart from the typical groceries, a butchery, a wide range of fresh fruit and vegetables, a bakery with a variety of breads, a confectionary with freshly baked products, a delicatessen counter with local and imported specialised meat and cheese products, take-away meals prepared by chefs, a Sushi counter and a section offering a selection of local and imported wines. The supermarket under study offer their customers a choice from more than 300 different cheeses as well as two special types of beef steaks, apart from the normal fresh cuts. As far as their prepared food is con- cerned, a range of the dishes is prepared in accordance with the recipes of the internationally acclaimed chef, Gordon Ramsay. Ramsay also endorses these dishes, most of which contain only ingredients from the supermarket's own private label range of food. Even the traditional grocery section has been changed to cater for customers with specific http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2017.09.004 Received 7 June 2017; Received in revised form 5 September 2017; Accepted 6 September 2017 E-mail address: nst@sun.ac.za. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services 40 (2018) 48–59 0969-6989/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. MARK