Can social support alleviate stress while shopping in crowded retail environments?

This paper aims to find out whether sales associates and shopping companions, as two factors of the social servicescape, can help customers alleviate their levels of stress while shopping in crowded retail scenarios. Social Impact Theory is used to build a theoretical framework that is tested on a sample of mall shoppers. The findings demonstrate that sales associates can reduce customers' level of stress in crowded situations by employing their task and interaction competences. Customers with shopping companions feel less stress while shopping. When the companions are similar to the customer in shopping preferences, they can create boundaries to stress created by crowding. Finally, this research offers important implications for store managers as well as for sales associates.