Consumers' Affective Response to Delays at Different Phases of a Service Delivery¹

A field experiment was conducted in an educational setting to investigate affective reactions occurring at different phases of the delivery of a service. An eight‐minute delay caused more negative affective reactions when it occurred either before the service started (preprocess) or after the service had terminated (postprocess) than when it occurred in the middle of the service encounter (in‐process). No differences were observed for positive affect. Field theory is proposed as a theoretical framework to account for the results, and practical applications for addressing the social problem of structuring waiting environments are discussed.