Customer air quality perceptions: conceptualization, scale development, and validation

Air quality affects how consumers experience retail environments. In their efforts to monitor and manage air quality, retailers often rely on objective measures. However, those measures do not capture consumer perceptions about their nuanced, lived experiences with the air. By developing a customer-perceived air quality measure for use in retail stores, the current research aims to help retailers understand and leverage these influential perceptions. Building on retail atmospherics and air quality research, as well as established scale development procedures, the authors develop and validate a scale with items pertaining to air breathability, circulation, freshness, humidity, scent, and temperature in Studies 1a–1e. Through content validity assessments, readability tests, and item judging, they establish a reduced item pool. Study 2 refines the scale to 26 items and provides initial validation with café customers; it shows that perceived air quality predicts dwell time, which predicts spending, whereas an objective air quality indicator predicts neither. Study 3 offers further validation among supermarket customers and supports customer-perceived air quality as a distinct perceptual layer of the retail atmosphere. Study 4 provides experimental validation. The resulting AirQual scale offers highly relevant implications for both theory and managerial practice.