The retail ethnoscape framework: cultural embeddedness of (un)welcome

Purpose To explore the cultural embeddedness of (un)welcome experiences among ethnically marginalized consumers in retail spaces. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on Arjun Appadurai's notion of the ethnoscape, the study is empirically grounded in critical-incident interviews with consumers from multiethnic backgrounds in Sweden. Findings Three dimensions through which (un)welcome is negotiated are identified: interpersonal recognition in service encounters, cultural resonance in visibility encounters and atmospheric conviviality in material–sensory encounters. The research theorizes the Retail Ethnoscape Framework, conceptualizing (un)welcome as interpersonal, representational and spatial zones of disjuncture between the retailer's official mind and the consumer's lived ethnoscape. The study introduces retail proprioception – a learned bodily attunement through which marginalized consumers detect these disjunctures – revealing the somatic origin of the inclusionary labor they perform. Research limitations/implications The framework calls for culturally sensitive service scripts, strategic workforce diversity, and integrated inclusion design. For consumers, understanding retail proprioception enables more effective marketplace navigation, while societally, genuinely welcoming retail environments foster multiethnic engagement, well-being and social cohesion, advancing human-centric retail. The small Swedish sample limits generalizability. Originality/value The article advances retail welcome research by moving understandings of (un)welcome beyond discrete cues toward cultural embeddedness, extends atmospheric scholarship by demonstrating that environmental elements are perspectival constructs, reframes consumer vulnerability from a trait to a contextually activated state, and contributes to marketplace inclusion/exclusion scholarship by identifying retail proprioception as the embodied mechanism through which inclusionary labor falls disproportionately on marginalized consumers.