FACTORS AFFECTING SHOPPING CENTRE AVOIDANCE

Abstract

Shopping centres today face stiff competition from counterparts in the city and suburban areas. There is a strong need for shopping centres to attract and retain their shoppers to stay in the competitive game. For shopping centre managers, understanding the factors that lead to shopping patronage and avoidance is of utmost importance. This study seeks to explore the factors affecting shopping centre avoidance and also to confirm the findings of past researches on its relevance in the present context. A rigourous examination of factors affecting shopping centre avoidance is carried out and presented in this study. Shopping centre managers may find of interest and benefit of what the findings of this study can potentially offer to help them in their decision making to keep their centres more attractive and reduce avoidance by shoppers. Six possible factors are identified; viz, poor physical design, poor ambience, human crowding, spatial crowding, degree of happiness, and excitement. To investigate these six factors, six hypotheses were formulated and tested using multivariate factor analysis and multiple linear regression. Each of the factors that contributed to shopping centre avoidance is also analysed further. The study reveals that the main factors affecting shopping centre avoidance are poor ambience, human crowding, spatial crowding and degree of happiness. The implications of these findings and the limitation of the study are discussed.