Clean Up By Cleaning Up

After watching a film portraying incest, your shoppers will drink less chocolate milk than will your shoppers who watched a less morally offensive film. The choking off of chocolate milk consumption also happens if you ask shoppers to think about instances of fraud or cheating.
     The researchers at University of Pennsylvania, University of Colorado-Boulder, Duke University, and Fundação Getúlio Vargas looked at consumption of chocolate milk and water, but they say their conclusions apply to all sorts of eating and drinking. When people are morally disgusted, the disgust generalizes psychologically so that the people are less interested in buying foods and beverages.
     But since I don’t expect you’ll be showing flicks on incest, fraud, or cheating real often in your store, what does this mean for you?
     It means that it’s worthwhile to keep your store morally as well as physically clean.
     Other research finds that the principle holds even with less outrageous transgressions: Do it as gently as possible while still making your point, but whenever a shopper violates the norms of courteous store behavior in front of other shoppers, clearly call out the offense and offender. Researchers at University of British Columbia and University of Alberta find that unless you do the scolding yourself, the other shoppers may do it, leading to problems.
     Too often, people will cut in front of others who are waiting in a checkout line, ravage the tray of free samples so that none of the good ones are left for others, or unnecessarily create a huge mess at a merchandise display. The British Columbia/Alberta researchers saw that other shoppers who witness this happening are tempted to punish the offender. The observers do fear embarrassing themselves, but also have trouble looking the other way.
     This is to your disadvantage as a retailer because the mental turmoil inside the heads of these shoppers preoccupies their thinking, and preoccupied consumers generally buy less. Worse yet is if the miscreant bounces from one offensive behavior to another as shoppers watch.
     Also worse is if the store is physically disgusting. In a Morpace Omnibus consumer survey, over half the number of respondents said they’ve avoided a business because it looked dirty from the outside. Of customers who shopped at a store a single time and did not return, more than one-third said a reason was that when the customer entered, they found the premises to be dirty.

Click below for more: 
Scold Misbehaving Shoppers Publicly 
Keep It Clean 
Set the Moral Tone Which Fits