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A retailer can do various things to eliminate any other possible irritations within their environment. For example, to avoid shoppers feeling that store personnel are unavailable to assist, they can better train their employees to deal with customers in a more visible and effective manner. They may also install evaluation systems to monitor the personnel's performance in relation to customer service.
LIMITATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
The first limitation of this study is the fact that a non-probability sampling method was used and therefore the results cannot be generalised to a larger population. Furthermore, the sampling method increased the likelihood of selection bias due to the discretion of the researcher when selecting respondents. The second limitation is that the contexts in which this study was conducted were limited and could not be generalised to other contexts, in that data was solely collected from male and female students at the University of Pretoria. A major limitation of this study is the measurement instrument. The non-existence of a scale to better measure ambient, design and social factors of the shopping environment made it difficult to conduct sophisticated statistics and analysis of the irritation in the shopping environment.
It would be a worthwhile exercise for researchers to identify a valid and reliable scale for grouping irritations in the shopping environment. This will allow for more sophisticate analysis to be conducted to better understand irritation in the shopping environment, locally and globally.
It may be that key irritations were also missing from this particular study. Exploratory research could therefore aim to find more irritations, and specifically, irritations which are specific to South African consumers.
It may too be worthwhile and important for retailers to look at how irritations in the shopping environment affect store patronage, whether for example someone would return to a store after experiencing crowding. The results may have major managerial implications.
A STUDENT PERSPECTIVE ON IRRITATION: ASPECTS IN THE SHOPPING ENVIRONMENT 368