Designing convenient retail centres

The modern consumer seeks to maximise the value they receive from all their marketing exchanges. A retail centre can provide value by increasing the benefits it provides and/or by minimising the costs consumers face when visiting it. Current academic interest is typically focused on just the one side of this equation - the hedonic benefits of shopping. In contrast, the other side of the value equation - convenience - has been largely ignored, presumably because the few studies that have included it found it to be of relatively less importance. Given that we live in an era of convenience, such findings should be treated with a degree of scepticism. This study empirically develops and tests an alternative definition of convenience to that used by previous studies. Armed with this new definition, the study examines the influence of convenience over consumers choice between shopping malls and shopping strips. Convenience is shown to have a significant influence in determing where we choose to shop.