The cost (and the value) of customer attire: linking high- and low-end dress styles to service quality and prices offered by service employees

Iris Vilnai-Yavetz () and Shaked Gilboa ()

Service Business, 2014, vol. 8, issue 2, 355-373

Abstract: This study tests the impact of customer dress on the price of goods and services offered and on service quality. Mystery shoppers visited stores in three different business contexts. For each context, 30 mystery shoppers paid three visits each, once in sloppy, once in casual, and once in fashionable attire. Supporting research hypotheses, dress had conflicting effects on employees: customers wearing fashionable/casual clothing received better service than those dressed sloppily, while the latter were offered goods and services at lower prices. The findings imply that organizations should reconsider their customer discrimination policies, and engage customers in developing accepted dress codes. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Keywords: Customer dress; Customer attire; Mystery shopper; Service quality; Impression management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11628-013-0199-5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:svcbiz:v:8:y:2014:i:2:p:355-373

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/business/journal/11628

DOI: 10.1007/s11628-013-0199-5

Access Statistics for this article

Service Business is currently edited by S.M. Lee and J. Millet Roig

More articles in Service Business from Springer, Pan-Pacific Business Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().