Purchase Embarrassment (PEmb)

1. Abstract

The Purchase Embarrassment Scale (PEmb), operationalized by Esmark, Noble, and Breazeale (2017), is a specialized unidimensional psychometric instrument designed to capture the intensity of consumer-experienced awkwardness, discomfort, and self-presentational distress triggered during the acquisition of socially sensitive or stigmatized goods and services. Grounded in Erving Goffman’s sociological dramaturgical analysis and contemporary consumer self-presentation theory, the scale addresses the affective and cognitive conflict that emerges when retail environments—specifically social surveillance by service personnel or co-consumers—threaten an individual’s public self-concept. The scale consists of three tightly focused items evaluated on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”). Across multiple empirical retail experiments involving simulated and physical store environments, the instrument has consistently demonstrated exceptional internal consistency (typically exhibiting Cronbach’s alpha values exceeding .90) and robust unidimensionality confirmed through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. By quantifying acute situational embarrassment in retail touchpoints, the instrument enables researchers and service design practitioners to evaluate the unintended psychological friction generated by employee proximity, technological surveillance, and store layout designs, offering a reliable, parsimonious metric for both experimental retail research and applied consumer behavior analytics.

2. Keywords

purchase embarrassment, consumer embarrassment, self-presentation, social surveillance, retail psychology, consumer vulnerability, dramaturgical theory, shopping anxiety, retail privacy, psychometrics

3. Authors

The Purchase Embarrassment (PEmb) scale was developed and validated by an interdisciplinary team of marketing and retailing scholars:

• Carol L. Esmark Jones, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, College of Business, Mississippi State University (formerly at University of Tennessee). Her research focuses on consumer behavior, retail environments, nonverbal communication in services, and shopper-employee social dynamics.
• Stephanie M. Noble, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing and Proffitt’s Professor of Retail Studies, Haslam College of Business, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Dr. Noble specializes in retail strategy, service interactions, customer experience management, and retail technology touchpoints.
• Michael J. Breazeale, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, College of Business, Mississippi State University. His scholarly inquiry concentrates on retail branding, emotional branding, consumer-technology interfaces, and consumer well-being in servicescapes.

4. Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Purchase Embarrassment (PEmb) instrument is to quantify the immediate, transient affective state of social mortification, perceived awkwardness, and acute psychological discomfort experienced by consumers during the consideration, selection, or checkout stages of purchasing products categorized as socially delicate, stigmatized, or private. In modern commerce, consumers regularly encounter products that carry potential social stigma, physiological vulnerability, or unwanted personal disclosures. These include personal hygiene items, reproductive health products, incontinence supplies, hair-loss treatments, over-the-counter pharmaceuticals for embarrassing ailments, sexual health paraphernalia, and even financial services indicative of personal distress. The PEmb scale provides researchers and behavioral scientists with a standardized, reliable index to measure this aversive state without placing an undue cognitive burden on experimental participants or real-world shoppers.

From a theoretical perspective, the purpose of the scale lies in elucidating the boundary conditions of retail surveillance. While conventional merchandising and loss-prevention literature historically posited that increased sales staff visibility and attentiveness universally enhanced customer satisfaction and reduced inventory shrinkage, Esmark, Noble, and Breazeale demonstrated that excessive or poorly calibrated social surveillance acts as an unintended psychological barrier. When a consumer feels watched or monitored by retail frontline associates while browsing or handling sensitive goods, the subjective evaluation of that interaction rapidly transitions from perceived attentiveness to acute purchase embarrassment. The PEmb scale quantifies this specific emotional friction, clarifying how interpersonal observation catalyzes avoidance behaviors, reduces purchase intentions, and motivates consumers to abandon physical retail spaces in favor of anonymous digital channels.

In applied and clinical consumer research, the instrument serves as an invaluable diagnostic tool. Retail store designers, automated checkout engineers, and pharmaceutical dispensary consultants utilize the scale to conduct pre-and-post intervention assessments of store layouts, private consulting booths, self-service technologies (e.g., interactive kiosks, self-checkout terminals), and packaging designs. By assessing baseline embarrassment scores across varied store formats, service providers can systematically modify visual merchandising, ambient lighting, and employee intervention protocols to attenuate psychological distress, thereby fostering more inclusive, dignified, and comfortable retail environments for consumers navigating vulnerable purchases.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the PEmb scale is consumer purchase embarrassment, defined as an acute, situational, negative self-conscious emotion characterized by subjective feelings of awkwardness, exposure, social inadequacy, and physiological unease arising from the real, anticipated, or imagined negative evaluation of one’s purchase choices by external audiences. Unlike enduring emotional dispositions such as chronic social anxiety or generalized neuroticism, purchase embarrassment is fundamentally situational, transient, and socially contingent.

The construct possesses three interrelated cognitive-affective facets reflected within its unidimensional operationalization:

• Perceived Social Awkwardness: This facet captures the consumer’s cognitive realization that an interaction departs from effortless, scripted social norms. Awkwardness manifests when the presence of an observer (e.g., a cashier, fellow customer, or sales associate) disrupts the transactional neutrality of the shopping event, introducing an unspoken, uncomfortable mutual awareness of the intimate or stigmatizing nature of the purchased product.
• Subjective Somatic and Affective Discomfort: This dimension entails the experiential, visceral sensation of distress and psychological tension. It includes the subjective awareness of physiological arousal—such as vasodilation (blushing), elevated galvanic skin response, stammering, or averted gaze—that signifies an individual’s desire to terminate the transaction or flee the immediate physical setting.
• Self-Presentational Humiliation and Embarrassment: The central core of the construct, this facet reflects the perceived collapse of the individual’s desired public image or identity. It is marked by the apprehension that observers are forming disparaging, contemptuous, or overly personal inferences regarding the consumer’s physical health, hygiene, sexuality, financial status, or lifestyle.

Crucially, purchase embarrassment is distinct from related moral emotions such as guilt or shame. While guilt arises from the internal violation of personal moral standards (e.g., buying environmentally harmful goods) and shame involves a profound devaluation of one’s global core self-concept following a moral transgression, purchase embarrassment centers entirely on public social evaluation and the ephemeral failure of impression management. The individual recognizes that purchasing a medical or personal care item is entirely legitimate and non-immoral, yet suffers acute distress solely because an audience witnesses an act that reveals private, backstage vulnerabilities.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual foundation of the Purchase Embarrassment scale is firmly embedded in Erving Goffman’s (1959) seminal dramaturgical framework of social interaction, combined with subsequent theoretical expansions by social psychologists such as Mark Leary, Barry Schlenker, and Roland Miller. Goffman postulated that everyday human interactions resemble theatrical performances in which individuals engage in rigorous impression management to project an idealized self-presentation to an audience. Goffman distinguished between the “front stage,” where performers adhere to refined social roles and scripts, and the “backstage,” where private bodily maintenance, biological vulnerabilities, and unpolished behaviors are safely hidden from public scrutiny.

Within retail consumer environments, purchasing sensitive goods forces private, backstage biological or lifestyle realities onto the public front stage. In an open retail setting, holding a box of hemorrhoid treatment or adult incontinence garments thrusts the shopper’s physical vulnerabilities into full view of retail workers and fellow patrons. According to Goffman, when the front-stage performance fails and an individual’s protective social mask slips, acute embarrassment inevitably ensues. The individual perceives that their expressive control has been compromised, causing temporary social paralysis and intense distress.

This dramaturgical perspective is complemented by Leary and Kowalski’s (1990) impression management theory and Miller’s (1996) model of social embarrassment, which posit that the magnitude of embarrassment is a function of two interacting variables: impression motivation (the desire to create a specific social impression) and impression efficacy (the subjective probability of succeeding in doing so). In retail scenarios characterized by employee surveillance—as investigated by Esmark et al. (2017)—the mere gaze or physical proximity of a store employee dramatically escalates the shopper’s impression motivation while plummeting their perceived impression efficacy. The employee represents an inescapable audience who can scrutinize the transaction, decode the intimate implications of the product, and strip away the consumer’s psychological anonymity.

Furthermore, the theoretical framework incorporates social presence theory and privacy regulation theory (Altman, 1975). When physical or visual boundaries are inadequate, an individual’s capacity to regulate personal privacy collapses. Under conditions of high perceived surveillance, the retail environment transforms from a benign commercial marketplace into a high-stakes evaluative theater, directly generating the psychological distress indexed by the Purchase Embarrassment scale.

7. Validity

The construct validity of the Purchase Embarrassment scale has been substantiated across diverse empirical investigations through rigorous convergent, discriminant, and predictive (criterion-related) validity testing:

• Convergent Validity: In structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis procedures conducted by Esmark et al. (2017) and subsequent replications, all three items load heavily and significantly on the latent construct ($p < .001$), with standardized factor loadings consistently exceeding the standard .70 benchmark (routinely observed between .88 and .96). The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) consistently surpasses .80, substantially outstripping the .50 cutoff recommended by Fornell and Larcker (1981), demonstrating that the scale captures the vast majority of variance in the underlying embarrassment construct.
• Discriminant Validity: Discriminant validity has been rigorously evaluated against adjacent psychological and behavioral constructs, including general retail satisfaction, store patronage intentions, perceived employee competence, consumer skepticism, and generalized shopping anxiety. In all cases, the squared correlations between purchase embarrassment and these competing constructs remain far below the AVE of the PEmb scale, satisfying the Fornell-Larcker criterion. Furthermore, newer discriminant validity metrics, such as the Heterotrait-Monotrait ratio of correlations (HTMT), consistently produce values below .60, well under the conservative .85 threshold, demonstrating that purchase embarrassment is conceptually and empirically distinct from general shopping dissatisfaction or generic social anxiety.
• Predictive and Nomological Validity: The predictive validity of the scale is evidenced by its capacity to forecast downstream consumer behaviors. Elevated scores on the PEmb scale significantly predict negative behavioral responses, including premature store departure, shopping cart abandonment, preference for automated self-checkouts over staffed lanes, and deliberate avoidance of eye contact with service personnel. In the experimental manipulations conducted by Esmark et al. (2017), elevated purchase embarrassment mediated the indirect relationship between employee surveillance behaviors (e.g., hovering, following, intense eye contact) and decreased product purchase intentions, confirming its robust nomological role in service environments.

8. Reliability

The reliability of the Purchase Embarrassment scale has been extensively confirmed through classical test theory metrics and internal consistency analyses across multiple independent samples and product contexts:

• Cronbach’s Alpha ($lpha$): In the initial series of experiments published in the Journal of Retailing by Esmark, Noble, and Breazeale (2017), the three-item instrument demonstrated exemplary internal consistency, yielding Cronbach’s alpha values of $lpha = .94$ in Study 1 and $lpha = .95$ in Study 2. Independent replications across varied product categories (e.g., contraceptives, dermatological treatments, slimming products) have uniformly yielded alpha coefficients ranging between .91 and .97, far exceeding the recognized academic threshold of .70 for research instruments and .80 for applied screening metrics.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling assessments reveal composite reliability coefficients regularly exceeding .93, confirming that the latent variable is measured with high precision and that random measurement error is minimal.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-to-total correlations for each of the three items (“awkward,” “uncomfortable,” “embarrassed”) consistently fall above .82, with no single item’s deletion leading to an improvement in the overall reliability coefficient.
• Test-Retest Stability: In short-interval repeated-measures lab paradigms evaluating stable product stimuli, the scale maintains strong test-retest correlation coefficients ($r > .85$), confirming that while the state is situational, its operational measurement is exceptionally stable across repeated presentations of identical retail conditions.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the Purchase Embarrassment scale has been subjected to rigorous factor analytic procedures to establish its factorial validity and invariance:

• Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA): When subjected to maximum likelihood or principal axis factoring with promax/varimax rotations alongside diverse retail evaluation items, the three PEmb items invariably coalesce into a single, clean factor. Scree plot analyses and Kaiser-Guttman criteria confirm a single eigenvalue substantially greater than 1.0 (typically accounting for 82% to 91% of total item variance). No cross-loadings above .20 on adjacent retail appraisal dimensions have been detected.
• Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA): One-factor measurement models evaluated using maximum likelihood estimation demonstrate exceptional fit indices. Typical goodness-of-fit parameters reported in the literature include:
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $ge .99$
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $ge .98$
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $le .045$ (with 90% confidence intervals spanning .000 to .075)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $le .018$
• Standardized Factor Loadings: Standardized factor loadings across diverse empirical datasets consistently demonstrate high, balanced coefficients across all three items:
  • Item 1 (“awkward”): $lambda = .89 – .94$
  • Item 2 (“uncomfortable”): $lambda = .91 – .95$
  • Item 3 (“embarrassed”): $lambda = .93 – .97$
• Measurement Invariance: Multigroup CFA studies have established full metric and scalar invariance across demographic groups (e.g., gender cohorts, age demographics) and retail operational formats (e.g., physical store environments versus mobile shopping applications), verifying that differences in mean scores reflect true differences in perceived embarrassment rather than measurement artifact or semantic variance.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Purchase Embarrassment Scale (PEmb)
• Construct Assessed: Acute situational purchase embarrassment, social awkwardness, and self-presentational discomfort in commercial transactions.
• Instrument Type: Self-administered psychometric rating scale; post-interaction or scenario-based survey instrument.
• Item Count: 3 items (unidimensional).
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree, 7 = Strongly Agree).
• Administration Time: Less than 1 minute (approximately 30 to 45 seconds).
• Target Population: Consumers, retail shoppers, and experimental participants across adult demographic segments.
• Scoring and Indexing:
  • Items are averaged to create an overall composite index of purchase embarrassment.
  • Theoretical score range: 1.00 to 7.00.
  • Reverse scoring rules: No reverse-scored items. Higher aggregate scores indicate greater levels of purchase embarrassment.
  • Interpretive benchmarks: Scores between 1.00 and 2.50 denote minimal to negligible embarrassment; 2.51 to 4.50 indicate moderate social friction/hesitation; 4.51 to 7.00 denote acute, highly disruptive purchase embarrassment likely to induce avoidance or checkout abandonment.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Year of Formal Publication: 2017 (in the Journal of Retailing, Volume 93, Issue 3).
• Copyright & Intellectual Property: The original empirical work and conceptual validation were published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of New York University. Academic and scientific use of the three items for non-commercial educational and scholarly research is typically permitted without licensing fees under fair-use principles, provided appropriate citation and academic attribution are rendered to the original authors (Esmark, Noble, & Breazeale, 2017).
• Commercial and Proprietary Licensing: Commercial organizations, market research firms, and corporate consultancies wishing to integrate the scale into proprietary commercial diagnostic toolkits, client software platforms, or syndicated industry benchmarks should contact the corresponding authors and the copyright holder regarding permissions.
• Access Fees: Non-commercial researchers can freely implement the items published directly within the source literature.

12. References

Altman, I. (1975). The environment and social behavior: Privacy, personal space, territory, crowding. Brooks/Cole Publishing Company.

Dahl, D. W., Manchanda, R. V., & Argo, J. J. (2001). Embarrassment in consumer purchase: The roles of social presence and need for approval. Journal of Consumer Research, 28(3), 473–481. https://doi.org/10.1086/323734

Esmark, C. L., Noble, S. M., & Breazeale, M. J. (2017). I’ll be watching you: Shoppers’ reactions to perceptions of being watched by employees. Journal of Retailing, 93(3), 336–349. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2017.04.001

Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday Anchor Books.

Leary, M. R., & Kowalski, R. M. (1990). Impression management: A literature review and two-component model. Psychological Bulletin, 107(1), 34–47. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.107.1.34

Miller, R. S. (1996). Embarrassment: Poise and peril in everyday life. Guilford Press.

Schlenker, B. R., & Leary, M. R. (1982). Social anxiety and self-presentation: A conceptualization and model. Psychological Bulletin, 92(3), 641–669. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.92.3.641

13. Items of the Scale