Retail Employee Unfriendliness (REU)

Abstract

The Retail Employee Unfriendliness (REU) scale is an empirically validated psychometric instrument designed to assess customer perceptions of interpersonal hostility, coldness, and non-cooperative behaviors exhibited by frontline retail service personnel. Developed by Albrecht, Walsh, Brach, Gremler, and van Herpen (2017), the REU framework addresses an essential yet historically under-researched phenomenon within services marketing and organizational psychology: the explicit perception of employee unfriendliness and its catalytic role in shaping the retail climate. While conventional retail metrics historically prioritized positive relational constructs—such as employee warmth, service orientation, and organizational citizenship behaviors—the REU scale systematically operationalizes the negative valence of service encounters across both verbal and non-verbal behavioral manifestations.

The complete instrument comprises a rigorously developed 9-item full-length scale alongside an abbreviated 3-item short form optimized for high-volume retail environments and longitudinal diary studies. Responses are gathered using a standard 7-point Likert response scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly agree”). The scale integrates direct assessments of employee demeanor (e.g., grumpiness, unfriendly tone of voice, absence of smiling or eye contact) alongside reverse-coded items capturing essential baseline courtesies (e.g., pleasant greetings, friendly parting rituals, warm facial expressions). Psychometric evaluations across multiple consumer samples demonstrate exceptional reliability (Cronbach's $\alpha > .88$; Composite Reliability > .90), robust unidimensional factor structures validated through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and pronounced convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity—specifically predicting downstream customer unfriendliness via descriptive social norm activation.

Keywords

Retail Employee Unfriendliness, REU Scale, Frontline Service Encounters, Customer-Employee Interaction, Social Norms Theory, Interpersonal Demeanor, Emotional Contagion, Non-verbal Communication, Service Climate, Customer Retaliation

Authors

The Retail Employee Unfriendliness scale was developed and psychometrically validated by an international team of researchers specializing in services marketing, consumer psychology, and organizational behavior:

• Arne K. Albrecht — Kühne Logistics University and University of Münster, Germany.
• Gianfranco Walsh — Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany.
• Simon Brach — WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, Vallendar, Germany.
• Dwayne D. Gremler — Department of Marketing, College of Business, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, USA.
• Erica van Herpen — Marketing and Consumer Behaviour Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands.

Correspondence regarding the original development and empirical deployment of the instrument can be directed to the lead author or through academic correspondence channels established via the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Retail Employee Unfriendliness (REU) scale is to capture and quantify customer-perceived negative interpersonal conduct from frontline service employees during brief or extended retail interactions. Service encounters, frequently termed “moments of truth,” rely heavily on the affective and relational performance of boundary-spanning employees. When employees manifest unfriendliness, customers do not merely record an absence of customer service quality; they experience an active interpersonal violation that threatens their psychological comfort, perceived social status, and hedonic enjoyment.

Prior to the development of the REU scale, empirical research frequently treated employee negative affect as a simple bipolar opposite of friendliness, often presuming that low scores on conventional service excellence or friendliness inventories adequately measured hostility or coldness. However, psychometric and psychological evidence consistently indicates that negative interpersonal behaviors possess unique psychological salience, eliciting stronger cognitive processing, heightened recall bias, and more acute behavioral reactions than the mere lack of positive affect (the “bad is stronger than good” phenomenon). The REU scale fulfills the critical need for a dedicated, psychometrically sensitive instrument capable of isolating employee incivility, apathy, and non-verbal rejection.

In applied retail research, organizational psychology, and service management, the REU scale serves several key functions:

• Diagnostic Quality Auditing: Enables retail organizations to benchmark store-level interpersonal performance and identify localized deficiencies in employee display rules and affective delivery.
• Testing Behavioral Contagion: Provides researchers with a precise metric to investigate how employee unfriendliness initiates destructive service spirals, specifically investigating whether employee hostility legitimizes reciprocal unfriendliness from customers or spillover hostility toward third-party shoppers.
• Intervention Evaluation: Functions as a sensitive pre- and post-measurement tool to evaluate the efficacy of frontline employee de-escalation programs, emotional labor management seminars, and customer care training.
• Structural Equation Modeling (SEM): Facilitates high-precision empirical modeling of consumer retaliation, negative word-of-mouth (NWOM), brand avoidance, and customer switching behaviors in competitive retail landscapes.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the REU scale is Perceived Frontline Employee Unfriendliness. In service encounter theory, employee unfriendliness represents an interpersonal appraisal wherein a focal customer perceives that a frontline employee displays cold, irritable, indifferent, or overtly dismissive behavioral cues during an interaction. This construct does not evaluate technical incompetence or task-based service failure (such as ringing up an incorrect price or stocking errors); instead, it isolates the affective, communicative, and relational demeanor of the employee.

The construct encompasses four primary interpersonal dimensions integrated into a unified psychometric factor:

• Acoustic and Vocal Cues: Captures the auditory dimension of communication. A customer evaluates an employee's vocal tone, inflection, volume, and paralinguistic signs. A flat, monosyllabic, abrupt, or sarcastic vocal tone indicates hostility or reluctance to engage, signaling to the consumer that their presence is an unwelcome burden.
• Kinesic and Non-verbal Expressions: Encompasses facial affect and bodily orientation. Non-verbal communication represents a substantial proportion of emotional transmission during brief retail transactions. The construct explicitly captures the deliberate or non-conscious withholding of positive facial expressions (absence of smiling, frowning, scowling) and the presence of sullen, “grumpy” physical displays.
• Oculesic Engagement (Eye Contact): Evaluates visual attention and mutual gaze. In retail settings, direct eye contact functions as an explicit signal of recognition, respect, and attentiveness. Averting gaze, looking away while scanning merchandise, or refusing to establish visual contact functions as an active psychological micro-invalidation, signifying interpersonal dismissiveness.
• Normative Interaction Rituals (Greetings and Departures): Evaluates adherence to foundational social conventions governing human interaction. Greeting rituals establish an open communicative channel, while parting rituals («saying goodbye») formally close the encounter with mutual acknowledgment. Violating these foundational civil rituals constitutes unambiguous interpersonal unfriendliness.

The construct reflects subjective perception rather than an objective observational audit. In consumer psychology, customer behavioral and attitudinal reactions are dictated by their subjective perceptual reality. Thus, the REU scale assesses the psychological reality of the customer following interaction with the employee.

Theoretical Framework

The foundational framework underlying the development of the Retail Employee Unfriendliness scale is anchored primarily in Social Norms Theory, complemented by theories of Emotional Contagion, Emotional Labor, and Expectancy Disconfirmation.

1. Social Norms Theory and the Focus Theory of Normative Conduct

Central to Albrecht et al.'s (2017) investigation is Cialdini, Reno, and Kallgren's (1990) Focus Theory of Normative Conduct, which delineates between injunctive norms (what behaviors are socially approved or disapproved) and descriptive norms (what behaviors people actually do in a given setting). While broad cultural and commercial injunctive norms dictate that retail environments should be characterized by politeness, deference, and cheerfulness, the acute behavioral cues presented by an employee establish an immediate, context-specific descriptive norm.

When frontline employees display unfriendliness (e.g., refusing eye contact, displaying grumpy facial expressions, or speaking curtly), they communicate an environmental descriptive norm that politeness and cordiality are suspended within this immediate context. Consequently, customers perceive that interpersonal hostility or indifference is standard operating behavior within the store, which lowers cognitive barriers against customer misbehavior and fosters reciprocal or displaced unfriendliness.

2. Emotional Contagion and Interpersonal Affect

According to Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson's (1994) primitive emotional contagion paradigm, human beings automatically, non-consciously mimic and synchronize their vocalics, facial expressions, postures, and movements with those of another person, converging emotionally as a result. In retail settings, an employee's hostile vocal inflection or lack of smiling induces subtle negative physiological and affective changes in the consumer. The REU scale operationalizes the explicit behavioral signals that initiate this emotional transmission mechanism.

3. Emotional Labor and Display Rules

Organizational display rules (Hochschild, 1983; Grandey, 2000) require service employees to regulate their internal emotional states and external expressions to display positive affect (e.g., “service with a smile”). When employees experience emotional exhaustion, burnout, or low organizational identification, their regulatory resources deplete, resulting in visible “leakage” of negative affect. The REU scale captures the precise behavioral manifestations that occur when frontline workers fail to maintain expected emotional display standards.

Validity

The psychometric properties of the Retail Employee Unfriendliness scale were rigorously evaluated by Albrecht et al. (2017) across a series of multistage qualitative, laboratory, and field studies, verifying strong construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was initially established through comprehensive domain specification and expert panel sorting tasks, ensuring that the 9 items exhaustively cover the behavioral manifestations of unfriendliness without straying into unrelated dimensions of service failure (such as technical delay or operational incompetence). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) performed on independent consumer validation samples confirmed that all nine items load robustly onto a single latent factor. Standardized factor loadings across all items routinely surpass the conservative .70 threshold, indicating that each item accounts for a substantial proportion of shared variance with the underlying latent construct.

Convergent validity was further demonstrated through Average Variance Extracted (AVE) calculations. The AVE values for the REU construct exceeded the conventional benchmark of .50, establishing that the variance captured by the construct exceeds the variance attributable to measurement error.

Discriminant Validity

To confirm that perceived unfriendliness represents an autonomous construct distinct from related services marketing variables, discriminant validity was evaluated using the Fornell-Larcker criterion and modern Heterotrait-Monotrait (HTMT) ratio analyses. The REU scale was contrasted against several neighboring constructs, including:

• General service dissatisfaction
• Other customer unfriendliness
• Core service failure (e.g., stockout, billing inaccuracies)
• Perceptions of retail store atmosphere

In each comparison, the square root of the AVE for the REU scale significantly exceeded the inter-construct correlations, and the HTMT ratios remained well below the conservative .85 cutoff threshold, confirming that the REU scale captures a conceptually distinct operational construct.

Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity

The predictive validity of the scale was robustly demonstrated in both experimental scenario designs and retrospective consumer field surveys. Statistically significant structural regression paths confirmed that higher scores on the REU scale directly predict:

• Elevated customer retaliatory unfriendliness toward the offending employee ($eta > .40, p < .001$).
• Heightened customer unfriendliness directed toward other shoppers in the retail setting, confirming normative spillover mechanisms.
• Depressed store patronage intentions, reduced willingness to recommend, and elevated negative word-of-mouth communication.

Reliability

The internal consistency reliability of the Retail Employee Unfriendliness scale has been confirmed across diverse retail environments (e.g., fashion apparel, grocery supermarkets, consumer electronics) and international participant pools.

Internal Consistency

Across the development and validation samples reported by Albrecht et al. (2017), the 9-item scale demonstrated high internal consistency:

• Cronbach's Alpha ($\alpha$): Values consistently range between .89 and .93 across separate empirical studies, substantially surpassing the standard academic threshold of .70 recommended for psychometric instruments.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling evaluations revealed composite reliability estimates exceeding .91, indicating high internal consistency among the items representing the latent factor.
• Short Form Reliability: The 3-item short form (consisting of items 1, 2, and 5) maintains robust internal consistency, with Cronbach's alpha values typically ranging between .83 and .88, making it a reliable proxy for the full inventory when survey length is restricted.

Stability and Item-Total Statistics

Item-to-total correlations across the inventory reliably exceed .60, confirming that each item contributes meaningfully to the common underlying factor. Corrected item-total correlation analysis indicates that the removal of any individual item does not significantly increase the overall alpha coefficient, supporting the retention of all nine items in the full instrument.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the Retail Employee Unfriendliness instrument was validated through sequential exploratory factor analyses (EFA) and rigorous confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) within a structural equation modeling framework.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During scale purification, exploratory factor analyses using principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood estimation with oblique rotations (promax) were executed on calibration samples. Eigenvalue-greater-than-one criteria and scree plot inspections unambiguously revealed a dominant single-factor solution. The primary factor accounted for over 60% of the total variance, with scree tests indicating a sharp break after the first factor, confirming the essentially unidimensional nature of customer-perceived employee unfriendliness.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent CFA procedures on independent validation samples confirmed that the single-factor model exhibits excellent goodness-of-fit to the empirical data across standard structural equation modeling indices:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $ge .96$ (exceeding the $ge .95$ standard for superior fit).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $ge .95$.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $le .055$ (with 90% confidence intervals spanning .038 to .071).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $le .039$.
• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom ($\chi^2/df$): Values consistently fell below the recommended 3.0 threshold.

Standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) for the 9 items were all statistically significant ($p < .001$), ranging from approximately .68 to .88. The 3-item short form demonstrated near-perfect identification and excellent factor loadings ($lambda > .80$ for items 1, 2, and 5), supporting its psychometric interchangeability with the complete 9-item scale when measurement parsimony is required.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Retail Employee Unfriendliness scale is structured as follows:

• Instrument Name: Retail Employee Unfriendliness (REU) Scale
• Authors: Arne K. Albrecht, Gianfranco Walsh, Simon Brach, Dwayne D. Gremler, and Erica van Herpen (2017)
• Construct Assessed: Customer perceptions of frontline employee unfriendliness and hostile/cold non-verbal and verbal demeanor
• Format: Self-administered post-encounter questionnaire (paper-and-pencil, mobile survey, or online panel administration)
• Item Count:
  • Full Version: 9 items
  • Short Form Version: 3 items (Items 1, 2, and 5)
• Response Format: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly disagree to 7 = Strongly agree)
• Reverse-Scored Items: Items 3, 4, 7, and 9 assess friendly verbal/non-verbal behaviors and must be inverted prior to index computation
• Scoring Methodology:
  • Reverse-score items 3, 4, 7, and 9 (i.e., $1 \rightarrow 7$, $2 \rightarrow 6$, $3 \rightarrow 5$, $4 \rightarrow 4$, $5 \rightarrow 3$, $6 \rightarrow 2$, $7 \rightarrow 1$).
  • Calculate the composite mean score across all 9 items (or the 3 items of the short form).
  • Higher scores indicate higher perceived retail employee unfriendliness.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Retail Employee Unfriendliness scale was published in 2017 in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (Volume 45, Issue 6). The instrument was developed within an academic research context and is distributed under conventional scholarly fair-use guidelines.

Researchers, academic faculty, and non-commercial investigators may utilize and adapt the scale items for educational, scientific, and empirical research without paying licensing fees, provided that appropriate academic attribution is accorded to Albrecht et al. (2017). Commercial enterprises, market research corporations, or consulting entities seeking to integrate the instrument into proprietary customer satisfaction auditing platforms should consult the copyright policies of the publisher (Springer Nature) and contact the corresponding authors via RightsLink or institutional correspondence to secure formal licensing approval.

References

• Albrecht, A. K., Walsh, G., Brach, S., Gremler, D. D., & van Herpen, E. (2017). The influence of service employees and other customers on customer unfriendliness: A social norms perspective. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 45(6), 827–847. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-017-0530-8
• Cialdini, R. B., Reno, R. R., & Kallgren, C. A. (1990). A focus theory of normative conduct: Recycling the concept of norms to reduce littering in public places. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(6), 1015–1026. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.58.6.1015
• Grandey, A. A. (2000). Emotion regulation in the workplace: A new way to conceptualize emotional labor. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 5(1), 95–110. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.5.1.95
• Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1994). Emotional contagion. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139174138
• Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
• Oliver, R. L. (1980). A cognitive model of the antecedents and consequences of satisfaction decisions. Journal of Marketing Research, 17(4), 460–469. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378001700405

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)