Benjamin Lawrence

The Warm Glow of Restaurant Checkout Charity

Checkout charity is a phenomenon whereby frontline employees (or self-service technologies) solicit charitable donations from customers during the payment process. Despite its growing ubiquity, little is known about this salient aspect of the service experience. The present research examines checkout charity in the context of fast-food restaurants and finds that, when customers donate, they experience a “warm glow” that mediates a relationship between donating and store repatronage. Study 1 utilizes three scenario-based experiments to explore the phenomenon across different charities and different participant populations using both self-selection and random assignment designs. Study 2 replicates with a field study. Study 3 examines national store–level sales data from a fast-food chain and finds that checkout fund-raising, as a percentage of sales, predicts store revenue—a finding consistent with results of Studies 1 and 2. Managers often infer, quite correctly, that many consumers do not like being asked to donate. Paradoxically, our results suggest this ostensibly negative experience can increase service repatronage. For academics, these results add to a growing body of literature refuting the notion that small prosocial acts affect behavior by altering an individual’s self-concept.

Influence of Organizational Form and Customer Type on Online Customer Satisfaction Ratings

In this paper, we explore the impact of the organizational form (company‐owned versus franchised) and the type of customer (nonbusiness versus business) on online consumer‐generated satisfaction ratings in the hotel industry. Our empirical study deals with 6,348 ripdvisor reviews regarding stays at one of 134 hotels of a plural form chain located in a estern uropean country. Our main finding reveals that the type of customer moderates the relationship between organizational form and customer satisfaction; business travelers having higher satisfaction with franchised hotels than company‐owned hotels in terms of satisfaction. We discuss the implications of these findings for the management of plural form chains.

Regional Contrasts in Consumers’ Attitudes and Behavior Following the BP Oil Spill

In this paper, we examine how consumers’ reactions to the British Petrolium (BP) oil spill and their attitudes about the Gulf of Mexico as a tourism destination differ as a function of the respondents’ geographic location of residence and their past travel behavior. A survey conducted with 540 travelers and tourists, which began three weeks following the successful capping of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, reveals that consumers’ reactions to the oil spill varied by geographic location and past travel behavior. In particular, consumers from the southeast region, when compared with the three other geographic regions we sampled, had more negative views regarding the oil spill on a number of dependent measures. We also found that individuals who traveled to Florida in the two years prior to the oil spill reported higher perceptions of environmental risk than those individuals who had not traveled to Florida during that same time frame.