Fast thinking, slow shopping: A context-contingent model of impulse buying across retail formats

This study challenges the conventional “one-size-fits-all” approach to understanding in-store impulse buying (IB) by proposing and testing a context-contingent Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) model. We argue that the psychological pathways driving IB are systematically moderated by the consumer's shopping mission. Drawing on dual-process theory, we operationalize these missions by analyzing three distinct retail formats: convenience stores (‘fast thinking’), supermarkets (hybrid), and hypermarkets (‘slow thinking’). This framework is based on the premise that different retail formats demand systematically varying levels of cognitive elaboration and time resources from the consumer. Using data from a rigorous on-site intercept survey of 539 consumers in Taiwan, a multi-group structural equation model reveals that the drivers of consumer behavior are highly context dependent. While service personnel quality is a universal driver of store image (SI), physical cues like product display and cleanliness have format-specific effects. Most notably, impulse buying is directly triggered by proximal cues (product display) in “fast thinking” contexts, while distal cues (personal, cleanliness) have no direct effect. Critically, our findings uncover that a positive store image does not significantly influence impulse buying in any format. This research enriches the S-O-R model by validating the shopping mission as a key moderator and provides compelling evidence that decouples the cognitive evaluation of a store (store image) from the affective act of an impulse purchase, thereby opening a crucial new avenue for future research.