Customer: Salesman Interaction in Appliance Retailing

Abstract

The study' reported here focuses exclusively on the verbal record of the 40 complete transactions which involved the actual purchase of either a refrigerator or a color television. The purchase occurred either at the time of the test store observation or within the following two-week period. Not all possible transactions involving a purchase in these product categories were analyzed due to certain idiosyncracies. For example, some transactions appeared to be a continuation of a prior visit and were therefore incomplete. In a few other cases, although a purchase was made, discussion seemed to center on a different product. In another case, a refrigerator purchase was actually an adjustment for one purchased a few days earlier which had failed. The analysis procedure was as follows: (1) Each transaction was transcribed verbatim. (2) Special coding sheets were prepared and the frequency of reference by the customer and by the salesman to various alternatives, product attributes, etc. were tabulated. The transaction itself determined the categories and every reference (questions, answers, or comments) to that category by the salesman or customer thereafter was recorded. Ref-

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 74 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.