Shopping with(out) distancing: modelling the personal space to limit the spread of contagious disease among consumers in retail stores

ABSTRACT

This research aims at providing a new model of consumers’ personal space to limit the spread of contagious disease while shopping in person. To this end, it adopts an agents-based simulation approach to model consumers’ movements in the store during COVID-19 pandemic. Findings show the extent to which consumers’ contacts with others increase the risk of contagion, due to the occurrence of social gatherings in certain areas. Specifically, there is a linear correlation between the number of consumers in the store and the number of consumers susceptible to contract the disease. Thus, the personal space from a psychological perception becomes an individual and compulsory boundary to protect consumers from contagious disease. Finally, our results extend the concept of social distance and personal space while shopping, and support retailers to provide safer shopping experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Physical distancing
• retailing
• agents-based simulations
• personal space
• COVID-19
• contagion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Each consumer would visit three areas in a temporal distance of 100 steps, stay in each area up to 1/3 of the total time, move of half metre for each temporal step after each area, and there is one infected consumers (each frame is captured after 10 temporal steps from each other, the row helps visualising the infected consumer (I), and the square the susceptible consumers (S)).

2. Specific areas are not indicated on the map to preserve the anonymity of the store.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eleonora Pantano

Eleonora Pantano is Senior Lecturer of Marketing. Her research activities mainly relate to the development of new customer/tourism solutions to improve analytics, strategies and management.

Gabriele Pizzi

Gabriele Pizzi is Assistant Professor of Management. His research activities mainly relate to new technologies in retailing.

Eleonora Bilotta

Eleonora Bilotta is Full Professor of Cognitive Psychology. Her research interests include Cognitive Psychology, and Continuous and Discrete Dynamical Systems.

Pietro Pantano

Pietro Pantano is Full Professor of Mathematical Physics. His research interests include Theory of Complexity and self-Organizing Systems, and Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems.