Shared but feared: A vulnerability-sensitive account of consumer responses to post-crisis service environments

Shared service environments are typically designed to facilitate comfort, efficiency, and positive consumer experiences. In post-crisis contexts, however, these environments may also be appraised through concerns about exposure, controllability, and personal vulnerability. Building on a context-specific refinement of the organismic component within the Stimulus–Organism–Response framework, this research examines how residual infection-related fear is associated with consumer responses to shared service environments in a post-pandemic context. A two-study design was implemented within a single French-language survey (N = 425). Study 1 tested whether residual infection-related fear was associated with avoidance of public service environments through differentiated forms of health anxiety. Structural equation modeling showed that residual infection-related fear was positively associated with both personal and interpersonal health anxiety, but only personal health anxiety was associated with avoidance, yielding a significant indirect effect through the self-focused pathway. Study 2 experimentally manipulated store density (high vs. low) and sanitary signals (present vs. absent) to examine how servicescape cues influenced perceived crowding and shopping satisfaction. Results showed that higher density reduced satisfaction, but this negative effect was attenuated when sanitary signals were present. Perceived crowding did not mediate the density–satisfaction relationship. A separate exploratory analysis indicated that the overall association between sanitary signals and satisfaction was more positive among individuals reporting higher residual infection-related fear. Taken together, the findings suggest that post-crisis responses to shared service environments may reflect the interplay between situational cues and heterogeneous vulnerability orientations, consistent with a vulnerability-sensitive appraisal system. The research offers a context-specific contribution to servicescape theory by suggesting that, under residual health-threat salience, organismic processes may require a more differentiated specification in contexts marked by residual threat, and by highlighting how visible safety-related cues may improve evaluations of dense service environments. Exploratory evidence further suggests that the overall association between such cues and satisfaction is more positive among consumers who remain more sensitive to infection-related risk.