Crowding and green choice: Understanding a U-shaped relationship in China’s organic food market

Organic food represents a product category in which safety-and-health attributes and environmental attributes are both salient, making it an appropriate context for examining how retail situations shape sustainable consumption. This study investigates the nonlinear effect of shopping crowding on organic food purchase behavior and purchase intention, and further examines whether different crowding levels activate different organic food attribute cues. First, transaction records from a large supermarket chain in China provide associational evidence of a statistically supported U-shaped relationship between shopping crowding and organic food purchase behavior, with the turning point located in the upper portion of the observed crowding distribution and modest changes in predicted purchase probability. Second, a randomized scenario experiment provides causal evidence for the low–moderate–high nonmonotonic pattern in organic food purchase intention and identifies distinct indirect-effect structures involving positive emotion and perceived loss of control. Third, a 2 × 2 experiment compares the two crowding endpoints and shows that environmental-responsibility cues are relatively more effective under low crowding, whereas safety-and-health cues are relatively more effective under high crowding. Taken together, the findings extend crowding research and sustainable consumption research by identifying a nonlinear crowding effect, integrating compensatory control theory with consumer emotion theory, and showing how the match between retail situations and product attribute cues shapes organic food choice.