Building a service quality scale for Chinese retailing businesses -- using RT-Mart as an example

Increases in wealth mean international hypermarkets are attracted to Chinese customers including those in Taiwan. Stores offer a fairly uniform range of products supported with service in the recognized hypermarket format. Competition leads stores to attempt differentiation of the instore service experience. Western cultural values infuse extant measures of service quality (e.g., Parasuraman et al., 1985, 1988) to the exclusion of dimensions critical to explaining Chinese customers' assessment of retail service. We propose a retail service quality scale for Chinese customers that bases on interpretive study (Stanworth, 2009) and robust analysis of data from customers of RT-Mart.