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Several factors such as rising per capita income, emergence of nuclear families, entry of multinational companies offering a huge variety of products has raised the demand of household products. This has been seen as an opportunity for the ushering organized retail sector that is growing by leaps and bounds in India. Even in the middle and small cities, the shopping malls have been successful to snatch the customers of small kirana stores at a very fast pace, thereby, making it imperative to locate the factors that contribute in forming changing attitude of customers' towards shopping malls. The present study tried to attain this objective by applying the statistical technique of factor analysis and extracted six important factors determining customers' perceptions towards shopping malls in India.
INTRODUCTION
Retailers across the world have always been trying to provide best services and environment to their customers, which have led to the emergence of organized retailing. Due to better services and shopping environment, these stores have always been attracting more customers than the traditional retailers. India is also witnessing significant socio-demographic changes in its system in the present time which have lead to many new developments. As the trend of nuclear families is emerging at a very fast pace in India, huge demand for household products has beeh projected in the near future (Nielsen, 2007). Moreover, the growth in the Indian GDP and per capita income with the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) has made Indian market the leader as far as growth of retail industry is concerned (Kearney, 2006). With the rapid economic growth, consumer behavior also tends to change. Consumer with increased purchasing power looks for 'comfort, easiness and pleasure' while shopping (Ali and Juliana, 2008). Studies conducted in the past also refer to expectations of customers in terms of hedonic and utilitarian values (Hirschman and Holbrook, 1982; Lesser and Kamal, 1991; Babin et al, 1994; Mathwick et al, 2002; Sit et al, 2003; and Carpenter et al, 2005) whereas, hedonic relate to the values derived from the enjoyment during shopping, utilitarian values refer to the economic aspect of the transactions.
While economic theory looks at shopping as merely a chore undertaken to acquire utility-producing products (Sargent, 1993), research quotes that many customers derive intrinsic enjoyment from...