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Fruit Vending Machines as a Means of Contactless Purchase: Exploring Factors Determining US Consumers’ Willingness to Try, Buy and Pay a Price Premium for Fruit from a Vending Machine during the Coronavirus Pandemic

Authors :
Meike Rombach
David L. Dean
Tim Baird
Jill Rice
Source :
COVID; Volume 2; Issue 12; Pages: 1650-1665
Publication Year :
2022
Publisher :
MDPI AG, 2022.

Abstract

During the coronavirus pandemic, buying and consumption patterns of US consumers shifted towards contactless buying. While the topic of online buying is well explored within the existing literature on this topic, purchasing fruit from a vending machine is still yet to be investigated. This exploratory study used quantitative data to examine the factors driving US consumers’ willingness to try, buy and pay a premium for fruit from vending machines. An online survey of 391 US consumers was conducted to fill this research gap between 7 July and 10 July 2022. This survey was distributed via Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing platform which is widely used for consumer research. Smart PLS 4 facilitated the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) analysis, as this method well suited for testing exploratory models with complex relations between the latent variables. Results indicated that COVID-19 pandemic-related benefits, quality benefits, value-related benefits and experiential benefits were the most important predictors that determined willingness to try, buy and pay a price premium when purchasing fruit from a vending machine.

Details

ISSN :
26738112
Volume :
2
Database :
OpenAIRE
Journal :
COVID
Accession number :
edsair.doi.dedup.....e2cbb25d5f4f769bf4ef063d3e96388a
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.3390/covid2120119