Affective adoption of new grocery shopping modes through cultural change acceptance, consumer learning, and other means of persuasion

Research has shown very slow consumer adoption to new grocery shopping options, particularly virtual shopping in North America. While consumers have been willing to purchase objects virtually, there is an inherent scepticism in purchasing food using these modes. Research has also shown while this may be the case in some western countries, eastern countries such as China have seen different acceptance. Urban eastern consumers have embraced virtual shopping and have already moved to hybrid shopping modes including smart grocery shopping. This paper reviews theoretical assumptions which may explain a shift in western consumer's behavioural changes and posits a hypothetical conceptual framework for future empirical investigations. The framework advances the idea that cultural change acceptance may be an antecedent to other social factors such as consumer learning, affective factors, cognitive factors, normative appeals among others, trust, perceived privacy and security, and these provide links to the adoption to these new retail modalities.