When retail stores are designed, the assumed state of affairs is that consumers are sighted and visually attuned to labels, colors, lighting, point-of purchase displays, point-of-sale information, and merchandising.  These visuals provide a symbolic system that is assumed to be cognitively processed by consumers as they move through the shopping environment.  However, many legally blind people are impaired to the degree that reading signs and other printed materials and/or distinguishing landmarks and faces is difficult, if not impossible.  Thus, the marketplace imposes a number of substantial barriers to shopping for a consumer with visual impairments.  These barriers certainly can be and are overcome by using a variety of adaptive responses to the marketplace, and this paper shows why it is worth the effort to shop.

Interview texts of 21 consumers with visual impairments reveal that consumers engage in shopping behavior to achieve consumer normalcy.  Consumer normalcy reflects how identity is constructed and maintained in part through shopping and is defined as a desire to live like other consumers, be accepted as other consumers are, and be acceptable to one’s self in consumption contexts. 

Consumers simultaneously want to experience the pleasure of the marketplace, personalize the shopping experience to their unique desires, have control over the process, and be perceived as an equal participant in the consumption experience.  That is, they want to experience consumer normalcy.  Tension can be created in the servicescape when consumers are unable to derive these values of shopping in the marketplace. 

When consumers shop, they are trying on or affirming identities using the personal characteristics they use in their self-definition processes.  When symbolic elements in the servicescape suggest they should use alternative personal characteristics to define themselves, they feel unnatural or not normal.  For example, the informants see themselves as people with visual impairments, not people defined by visual impairments.  When the informants perceive others view them as like all people with disabilities or incapable of making their own choices, and when ascriptions of inferiority are indicated, then they feel unnatural and not normal, which is the exact opposite of what they are seeking in the marketplace.

Experiential and symbolic elements in the servicescape that indicate consumers are viewed from a single perspective stigmatize and repress consumers.  The stigmatized and repressed then must be in a constant state of negotiating and fighting for their identities.  When external factors in the retail servicescape interact with a person’s individual characteristics (e.g., visual impairment) and/or individual states (e.g., motivation), and inhibit a consumer’s opportunity to be in the marketplace or to exert control over their consumer behavior, the consumer experiences vulnerability, and the self is literally in jeopardy.

Being-in-the-marketplace is part of the essential ground for being in the contemporary world and when some consumers perceive they are not accepted and expected, the retail servicescape is responsible for the segmentation between various social groups as defined by physical ability, race, age, and often gender.  This type of segmentation fails to recognize the ability and willingness of many consumers to acquire and consume in the retail servicescape.  The outcome of this segmentation, intentional or not, is a repression of and a devaluing of the identities of certain groups of people, one of the negative consequences of marketing.

Training for retail employees should include information on how to recognize the uniqueness of consumers, how to ask questions about what type of assistance is desired so that the consumer can maintain control, and how to communicate that the shopper is expected.  A key aspect of this training needs to be to educate retail employees that consumer tastes are driven by characteristics inside a person, not by characteristics that are visible to the employee.

When the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law in 1990, proponents celebrated it because they believed it was a step toward the inclusion of people with disabilities into mainstream society, including the retail servicescape.  Mainstream means normal, anticipated, and expected.  These findings affirm the importance of this legislation, or at the very least its intent, by demonstrating that participation in public spaces such as retail servicescapes is important to the public interest.  As this research shows, shoppers with disabilities, in particular shoppers with visual impairments, want more than structural accommodations, they want to be able to participate, to be understood, and to feel like they belong.  Such a perspective has been relatively absent from education materials on the ADA for retailers, which instead have tended to focus on structural accommodations.  Education should now also include information on social accommodation, such as that described in this paper.