Broken Ties
For many people, COVID-19 has brought the negative consequence of closing a treasured commercial space, whether a bar, restaurant, or some kind of store. In fact, the pandemic has abruptly ruined many small businesses, thus severing long-lasting relationships with loyal and affectionate customers. Like homes, neighbors, and cities, retail spaces give meaning to everyday experience. By making values, ideologies, and cultures tangible, they assume an important symbolic and emotional role in the creation of personal identity.
A research project with my co-authors John F. Sherry, Jr. (University of Notre Dame) and Annamma Joy (University of British Columbia), published in the Journal of Consumer Research, examines this constructive role and the multiple ways in which consumers can establish these bonds.
Employing a longitudinal study, we discovered how the features of retail spaces inspire attachment and detachment in customers and how those attachments evolve with personal biographies. Significant ties can develop through both slow and immediate processes, stimulated by the sensual, symbolic, and cerebral elements of a space. Some people may fall in love with what will become a treasured place during a first visit, seduced by the atmosphere and immediately feeling a sense of belonging. Others develop strong ties slowly over time as they learn to appreciate the value of places and the impact of commercial settings on their lives. In favorite spaces, individuals learn how to consume, find sources of inspirations, and develop new affective and practice repertoires stimulated by the socio-material elements of the spaces, ultimately reinforcing a new sense of self.
Attachment gives people emotional stability, feelings of affection, and increased knowledge and self-awareness, and the research shows that detachment-whether forced or voluntary-must be considered an integral and complementary component of attachment. Voluntary detachment benefits consumers because it affirms personal biographies by reflecting the desire for change. Such detachment is rarely sudden. Rather, a bond's dissolution is typically gradual in response to any of a number of factors. According to the theoretical tenets described in the article, which are grounded in affordance theory, this evolution can be explained by the dynamic and fluid relationality of the bonds between the environment and individuals. Affective ties between individuals and spaces reflect ongoing processes of becoming in which personal biographies entwine with the trajectories of the bond. Voluntary detachment thus becomes a way to rejuvenate one's identity. People need to change and thus need to detach from loved spaces.
In the case of forced detachment, bonds with favorite places can be disrupted for reasons entirely independent of individual will, and the loss can affect consumers in various degrees of intensity. Individuals may use a variety of coping strategies to recover from a forced detachment or may take no action at all. While some consumers may accept forced displacement without a resolution, others discover in it a source of motivation or an opportunity to form new bonds. In most cases, the socio-material affordances of lost loved places have the power to shape consumers' new relationalities. In fact, people commonly look for the same anchors, design elements, kinds of servicescape, and other elements that characterized the loved retail setting.
In the near future of increasingly frequent store closures-even if only temporary ones-it will be important to consider not only the loss of functional benefits but also their impact on consumers' sense of self, symbolic meanings, and emotional repertoires. The opportunity to save and preserve their affordances in new forms may offer a way to sustain personal biographies.