Service Consumers’ Value Perception: Evidence from Restaurants in the City of São Paulo

Abstract

This research aims at creating a model that could explain consumers’ value perception of restaurants attended on Sundays in the city of São Paulo. The research was carried out in two phases. The first was an exploratory research – a focus‐group type with two groups of eight individuals each, whose objective was to discover the main variables that impact the value perception of consumers who attend restaurants on Sundays. Thus, a balanced Likert‐type scale was generated, with seven levels of concurrence. The scale was submitted to five experts for a theoretical validation and was applied to a nonprobabilistic sample pursuant to the judgment of 360 consumers with the same profile as of those of the focus group. Then, in a second phase, validation of the scale by the confirmatory factor analysis method was provided as well as the building and analysis of five causal models by the method of structural equation modeling and the five‐hypotheses test. The final model with a better adjustment (hypothesis 1) was composed of PRICE as an endogenous variable and ENVIRONMENT, SERVICE, FOOD, and HYGIENE as exogenous variables. Such conclusions allow the perception of the decision process in relation to restaurant selection in two phases: (1) when a group of restaurants is chosen, and (2) the moment when the PRICE variable takes over the role of defining the value offered by each restaurant, which will motivate the selection.