Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the retail store decision criteria of customers in founder member states of the European Union and customers in Central and Eastern European (CEE) accession member states.Design/methodology/approach – Based on the literature review we theorize that significant differences will exist between founder member state customers and CEE accession member customers and that retailers would be wise to forego a standardized retail mix in favour of strategies more precisely adapted to individual national markets. Utilizing a well‐established retail customer decision criteria scale, the authors collected data from 1,221 Eastern and Western EU customers.Findings – It was found that CEE shoppers hold very high expectations of what they desire in a retail store. Indeed, their expectations were higher than those of founder member state customers on 21 of the 22 dimensions measured.Research limitations/implications – Because of the convenience nature of the data collection m...