Abstract
This study examines the effects of the customer's perceptions of being the object of employee attention in physical store settings. Our specific concern is employee attention when the customer is browsing in a store and does not require any particular service from employees. A main thesis is that we humans are highly sensitive to others' attention (and inattention) in social settings and that others' attention can influence our sense of importance from a meaningfulness-in-life point of view. Three experiments in which employee attention was manipulated (low vs. high) confirm this: high employee attention enhanced a sense of importance , which mediated the impact of employee attention on customer satisfaction. The net result, in each experiment, was a higher level of customer satisfaction under the condition of high employee attention.