Abstract:
Street food vendors are common in South Africa’s townships and are typically patronised by individuals in lower-
income brackets. The extent to which service quality considerations play a role in the patronage of such informal,
survivalist food businesses remains largely unexplored as service quality studies tend to focus more on well-
established businesses. In response to this shortcoming, this empirical study investigates whether customers’
perceptions of service quality – based on the dimensions of tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and
empathy – are related to repeat patronage of street food vendors. The researchers assumed a positivist philosophical
disposition and relied on data collected from a purposive sample of patrons to investigate the possible existence of
relationships between service quality dimensions and repeat patronage. Results revealed favourable perception
scores for tangibles, assurance and reliability but not for responsiveness and empathy. The service quality perceptions
of first-time customers were also shown to be statistically different from those of repeat patrons. Interestingly, while
findings point to the existence of statistically significant relationships between service quality dimensions and repeat
patronage, the weak and moderate strengths of the identified relationships highlight that patronage considerations
for the studied population possibly lie outside the five dimensions of service quality.
