Creating Effective Customer Policies for Disabled People in the Mainstream Private Market

This thesis explores inequality and exclusion of disabled people as customers in the European single market and identifies potential causes of market inaccessibility and opportunities for creating more effective customer policies. The study adapted the concept of the ‘travel chain’ and examined disabled customers’ experience in acquiring customer information, traveling to the shop, navigating retail premises, and interacting in a shop. While the capitalistic nature of and processes in the market prohibit customers from fully exercising customer freedom and choice, for disabled people, customer participation is even more difficult and restrained. Putting forward the experiences of people with impairments gathered through mystery shopping and semi-structured interviews (in Lithuania and the UK) formed the foundation of this research. It was augmented by stakeholders of the European single market for information and communication technology products as well as civil society’s insights gathered through covert observations and semi-structured interviews. This stage of the research investigated the stakeholders’ actual lifeworld regarding disabled customers and market accessibility, power relations among them and access to the formulation of discourse in the public sphere. The presented work has been influenced by the social model of disability, which, combined with Habermas’ theory of communicative action, provided deeper understanding into multiple levels (global, regional and national) of the social, political and attitudinal factors shaping business, civil society and disabled customers’ experiences and realities. A range of overlapping restrictions emerged within discussions about shopping experience challenging legal construction of disabled people as ‘vulnerable’ consumers because of their impairments. They demonstrate how disabled customers’ exclusion is shaped by ableism, as well as the state and business’ focus on non-disabled citizens and customers. The role played by business and civil society’s notions of ...