The recent expansion of the European Union has created immense challenges for retailers as they seek to expand into the new eastern regions. There is little research that examines the diversity of retail preferences across the newly expanded EU. In this paper we seek to empirically 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
We 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. In addition, our findings provide further support for the notion that retailing strategies for one country cannot be effectively extended to other countries without adaptation (de Mooij and Hofstede, 2002).

Research limitations/implications
Because of the convenience nature of the data collection method utilized in the current study, future research that examines these two groups might want to employee a more stratified sampling approach across all the countries. Other limitations that provide fertile ground for future studies include specific explorations of the retail decision criteria with more complex measurement scales which tap each sub construct more thoroughly.

Practical implications
It is apparent that retailers should thoroughly evaluate new target markets, especially when they are distant and unfamiliar. This is demonstrated by the fact that CEE accession state customers view retailing substantially different than founder member state customers in all but four of the 22 retail decision criteria in our study. We conclude that retailers should pursue country-adapted strategies when entering the new CEE accession states.

What is original/value of paper
The recent expansion of the European Union has created immense challenges for retailers as they seek to expand into the new eastern regions. Our paper presents some of the first empirical research which examines the diversity of retail preferences across the newly expanded EU.