In this paper, outage performance of hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) technique in interference dominant mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is analyzed. Unlike prior analysis, interference and spatial randomness of the nodes (i.e. the randomness in the number of nodes and nodes' locations) are considered. Based on the theory of point processes, the outage probabilities of two popular HARQ techniques, that are type-I HARQ and HARQ with chase combining (HARQ-CC), are derived in closed forms. The outage performance gain of HARQ-CC over type-I HARQ is also discussed and is found to follow the scaling law of Θ (k ^2(k+1)/α ) where α is the path loss exponent and k is the number of retransmissions. It is also demonstrated that both type-I HARQ and HARQ-CC can significantly improve the communication performance even in interference dominant MANETs. Furthermore, it is revealed that in most cases HARQ-CC is superior over type-I HARQ, however, for a dense network type-I HARQ can provide comparable performance with lower complexity than HARQ-CC and is thus more preferable.