Dover Street's customer service is what Gilchrist describes as “old-school,” with a mythical performance of salesmanship he calls the “selling ceremony.” Every employee goes through “an induction” that lasts “a few months” and covers “all sorts of different things—product knowledge and knowledge of the company, knowledge of Comme des Garçons, knowledge of Dover Street, and what our selling ceremony looks like.” (Its website, meanwhile, has just a handful of lower-priced products on offer. “We're very much focused on brick-and-mortar,” Gilchrist tells me. “That's going to be our future for sure.”)

“For us, it's very one-on-one,” Gilchrist says of the selling ceremony. “I really like for a member of staff to start the conversation with a client, to be the person that takes them around the whole building. And they'll be the person that rings the sale, wraps it, and takes them to the car.” I recalled that when I visited the store the day before, I'd tried on (if you will) a $575 Marine Serre Anti Pollution Mask. The salesperson had gingerly wrapped it around my head and fastened it admiringly. “And it really works,” she said as she read to me from the accompanying air purifier manual. Usually you go to old shops where this service is standard to tap into an older, gentler world. (It's like going out to a white-tablecloth restaurant for a martini when you usually live on kale out of a recyclable bowl.) But Dover Street brings that sensibility to the brands that are writing the story of the next decade in design.

Even outside of these shrines to idiosyncratic products, many customers are finding that going to a store is just more convenient than the rigamarole of ordering, waiting, finally trying it on, and then—what the heck?—discovering that it doesn't fit and taking the whole tragically rewrapped package back to the post office. Nordstrom Local is a sort of all-purpose-but-shopping hub, located separately from the department store like a bank branch, where you can pick up or return online purchases, get gifts wrapped, and have clothing altered. (In fact, Nordstrom Local has made the business the largest employer of tailors in North America.) “Part of the challenge is you can't keep thinking of yourself as a department store and keep trying to optimize to that model,” Jamie Nordstrom, the company's president of stores, tells me. “We want to be the solution for a lot of things for customers.”

Nordstrom says he and his team are constantly experimenting to better serve customers—you can get your nails painted or rent a tux at the Nordstrom Local on Melrose in Los Angeles, or maybe have your child's stroller professionally cleaned on the Upper East Side. (Would a Bushwick Nordstrom Local give you painting lessons? Stay tuned, folks.) All five locations offer personal styling services. “We put lots of offers out there in front of customers to see if they resonate,” Nordstrom says. “And when they do, it's great and we pour the gas on. When it doesn't, we go, ‘Okay, we learned that doesn't work. Let's try something else.’ ” (When asked for an example of something that didn't work, he reached not for a Nordstrom Local example but all the way back to the 1960s. “In our kids' shoe departments,” Nordstrom says, “we used to have monkeys in cages.”)

Nordstrom bristled a bit at the idea that sales associates are transforming into an army of personal shoppers. “I think the customer is way more in control than they ever have been before,” he says. “There's just so much more choice and control that the customer has about how they want to buy something. The retailers that do the best job of delivering on all those different kinds of choices and journeys are the ones that will succeed.” Deep discounts and digital shopping have trained consumers to think they can try something on in a store but find it for a lower price online. Over the next decade, stores are employing their full arsenal of skills, talents, and charms to woo you, making sure that the purchase—even if it happens outside the store confines—is made with them.