Carnivale of Customer Service--Best Practice

Day 2 of the Carnivale continues. The first five posts emphasized the importance of attitude, both from management and from employees. While still emphasizing the importance of attitude, now we start to move in another direction with a post by Thom Singer, of Some Assembly Required--The Business Development/Networking Blog. This post, and the next one, offer best practices.

Thom's post describes two customer service experiences, one that failed to meet his needs, the other that exceeded his need. This post illustrates perfectly the Southwest Airlines policy of "Hire for attitude, train for skills."
Here's Thom:

Last weekend I had cause to shop at both Nordstrom's and Wal-Mart on the same day. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was in a hurry. I knew exactly what I needed in each store and my hope was to get in - and get out!

On first glance, which store do you think provided me with the superior customer service experience? More...