Frequent RSR readers know I am an Amazon Prime junkie, but some days, as an old friend used to say, “The sun is shining and the store windows are gleaming ” and you’ve just got to go shopping. So it was this past Sunday.

We drove past our original destination, Fairchild Gardens, and went instead to Dadeland Station (a small quasi-mall). We went to several stores I hadn’t been to in a long time, and I have to say, the world has really changed. Retailers are definitely putting their customer service money where their mouths are, and it mostly spells good news for shoppers.

First stop: Best Buy. I haven’t been in a store for years… but I had a pretty immediate need for a high quality portable Bluetooth speaker. Music is required for a very special occasion, and my little portable speakers proved inadequate. Clearly I’m not the only person wanting a portable Bluetooth speaker; I was gobsmacked by the sheer number of items available from companies like Beats, JBL, Bose, Sony, and others. Prices ranged from $39-$499 and they were all hooked up and available to try.

My brain hurt after about five minutes (and 10-15 devices). I couldn’t see spending $500 on a single speaker, but I knew the cheap ones weren’t powerful enough. Luckily a store employee came over to help me out (big change #1!). He didn’t have to look anything up, and rapidly helped me narrow my choices to two. I could pick the Bose for higher quality sound, or a brand called Ultimate Ears (owned by Logitech, as it turned out) for decent sound but more ruggedness for outdoor use. He just made it an easy binary decision, and I walked out with the UE Boom – also rated highest by PC Magazine and Cnet (yes, I checked both sites!).

This was a tremendous change from my last visit to Best Buy a couple of years ago, where I encountered surly sales personnel and not enough choices in products. Hubert Joly deserves a round of applause. Best Buy is a different chain than it was, and it’s all for the better.

From there we headed to Target, another store I haven’t spent much time in lately. We were there to buy a small kitchen garbage pail. We had a hard time finding them, so we asked a friendly employee where they might be. She pulled out a company-owned iPhone and started running some searches. We helped her find the right word to find the location, and she walked us over to the exact spot where the products were located. I asked her how long they’d had the app. She didn’t know, because it turned out she’d only just started the previous Friday! What a great way to get an employee up to speed! She felt comfortable, and even though she couldn’t quite figure out what to call it, between us, we got to the right search term.

That was the good news. The bad news was that the assortment was way too narrow. We couldn’t find the right size or shape. The surprising story (at least for me) is that almost half the store has been given over to groceries. No wonder the assortment in other products is so thin!

You know, I don’t pretend to know all the ins and outs of moving so heavily into grocery. I know they’re a traffic / trip driver. I know they turn quickly. But I also know the profit margins are bupkis, to use a word from the old country. Would Target be better off broadening its assortment of much higher margin wastebaskets and shrinking its grocery assortment? Seems like it to me, but the company has clearly gone in another direction. And so did we. We headed over to the Container Store where we got exactly what we were looking for in record time.

Next up, a quick (or so I thought) stop at PetSmart to buy two new litter boxes and new litter for the cats. I knew exactly which two styles I wanted. Unfortunately, they were not to be found amid the 30-40 different litter boxes they had on the shelves. These things were really exotic, and in frankly hideous colors. As my partner said “Cats may be color blind, but people aren’t. These are awful. “

We walked out empty-handed. There is another chain that has exactly what I want, and I’ll go there on another day. This can only be thought of as SKU-overload. I don’t think a helpful employee would have been useful in this case. Maybe a merchant with simpler tastes would have done the trick.

Finally a stop at Trader Joe’s was in order. After all, there is no TJ’s really close to my house, and we were in the neighborhood. The company doesn’t have the kind of moveable feast that Costco has, but it did have samples of insanely good porcini mushroom lasagna (bought it!) and lots of wine to taste (bought that too!). We checked out with a very friendly store employee. She was a former Whole Foods Market employee who raved about how empowered she felt at TJ’s vs. the very (her words) “strict and rule-based environment at Whole Foods. ” She also gave me some tips about how to serve the lasagna I’d bought. The woman totally loved her job, and you could feel it.

When all is said and done, why should you care about my shopping trip?

• Best Buy is using knowledgeable employees to improve the in-store shopping experience and make it simpler.
• Target is using technology to bring employees up to speed faster, and provide great customer service. It has a ways to go with its product mix, but these changes don’t happen overnight.
• Trader Joe’s is creating an environment of employee empowerment to create super-excited and helpful staff.
• It’s possible to over-assort a store. Too many options are as bad as too few, it seems. Curated assortments are a very good idea.

Our research has been telling us that this is how Retail Winners act. It was good for me to see it in action. And it made for a very pleasant afternoon. It has been a long time since I’ve been able to say that about a day at the stores.

Maybe I’ll make an effort to do it more often. Of course, if I do, that’ll be bad news for Amazon.com. But that’s a whole other story, isn’t it?