Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Forbes, but it seems really relevant to our retail readers as well. It’s an object lesson in surviving and thriving in a world where logic says you shouldn’t really succeed.

If you mention the company GameStop to a casual observer and talk about its success story, they are likely to reply something to the effect of “Didn’t all that business move on-line? ” The implication is that in the digital age, stores selling computer gaming equipment are anachronisms.

In some ways, you could argue GameStop bricks and mortar retail stores are in an even trickier situation: Yahoo Finance lists a somewhat intimidating set of direct competitors including Best Buy, Walmart, Dell, Target, Sears, Costco and others. It really should also list Amazon.com as well, I think.

As it turns out, GameStop is alive and well. It is a $9 billion specialty retailer with fingers in a lot of pies. It maintains its leadership as the retailer with the highest market share in video games, but it also has its fingers in several other pies.

It is a digital/mobile publisher, in the top ten. Ever heard of the web site kongregate.com? That’s a GameStop property. Ditto for gameinformer.com.

It is a technology provider. Its Spring Mobile wireless business is the single largest AT&T wireless reseller (also selling its “Cricket: ” contract-less solution). It also owns a chain of Apple reseller stores called Simply Mac. These stores operate in secondary markets where Apple has chosen to not open its own Apple stores. It is the single largest reseller of all Apple products and services. Who knew?

It sells Collectibles. Dying for a Darth Vader plush toy or a unique Monopoly set? Get it at the company’scollectibles site. I don’t think it’s the place for Hummel figurines, but for all things games, they’ve got it right there. It’s even got a separate site for its own licensed products, thinkgeek.com. ThinkGeek also just opened its first retail store in Orlando, Fl. We are likely entering sacred days for ThinkGeek, as we plunge into the Halloween season.

But separate lines of business and web sites are not enough to make for a successful enterprise. It turns out that a big differentiator for the company is its in-store customer experience and its tailored loyalty program, PowerUp Rewards.I believe that GameStop provides a valuable model for 21st Century retailing in general – combining the personalized experience of the past with the technology available today. Let’s take a look at the PowerUp Rewards program and its success to date.

Launched in 2010, the PowerUp Rewards loyalty program boasts some pretty impressive statistics:

• More than 40 million members
• 1 in 5 people in the US are in the program
• PowerUp Rewards members drive 3 times the sales of non-PowerUp Rewards members and a somewhat stunning 5 times the profitability.

The company uses the data gleaned from PowerUp Rewards members to drive personalized recommendations and suggested trade-in values for games and even helps the company decide effective demographics for new store openings.

Perhaps most importantly, the company has recognized that notwithstanding all the noise, people still really like to go to stores. It has evolved from thinking its digital channels (traditional web and mobile sites) were going to drive its business to recognizing that their primary purpose is to act as steps on the path to purchase. Instead of focusing on conversion metrics for the web sites, it follows those paths to purchase. This yields some interesting metrics: 60% of customers visit GameStop’s web site before coming to stores (and 60% of that traffic comes from mobile devices). Twenty-six percent of Web Visitors (who don’t buy), show up in a store to buy something within 48 hours.

Data junkies, meditate on this for a minute. For every $1 of direct sales online, GameStop’s mobile channels are influence TEN TIMES that amount in stores. Ten times.

Two things amaze me about those statistics. The first is that the company actually measures this data (again, thanks to the PowerUp Rewards program). This is far rarer than one would suspect in the world of retail. The second thing is that they’ve understood the true value of digital channels. This requires a lot of organizational alignment – fear of cannibalization often keeps retailers from getting their various on-line and store-based organizations to work together.

Even more importantly, GameStop has unlocked the secrets to the new Holy Kingdom of retail – Millennials. GameStop defines Millennials as the approximately 80 million people aged 18 to 34. The company believes that understanding Millennials and delivering the experience they want will be a key to its future success.

The company has highlighted two key characteristics of Millennials. First – they are not a homogeneous group. They expect individualized experiences. I could argue that this is true of most generations, particularly Baby Boomers, but it’s hard to see the era of Big Box discount retailing (which came about during the Boomer generation) as any kind of “individualized ” experience. It’s mass merchandising, by definition.

Second – Millennials demand authenticity. In other words, the person who engages with them in the store must actually care about what they want. And despite conventional wisdom, those Millennials really do prefer to talk with a human than interact with a kiosk. GameStop is one retailer who has clearly shifted from self-service to assisted service – assisted by humans who share the customers’ passion.

Bloomberg profiled both the company and one specific store manager, Tim Brooks in early 2015. Mr. Brooks is the antithesis of many retail employees. He knows more than 90% of his store’s customers by name, has been with the company for more than a decade, and works with those customers as individuals. I don’t know many retailers who can say the same about any of their store managers. It turns out that “old school ” retailing still works, and works well.

Early in my analyst career I used to talk about retailing in the context of physics. My thesis was we have the physics of the very large retailer whose focus is on mass, economies of scale and the supply chain, and the physics of the very small retailer, whose focus is on personalized attention, tailored assortments and customer intimacy. I believed that the future of successful retail lay in finding a Grand Unified Theory – where we could have the best of both worlds.

GameStop is one retailer that is taking that step. It’s using data and people to get there, and that’s a real refreshing change.