Fair warning: this isn’t a technology story. Nor is it an article about a specific best practice all retailers should follow. But it is an anecdotal story about exceptional customer service, and about store associates going well above and beyond the daily routine to solve a customer’s problem. And in an age when we write so much about the value of store associates understanding their customers and complementing in-store systems with the tried-and-true human touch, it seemed worth sharing.

A few days ago I was in San Diego visiting my friends Will and Gia. San Diego in the winter is enough to make one think that my colleague Leslie Hand at IDC had the right idea leaving Boston’s dreary winters for some serious Vitamin D.

This past Christmas, Gia had bought Will a guitar. He hasn’t done much with it, and while we were settling in at a very nice restaurant, she asked if I’d give him a guitar lesson after dinner. One problem: his guitar had a broken string.

It was 8:15pm when the topic came up, we had just ordered, and his local music store — Sam Ash, a store I never shop at either in person or online — closes at 9. That’s when I remembered something I’d seen at the recent NRF Big Show and came up with a harebrained idea.

One of the demos I saw in New York featured self-service lockers from a company called Apex where customers could buy online, and when they got to the store for pickup, even if it was after hours, they could safely retrieve their product from the locker units located just outside the store. I knew Sam Ash didn’t have this type of system installed, but since guitar strings cost only about $10, I was willing to try a low-tech version of the solution.

I called the store and explained that I needed acoustic guitar strings, but wouldn’t be able to get there before close. I asked the young woman in the accessories department if I could pay for a set of strings over the phone on my credit card, and whenever the store was closing someone could leave them just outside the store. Perhaps on top of a pilon or a trash bin. I knew the risk that they might get stolen, but again, at $10, I wasn’t particularly concerned if they weren’t there once I arrived. She said she’d have to ask her store manager and call me back.

Ten minutes later, with our entrees still on the way, she called me back and said her manager wasn’t agreeable to my idea. I explained that the risk was entirely on me, that I completely understood if my purchase wasn’t there when I arrived, but the answer was still no. However, she had a different idea.

She asked when I could reasonably make it to the store. That if I could get there before 9:30 someone would wait around until I arrived. As someone who has spent years working in retail stores, I protested immediately. This wasn’t important enough to make someone who’d just worked a shift stick around after hours. But she insisted it wouldn’t be a problem, that there were some after-hours tasks to perform, and that if I could get there by 9:30 it wouldn’t be an issue at all.

We skipped dessert, jumped in the car, and rolled up to Sam Ash’s San Diego store at 9:15. The outside lights were off, the window and door gates were all drawn, and it appeared we were out of luck. I knocked on the door just to be sure, and bam: the door flung open to reveal a fully lit and fully staffed store. “Are you Steve? “ When I said I was, the store manager presented me with 2 sets of guitar strings: one electric and one acoustic, free of charge, and informed me that they had just gotten this particular brand in, and hadn’t even put them out on the store floor for sale yet. I’d be the first person on the West Coast to try them out.

I was genuinely overwhelmed. These people had no reason to do what they’d done. I’m not a famous musician, I’m not even in a traveling band. And I wasn’t buying a $4k guitar — I’m a nobody buying a $10 pack of strings. The manager informed me that as a staff of fellow musicians, he prides his store on making sure that when people want to make music, his staff does everything it can to make that goal a reality. Because they make music, they understand how important it is to customers who want to make music as well.

When asked what I could do to show my gratitude (a Yelp review, maybe?) he gave me the email address for Sam Ash, himself, and said it would be great if I wrote a letter describing my experience. I did it before we even left the parking lot. Within, I told Sam about his staff, about what they’d done, and that as someone who has spent an embarrassingly large amount of money at such competitors as Guitar Center and Sweetwater, his San Diego staff had just made a lifelong loyal customer out of me. He responded the following day and seemed genuinely thrilled with the whole thing.

So like I said: this isn’t a technology story. And I’m certainly not advising any of our retail readers to ask their store associates to stay open after hours to give out free products. But the story was too good not to share. It may well be the best retail experience I’ve ever had, and what made it happen was a store staff that understood its customers — that empathized with its customers. And that is something worth emulating.

And I do mean it: I’m now a Sam Ash customer for life.