I’ve blogged before about the importance of great product selection and great customer service. Some retail chains with smaller stores, like Anthropologie and The Sharper Image, know that the two go hand in hand. Yet some larger stores, like The Home Depot, only emphasize customer service when they get enough complaints to make their bottom line suffer.

So it heartens me to see stories about retailers like family-owned Elliott’s Hardware in Dallas. They’re holding their own even with the arrival of nearby big-box stores like The Home Depot and Lowe’s. And outstanding selection plus dedicated customer service are the reasons why.

Quite a compliment that Home Depot’s district manager visits Elliott’s monthly. “It’s an old-school hardware store, and there are only a few of those left,” he says. “I strive to emulate some of that feel that they have at Elliott’s.”

The experienced staff at Elliott’s really go the extra mile for customers. The lawn and garden manager even “…keeps a hand scope in his pocket that magnifies by 10, various bugs in bottles, and leaves, blades of grass and soil that people bring to him for a diagnosis. He calls them ’salad bags.’ ”

A marketing professor at Texas A&M University, who has written books on customer service and been a Lowe’s Co. board member for nine years, has good things to say about Elliott’s:

“When a customer makes up his mind about where he’s going to shop today, he’s deciding what he’ll endure to get it. What you deliver each and every time affects your reputation. It’s cumulative and dynamic. It takes a while to build a reputation, and it takes much less time to ruin it.”

That pretty much sums it up for me. Don’t let your reputation go down the drain because of one poorly trained sales person or one out-of-stock item. Be like Elliott’s. Be a place where everyone knows the sales staff cares and the shelves are well-stocked. When the manager of your big-box competition starts stopping by regularly, you’ll know you’ve made a great impression.