Employees of the Wal-Mart Super Store here are extraordinarily courteous. Anytime I ask employees where to find something, they will break off whatever they're doing and walk me right to the item. Here's an experience I like to tell about:

My wife and I were looking for a patio table and chairs. We found a nice set at WM, but we had no way to get it home in our little Civic. We thought of ordering it on their website, but shipping was too expensive. So we kept looking.

We went back to WM and, while looking at the set again, an employee in the garden department (not a supervisor or manager), cheerfully told us that, because one of the six chairs was missing, we could have the table and five chairs for half price. Swell, we said, but we had no way to get it home. She asked where we lived. When we told her we were about 1.5 miles away, she volunteered that her husband, who worked nearby, had a pickup truck, and she and he would deliver the set to us at 5 p.m. And they did--gratis.

I have a friend who's a senior WM officer at their headquarters. I asked the WM employee if it'd be ok for me to write to my friend about her exceptional courtesy and service (didn't want to get her in trouble if she'd stepped on a company rule). She said it'd be ok. I wrote to my friend, and asked to make sure that the WM CEO saw my e-mail.

Sure enough, we were in the store a couple weeks later and ran into the courteous employee. She told me that, at that morning's pre-opening pep meeting, the store manager read an e-mail from the CEO, praising her for her outstanding service to my wife and me. Now, that's what I call excellence.

BTW: Target permitted (or used to permit) company pharmacists not to fill "morning after" pill prescriptions if it offended their beliefs.