Acknowledgments
My Nordstrom journey began in 1982, when I became a regular freelance correspondent in Seattle for Women’s Wear Daily and the other trade newspapers that then comprised Fairchild Publications.
One of the first companies I wrote about was Nordstrom, which was then a strictly West Coast retail chain, but was beginning to gain a national reputation for its culture of customer service. As a native of New Jersey, whose first job out of college was writing retail advertising for a division of Macy’s, I was fascinated by the Nordstrom culture of taking care of the customer. I remain fascinated to this day.
In 1990, I was contacted by Elizabeth Wales, a Seattle literary agent, whose next-door neighbor was Patrick D. McCarthy, then Nordstrom’s number-one salesman. They had an idea for a book on McCarthy and Nordstrom, and asked me if I was interested in writing it. You know what my answer was.
Five years later, in 1995, the hardcover, The Nordstrom Way: The Inside Story of America’s Number One Customer Service Company, was published by John Wiley & Sons. It quickly became a business best seller. Since then, there has been a second edition hardcover, a quality trade paperback, a mass-market paperback, and a handbook, The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence: A Handbook for Implementing Great Service in Your Organization, which combined elements of the original The Nordstrom Way and my 2001 book, Lessons from the Nordstrom Way: How Companies Are Emulating the #1 Customer ...
