Comments & Curiosities:

Where do you end up if you go from Sweden to New York to the Yukon to Seattle to Costa Mesa? In Fashion Island. It’s a little complicated but it’s true. It is if you’re Nordstrom anyway.

On Friday, Fashion Island finally got a brand new shiny Nordstrom. At 138,000 square feet, the new Nordy is smaller than its sister at South Coast Plaza, but there is every reason to expect that it will do a land office business.

Actually, Laura Davis, Fashion Island’s senior marketing director came up with a term that I think is more interesting than the store.

“We will be providing the community with what they’ve been asking for years, and that’s Nordstrom,” said Davis. “It really is going to resonate well with the coastal shopper, who is loyal to Fashion Island.”

Did you know there were “coastal shoppers?” I had no idea. Maybe they’re a sub-set of regular shoppers. Plus, they’ve been waiting years to get to a Nordstrom.

Apparently when coastal shoppers try to find South Coast Plaza, it doesn’t work. Whenever they get east of Jamboree, they become light-headed and disoriented and they have to turn back.

All I can say is, it’s a good thing John W. Nordstrom wasn’t a coastal shopper. It’s a long way from Sweden to Newport Beach and there are all sorts of turns.

It was 1887 when Nordstrom left his home in Sweden at age 16 and headed for New York City, landing on its fabled golden shore with a grand total of five bucks and not a syllable of English.

Nordstrom was a bright kid and quickly figured out that even if those books about “New York on $5 a Day” are true, he needed to get out of town, fast. He worked his way across the country as a miner and a logger over the next 10 years, until he saw a Seattle headline that read, “Gold in the Klondike.”

He set off the very next day for points north and spent the next two years doing the prospector thing until he had $13,000 in his pocket and returned to Seattle, which is much better than $5 in New York.

While he was in the Yukon, Nordstrom met a man named Carl Wallin who owned a shoe repair shop in downtown Seattle. The two men reconnected in Seattle and opened a shoe store together in 1901 — Wallin & Nordstrom.

Over the next 100 years, that first store grew like Topsy and became Nordstrom, Inc. — one of the largest and most successful retailers in the world. But small or big, John Nordstrom insisted on offering four things — service, selection, quality and value. Remember the service part. We’ll get back to that later.

By 1930, Wallin was retired and John Nordstrom turned the reins over to his sons, Everett and Elmer and Lloyd. Anyone and everyone in the Northwest knew that if you were looking for shoes, Nordstrom is where you went.

By 1960, Nordstrom had eight stores in the Northwest, the downtown Seattle store was the largest shoe store in the country, and the company decided to raise its sights from shoes to clothing.

By that time, the third generation of Nordstrom was large and in-charge, and the company went public in 1971, snagging the $100 million annual sales brass ring just two years later.

In 1978, the company took a deep breath and stepped onto the fastest of the retail fast tracks — California — in a place called South Coast Plaza. Speaking of which, in 1988, Nordstrom went bicoastal, first in Virginia then up and down the Right Coast.

But let’s get back to John Nordstrom’s uncompromising stance on customer service. If you are not old enough to wrinkle, you may not realize the impact that Nordstrom had on customer service, and not just in the retail biz.

Before Nordstrom blew into town, sales people did two things — straighten up inventory and ring up sales, period, and the more high-end the store, the more dreadful the service.

Customers were annoying interruptions and sales people made sure they knew it. Returns? Please. Department stores had more rules and restrictions about returns than the IRS. Merchandise could be returned or exchanged as long as it hadn’t been placed inside a bag or box, had not been carried outside the store or been touched by human hands.

Once Nordstrom showed up, it was a whole new world, with sales people that were actually helpful and knew their merchandise and kept track of your likes and dislikes and called you at home a few days before the big sale on that jacket you’d been stalking.

Returns? No questions asked — soiled, stained, worn, torn, singed, just hand it over, no problem. Need a different color, style, size, price? You’ll be sorry you asked. Best of all, when Nordstrom showed up, the other stores had to get in the customer service game, fast. If you’re as big a fan of good service as I am, just remember that you can thank Nordstrom for that.

And there you have it — Fashion Island, panning for gold in the Yukon and coastal shoppers. It’s all connected. I’m just not sure how. Shop on. I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at [email protected].