AT YOUR SERVICE

Like butter churns, iceboxes and the neighborhood bakery truck, friendly service is supposed to be a relic of a simpler time.

When you can order everything from salmon to sweat socks from a catalog and an Internet bookstore dwarfs the New York Public Library, some would argue face-to-face contact with a salesperson is about as relevant as Esperanto.

And when those few shopping expeditions we do undertake become nightmarish scenes from a Russian novel, complete with clueless stock boys and gum-cracking clerks talking on the phone to their boyfriends, we may not even mourn the loss.

But because we were convinced that old-fashioned, smiling service still exists, we went in search of the men and women who practice the art of the hearty handclasp and the thank-you-and-come-again valedictory.

Perhaps surprisingly, we found more than a few of these service heroes and heroines.

We found shopkeepers who pour their savings and their lives into bootstrap businesses.

And we found minimum-wage workers coping with rude, often angry customers.

Yes, they keep working because they are paid to. But they keep smiling, and brightening the lives of others, because that is the way they are, and the way they think things should be.

For many of us, isolated in our digitized world, these clerks, waitresses and countermen represent our only regular contact with strangers. They are our only objective measure, outside the televised mayhem on the news each night, of the state of the world. This alone makes them treasures.

This story was written by Times staff writers Steve Chawkins, Daryl Kelley, Kate Folmar, Coll Metcalfe and Fred Alvarez, and Times Community News reporters Massie Ritsch, Pamela J. Johnson and Nick Green.

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Worker Profiles Continue on B4 and B5