Shopping in Charlottesville

Baby Genius's award-winning children's products teach babies and toddlers essential skills through the power of music. Based on a bounty of research, the company's DVDs enrich the learning experience by merging classical pieces and familiar songs with vibrant images, keeping kids entertained for hours. Parents can sit back while animated animal educators teach pocket-size pupils better motor skills, dictionary-defying vocabularies, vampire-free counting, and nap-inducing dance moves that ready little ones for kindergarten and beyond.

All visitors to Colesville Nursery scrutinize a list of plants and a map upon their arrival, as if gearing up for a scavenger hunt. The preparation makes sense, considering that guests are unleashed onto the sprawling grounds, where they walk or drive through more than 50 packed acres of plants. The vast plant selection includes azaleas, roses, ornamental grasses, and even topiaries, whereas the garden shop supplies green thumbs with gardening tools and organic fertilizers.

Once customers hone in on their ideal plants, staff members carefully help load the leafy bounty into cars without damaging blossoms or rousting sleepy garden gnomes. If the flora is too big to fit in your vehicle, the nursery happily delivers to locales within a 100-mile radius.

Before Comfort One Shoes' sole experts are allowed to fit a single shoe to a customer's foot, they must graduate from Comfort One University and undergo a mentorship process. It's only then that they can help shoppers find their desired footwear, whether it be lace-up Ziera boots, On running shoes with CloudTec technology, or Thierry Rabotin shoes, handmade without uncomfortable, rigid components. Alongside men's and women's footwear, the shop stocks an assortment of bags and accessories such as colorful iPhone cases from Triple C Designs that protect phone exteriors and conceal scratches from the last time you transformed into a werewolf.

Comfort One Shoes also seeks to better the world through creative philanthropic efforts, such as collecting 25,000 shoes for those without and offering their employees half their pay and time off to volunteer in the community. Perhaps such initiatives are part of the reason Comfort One Shoes earned the National Shoe Retailers Association’s Retailer of the Year Award in 2011.

Each of Merrifield Garden Center’s three locations overflows with thousands of plants throughout the year, encompassing such variety that a reporter for CNN’s Eatocracy claimed “I might as well endorse my paychecks straight to them…because I always want to grow what they've got.” Knowledgeable garden experts, 25 of whom have been with Merrifield for 25 years or more, guide customers through row upon row of flowers, trees, shrubs, and other plants, or help them sort through an extensive selection of bulbs and seeds. Visitors may also bump into the founders themselves, or their children and other family members, 38 of whom still work at the thriving business that started 40 years ago. Merrifield doesn’t just proliferate plants, however; amenities such as cafes in Gainesville and Merrifield and a dog park in Gainesville make each garden center into a leisure destination as well. Three of its garden gurus run an hourlong TV show that's been going for more than two decades, and other staff publish gardening advice on the website and Facebook. The staff also work to protect the environment with a variety of eco-friendly initiatives. Besides stocking native plants and water-saving devices for their customers, they also compost more than 20,000 tons of soil and 25,000 cubic yards of brush left over from their comprehensive landscaping services every year. The Gainesville location also gathers old concrete, metal appliances, and rusted Optimus Primes for recycling free of charge.

A family whose love for flora spans three generations, the Stadlers started their plant-growing endeavors back in 1932 when Paul Stadler began gardening for clients in Georgetown after emigrating from Switzerland. Soon, they opened up a small landscaping-and-gardening center, and today—more than 75 years later—Stadler Nurseries has grown to populate 340 acres of fertile land where they propagate native plants, landscaping shrubs, trees, roses, and more than 700 varieties of perennials. A staff of horticulturists and enthusiastic green thumbs helps visitors navigate the vast greenhouses and outdoor gardens, offering tips on how to prune leaves, fertilize soil, and teach plants how to roll over on command.

An authorized AT&T retailer, AT&T Portables sets itself apart from the crowd with customer-service-oriented staffers who guide shoppers through the process of picking phones and accessories from an extensive inventory. Each employee is well versed in the bells and whistles of the latest smartphones from Apple, Samsung, Blackberry, and Nokia, helping shoppers translate tech specs into real-world pros and cons. Customers’ chosen phones are accompanied by a range of protective and stylish accessories, as well as cellular plans that provide an appropriate amount of minutes, text messages, and bandwidth for sending and receiving urgent cat videos.