Macy's runs 665 stores and is closing about 150 of them. A family department store in Davenport, Iowa has 39 — and it's building number 40.

The small one doesn't run storewide sales. No coupons, no one-day events, no holiday blowouts. It gives away shipping and gift wrap, keeps a live pianist on the floor, and hands out a store card that has never charged a cent of interest. By every rule in retail, it should have died decades ago.

Instead it outlived Marshall Field's, Younkers and Montgomery Ward, and today it's opening stores inside the buildings they left behind.

This is the story of Von Maur: two families, a red brick building from 1892, and one decision two brothers made in the 1980s that the rest of the department store industry never had the nerve to copy.

Did you ever shop at Von Maur, Petersen's, Younkers or Marshall Field's? Tell me what town, what year, and what you remember first — the piano, the free gift wrap, the no-interest card, or the guy asleep in the chair waiting on his wife.

Subscribe for more stories of the American businesses that refused to close.