(FORTUNE Magazine) – A small landmark in the history of e-business came into being a few days ago on New York City's Madison Avenue. E*Trade, the big online broker--founded on the belief that brick-and-mortar retail branches were for the dinosaurs of the industry--opened a retail branch. Inside the steel-and-glass office, with its dark-toned wood, you can speak to a human being--whose hand you can actually reach out and shake--and open an account, trade stocks, or check your portfolio. In fact, it's just like being online except that you're interacting with a breathing mammal rather than a computer screen. What a concept!

The new E*Trade Center is a landmark because it represents something larger. Other online brokers--Web Street, CSFB Direct--have gone or are going the same way; the e-business with the name arguably least likely to suggest a physical presence, directbanking.com, has opened a branch (in Boston). Make fun of their crude reversals if you want, but they're doing the right thing. Like many other e-companies, they're facing the reality that their customers are not cyborgs but rather human beings, who haven't evolved significantly in 20,000 years. Brokerage, banking, and many other transactions require no physical element, and yet...call us Neanderthals, but many of us apparently still like a few atoms with our bits. And in a consumer economy, we get what we want.

This phenomenon goes beyond much of the rationale for clicks-and-mortar business strategies. Yes, stores can be a highly efficient distribution network, and people do appreciate a place where they can return items. But I'm talking about something else: The power of the physical, the real, the tactile reaches deep into all of us, and it isn't easy to quantify or compare directly with other experiences. For anyone in business, that reality holds large potential.

Question: Why is there a magazine called Yahoo Internet Life? Why does Travelocity, the purely online travel agency, publish a magazine? Why is there a magazine called Internet World? Why do the publishers of these and many other titles, all aimed at denizens of the speed-of-light, nearly free, electrons-only cyberworld, spend money to press ink into paper and send it through the mail?

For that matter, why do we do it at FORTUNE? It's no irrational prejudice in favor of tree harvesting, I promise you. For us, as for any magazine, the costs of paper, printing, and postage are our largest expenses by a mile. We'd love a new business model that eliminated them. So what's the problem? It is that you and I and most of the world's info-consumers don't want our information in purely electronic form. We just don't. If someone e-mails you a long file to read, what do you do with it? Chances are you print it out. How come?

Ron Beegle runs a successful e-business, the online division of Gap. I asked him whether all those thousands of Gap stores around the world give a reality to his online offerings that contributes to his operation's sales. Of course they do, he said: "It's called trust." Not that people have to see and touch everything before they buy it. Gap.com sells items, such as maternity wear, that aren't available in any Gap store. But people have seen and touched enough Gap merchandise to satisfy their primal--and rational--urge to understand what they're buying but can't touch online.

I asked Ted Turner (vice chairman of AOL Time Warner, owner of FORTUNE's publisher) about the whole real-vs.-virtual topic some time ago, and--actually, that's not true. I asked him about something completely different, but he started talking about this anyway. And it riled him. Online chat rooms? Uh-uh. "I want a real person. I want a real member of the opposite sex with me, not some goddamn virtual...and I don't want to sit down at some keyboard and communicate with somebody on the other side of the world, I want my neighbors to come over and play bridge, and I want to touch 'em and look at 'em and knock 'em on the back. I don't want to communicate that way, I want to do it the old-fashioned way, with human contact--not, goddammit, through some computer! I'm not going digital! I'm staying in the analog world."

Whatever you may think of Ted, just remember he made himself a billionaire on the belief that most people are a lot like him.

A caveat: Any stand-pat traditional company that gets complacent because of the backlash against spreading virtuality is doomed. The truth is, e-commerce is great. The Net is great. Chat rooms--well, some people like them. We're not going back.

The vital fact for gung ho dot-commers is that major shifts in how we live never happen instantly or completely. We can all see where we're going--but as human beings, we're not there yet.