Sam Smith - The Maine reputation for straight talk, even in business dealings, may be on the wane, but as recently as the early 1980s, I set out to buy some fishing tackle for my sons. My first stop was LL Beans. I wasn't going to waste money on fancy gear but I thought I might pick up some nice hooks in the display case there.
I said to the clerk, "I haven't been fishing since I was a kid and all we used were mackerel jigs."
"They still work pretty good."
Mackerel jigs were simply a hook extending from a elongated diamond-shaped weight, so I left Beans having spent all of $2.19. My next stop was Mel's Sports. Mel had some nice but inexpensive metal reels so I picked up a couple.
"These for fresh watah or salt?" he asked unsolicited.
"Salt."
"You'd do better with the plastic reels."
It was true, but Mel lost a couple of bucks in the deal.
My last stop was a hardware store in the Falmouth shopping center. I walked in with my sons and asked about rods.
"These for you or your boys?"
"My boys."
"Well, I wouldn't buy these; they're too good. Go over to Zayres and get the Zebco Z-29. That'll do just fine."
L.L. Bean has a worldwide reputation of honesty and good customer relations, but Bean's wasn't that exceptional for Maine. I once bought a used car for my son sight unseen over the phone from David DeGrandpre at R & D Automotive. I figured I'd do better that way than buying a visible vehicle in a Washington lot. I was right. The car made two roundtrips across the country and innumerable college commutes before collapsing in Moab, Utah. Even then, my son got enough for the car to complete his trip to the west coast by train and bus.
Some of the best stories still come from Beans, though. Like the New York lady who complained that her woodstove was smoking up her living room. When pressed about how she had the flue set up, it turned out that she was not aware of flues and had just plunked the device down in her Manhattan living room and started burning wood. Bean's convinced her to send the stove back and gave her a refund. Another urban customer was upset because the wreath bought the previous December had turned brown in the intervening year. Bean's sent $25 so the customer could buy a new one in time for Christmas.
Once my mother called on what she suspected was a hopeless search to find a certain color yarn to finish her L.L Bean hunting boot needlepoint. The operator said she had been working on the same pattern and had some left to which my mother was welcomed if she'd come by her house to pick it up. And in the 60s when we received a damaged order, the company promptly replaced it. In the package were postage stamps in the same amount as the ones we had used returning the item.
Of course, LL Bean was also the pinnacle of local power. For a number of years after dial service was introduced, the store - being the only place in town open 24 hours a day and the town being without operators -served as the emergency center. At one local tells it, "A person dialing to report a fire got the register counter in the LL Bean salesroom. A clerk took the call, got the necessary information, hung up, flipped the necessary switches activating the whistle and. . . wholesale clerk evacuation usually followed. . .Of course, the size and demands of the Bean salesroom today would not permit half of the sales staff hurtling out the door every time the fire whistle sounded."
Much more useful for Bean was the fact that the US Post Office below the store and factory was a tenant of its biggest mailer and that LL's brother Guy was the postmaster.
