Eccentric Flower:199809/a trip to freeport

thirteen september ninety eight ten a m

a trip to freeport

My sinuses have been exploding for the last two or three days and the effect has been to make me not want to do anything but lie around and stare at something passively. Playing computer games, a fairly mindless exercise for the kinds of games I mean, was about the best I could muster.

I'm a little better today thanks to the Miracle Of Drugs - a statement to keep in mind next time I pull out my anti-drug rant. One stiff twelve-hour decongestant last night and I slept well for the first time since Wednesday. Still, you should take that as a measure of desperation, that I would resort to chemicals.

Meanwhile, the bills have never gone this late in the month without being paid, I have no laundry, and what little activity there has been this weekend has been choreographed - for, on top of it all, we have out-of-town visitors. Not staying in our house, thank heavens, but we have been spending nearly all our awake time with them.

Yesterday we went to Freeport, mostly to go to the L. L. Bean store. Freeport is in Maine, natch, and is a little over two hours away by car. You might not think a store is worth a two-hour drive, but the Bean store is enormous, open twenty-four hours, and is actually a lot of fun.

I love L. L. Bean. Their clothes last forever and they actually fit me. I am a hard size to fit, which is one reason I don't just buy from their catalog.

I spent a lot of money yesterday. That's what you do when you go there. A saleswoman was talking with another and was overheard to say, "The funniest question a customer ever asked me is whether we were paid on commission. Can you imagine? I laughed and said no. If I were paid on commission, I'd be a millionaire!"

Not quite true, but the store does a huge business, with people visiting it from all over, and the average purchase per person has got to be upwards of $200. I have never walked out of that store with less than $200 of merchandise, and I'm not especially well-off. So multiply $200 by, say, thirty customers an hour (checking out is very efficient there) ... let's call it a six-hour day just to add non-working time and fudge factor. That's thirty-six thousand dollars. Five percent of that is a healthy $1800.

The store is a small part of Bean's business. Bean has such a large shipping operation that it has its own zip code. It's really very impressive for a company that was once one man selling these funny-looking rubber-coated boots he'd invented.

You've probably overdosed on hearing about one particular American and his sex life right about now, so I thought I'd give you a good old success story to cheer you up. There doesn't seem to be a dark side to L. L. Bean that I've been able to find - the workers are happy, the customers are happy, the town of Freeport has no complaints (except maybe having to deal with all the traffic, but Bean does things like paying for repaving and such, because That's The Way They Do It).

Makes you wonder if it's really that easy to pull off, and if it is, why don't more companies do it?

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