Word: freeporters
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Down on the Freeport town wharf, a fisherman maneuvers through the fog beside the fish dealer's pier, his boat heaped with mussels. Three men in camouflage and carrying shotguns get into an aluminum boat and head out in the rain to where the ducks are. But up on Main Street, a different scene unfolds. At L.L. Bean, a woman fusses over a $65 goose-down pillow, then says to her husband, "I spend half my life in bed, I might as well have a comfortable pillow." Across from Bean's, at Cole Haan, beautiful shoes are on sale...
There is incongruity between the down-east Freeport of the mind's eye and what in the past several years has become what one critic calls "Maine Outletville." There are more shops than a nimble man or woman can shop in a day, more than the Merchants' Association president could count with certainty (about 70 is the best estimate...
...Freeport (pop. 6,000) is a former shoe factory town 20 miles up the coast from Portland on old Route 1. Its factory outlets sprang from the success of Bean's, founded in Freeport in 1912. It now does $40 million in sales on Main Street and attracts more than 2 million shoppers a year, maybe 2 1/2 million. Edgar Leighton, president of the Merchants' Association, says businessmen looked at those figures and wondered, "How come I'm not getting some of that." So they came to Freeport...
Last year 1,050,000 tourists from New York stopped in Maine. If the ratio of New Yorkers to other visitors holds true this rainy October day, 17% of the out-of-staters walking the streets of Freeport are from the Empire State, which partly accounts for the fact that not one of the men going into Bean's looks like a partridge shooter, though that is the recreation for many men of Maine in this season. What was once practical outdoor wear has become fashion clothing. A chamois shirt looks good on Saturday morning in Westport, Conn. The hunter...
Some firms bill their employees for the full cost of day care, but others charge so much less than privately run centers that it constitutes a major bargain. Intermedics, a heart-pacemaker manufacturer in Freeport, Texas, for example, charges its employees $25 a week per child. At its day care centers in Boston and Cambridge, the Stride Rite shoe company bills workers a maximum of $50 a week...