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 for $89, marked down from $165. Uncountable thousands are in town on a rainy Saturday browsing and buying at Anne Klein, Ralph Lauren and Timberland. Americans work five days and on the sixth shop.
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.
John Rogers owns the Falcon Restaurant, just down the street from Bean's, and he says customers ask his waitresses where various stores are, but "they don't know. The stores are going in so fast." He says it's not one new store at a time but ten or 15. "My sister-in-law lives in Florida now and has been gone three years. When she got back, she just couldn't believe it."
Rogers used to sell maybe 20 lobsters a day and now serves 50 or 60. The tourist season has stretched from three months to six months, the crowds thinning somewhat in fall but not the cash flow. He diagrams his business with a salt shaker (Mastercard) and a pepper shaker (American Express). He switches the salt and pepper to represent the change after Labor Day. Family people in summer use Mastercard, older people in fall use American Express, "and they spend more, so I tend to believe people using American Express have more to spend." Rogers loves all the business but not the traffic, which tests the ingenuity and patience of natives as they try to circumnavigate Main Street.
"If you're going south," says Rogers, "and was at my restaurant, you could go down Bow Street, across Depot, across Oak, across West, go through the municipal parking lot, and that would put you out just before the railroad overpass on Route 1, and you'd be clear."