"It's been a long night," Ms. Marshall said with a laugh.
For 20 minutes, Ms. Marshall and her colleagues fanned out around the store. The registers rang up brisk sales, especially of canvas tote bags that can be monogrammed on the spot. Then the public-address system buzzed to announce the departure of the bus, the crowd filed out, and the store was quiet.
So goes a typical Saturday night at L. L. Bean the largest tourist attraction in Maine, hauling in three and a half million customers annually, nearly three times the state's population. The store is devoted to the great outdoors, even if many customers rarely heed the call of the wild, instead using their Magalloway Bay fishing vests to attend soccer games, their Appalachian expedition packs to lug books, and their Maine hunting shoes to shovel snow.
It is also a paradise for traveling insomniacs. Since 1951, when Leon Leonwood Bean, the founder himself, removed the locks from the front doors and threw away the keys, the store has been open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.
"It's pretty much self-service after midnight," said a tent salesman identified by his name tag as Michael. "We get the camp counselors, after the kids go to sleep. We get some locals who don't like the lines during the day. And we get celebrities, people who don't want to attract attention."
A recent overnight visit revealed that there is apparently no shortage of people who prefer nothing more than to while away the wee hours testing hiking boots on artificial rocks or fishing for trout in an indoor pond.
10 p.m. Renovated last year, the Hunting and Fishing Store, directly opposite the Flagship Store, resembles a taxidermy museum, with trophy heads dotting the walls. On the first floor, a group of bikers in black leather jackets huddled at the gun counter, gazing at the shiny New Englander rifles ($1,995).
Upstairs, an elderly couple from New Jersey shopped for fishing rods, pausing to peer at the fishing videos running continuously on monitors.
