Hand Grain grinders on back order - Lehman's non-electric

[Guest guest]

[incidentally, if your temple wants to purchase a community grain grinder,

you might have more luck at Cumberland General Store. They sell a Diamant

hand-powered grain mill for $520 -- and have not been advertised in the

Wall Street Journal!]

 

Wall Street Journal

18 December 1998

 

IN AMISH COUNTRY, A STORE IS SWEPT UP IN YEAR 2000 PANIC

by Thomas Petzinger, Jr.

 

KIDRON, OHIO This crossroads town of about 300 has never seen so many

big trucks. They roll in full of wood stoves, solar radios and other

accouterments of nonelectric living. Then they roll back out with

deliveries to families in fear of the year 2000 computer flaw.

 

This is Amish country, where people have been buying nonelectric gear at

Lehman Hardware & Appliances for 43 years. But these days Lehman's is

inundated with out-of-town orders from Y2K survivalists, religious

fundamentalists and normal folks taking a few prudent precautions. The

store is staggered.

 

"We've run out of room for this stuff," says founder Jay Lehman, marveling

at boxes piled high in an outdoor lot. In the shop, an Amish mechanic

assembles hand-powered grain mills; there are 700 on back-order.

 

Jay Lehman and his son Galen are uneasy over the windfall. They refuse to

install more phone lines, though every line is jammed. They won't even

promote themselves as a Y2K vendor. Why their resistance? The answer

involves, culture, community and commitment to the long term.

 

The Lehmans are Mennonite, a Christian sect from which the more

conservative Amish split three centuries ago. Jay, now 69 years old, made

it only halfway through high school but has led church sessions the world

over. Galen, 38, spent his first decade in Africa and now runs operations

here, aided by siblings Kevin and Glenda. (A fourth, Wendy, is a Christian

peace activist.

 

Mennonites don't resist progress as staunchly as the Amish, but many are

selective in their adoption of advances. Galen sends e-mail, for

instance, but raises eggs and uses oil lamps at home. "We're not carefree

with technology," he says.

 

This ambivalence is evident in the business as well. In the catalog

operation, where a dozen attendants take orders through headsets,

computers are essential. But in the retail store, where many items sell

only once or twice a year, computers would only create work. The Lehmans

have no interest in tracking inventory or the profitability of products;

that information is meaningless when the larger purpose is facilitating a

way of life.

 

Thus, when someone needs a grating for a pot-belly stove, say, or a

replacement planter wheel, the Lehmans will try to hunt it down if they

don't have one in stock. Failing that they'll search for the casting

molds and hire someone to make it. If necessary they'll build it

themselves.

 

Jay searched the world for a gasoline-powered refrigerator before

discovering a Swedish version during a 1983 church mission to Sudan.

Today he sells them by the truckload. Galen is reverse-engineering a

kerosene-powered chick incubator in hopes of creating a production model.

With more people asking for carbide lamps, the store found a small shop to

produce about 200 a year. "It'll be years before we make money on that,"

Galen notes.

 

Yet the Lehmans go to such lengths out of commercial impulse as well as

cultural conviction. "In the end it pays," says Jay. "We built a

business on people saying, 'If you can't find an item anywhere else, go to

Lehman's.'" His patience with a payback is evident in his own backyard,

where nearly 20 years ago, he planted 5,000 walnut trees for the hardwood.

"They'll be ready in another 50 or 70 years," he says.

 

Over the decades Lehman's has attracted an increasingly secular clientele,

first as the energy crises of the 1970s triggered an earlier run on wood

stoves, later as tourrists overran Amish country. (A store brochure

implores visitors not to gawk at the Amish.) In late November, the week

before my visit, the guest book registered visitors from 18 states.

 

This popularity has driven the store through some 20 haphazard additions,

now encompassing an acre of floor space. For one expansion, Jay

disassembled an entire Amish barn, vintage 1830, and rebuilt it as part of

the store, the ax-hewn beams locked together without nails or pegs. The

store displays antiques from an era in which quilting bees and

barn-raising defined a sense of community, when "people were dependent on

each other and their own skill, not on their wealth and technology," says

Galen. In the store balcony, the side pieces of a cattle manger serve as

a security railing, the spindles worn thin by a century of cows nuzzling

between them for hay.

 

But nothing has been the same since June, when word sped over the Internet

that Lehman's was the place for Y2K survival gear. Now, the undersized

warehouse is a blur of Mennonite women stuffing boxes and stacking air

bills. In the catalog phone center, Y2K callers require special

hand-holding. ("You mean I need a chimney for that stove?") Galen resists

hiring additional employees he'll only have to lay off later. Jay

constantly frets bout forcing Amish and other loyal customers to wait

behind one-shot buyers.

 

Jacking up prices is no option, either. For one, panic has no price

point. For another, that too would hurt long-time customers, who use

Lehman's products not to isolate themselves but to deepen their reliance

on each other. Says Galen,, "We're here to support a lifestyle, not a

fad."

 

Though indeed short-lived, the Y2K challenge is a huge and hideous problem

demanding deep attention in the year remaining. But as we scramble to fix

the problem, maybe we should pause to regard the technology itself.

Driving from Amish country, passing the horse-drawn carriages in the

afternoon twilight, I wonder: If we can make things faster and more

powerful, can't we also make them more reliable? And cant' we use them

for bringing us together instead of driving us apart?