The day I lied to a L.L. Bean customer service lady.

It’s time to come clean about my history with L.L. Bean.

If you are not steeped in the world of Maine journalism, you may have missed the big announcement last week. While the country was paying attention to the constant dumpster fire of stories coming out of the White House, one of the state’s largest employers, and a legacy in Maine business, dropped a bombshell on the shopping world.

L.L. Bean was ending its lifetime guarantee return policy.

And frankly, it was about time.

People have been abusing this policy for years. Maybe it started out innocently enough. I can recall a pair of rubber boots that my mother had when I was a child that, one day, after years use, finally started to come apart at the soles, and water was no longer staying out. She got many good years out of these boots puttering in her garden, working around our home, tending to it as lovingly as she has since the day I was born. But those boots…they got returned. And L.L. Bean didn’t bat an eye.

That was more than twenty years ago. Now, people are getting more and more senseless with their returns. The reasons people have given to returning any host of items that the outdoor adventure megastore sells is simply laughable. A recent column by one of my favorite Maine newspaper columnists, Bill Nemtiz, recounts tales that almost seem unbelievable. Sadly, they are true. The poor folks at the customer service counter have endured fables of sunglasses being lost to the lake, and tables that were broken and no part of the actual table, except one leg, were able to be reproduced for the people behind the counter. That one was probably my favorite.

Upon sharing this column with my friends, one person told me that she was recently returning an item to the store, and in front of her was a woman returning a stack of child sized snow suits and other winter items. When asked for the reason for the return, the woman said, “They don’t fit anymore.” When asked by the customer service rep if there was anything wrong with them, without flinching, she said, “Nope.” Her children outgrew the clothes and she simply returned them.

Seriously. You can’t make this stuff up.

And did the store take back this mooching woman’s snow pants? You bet they did. And they did it with a smile on their face. As did the woman who had a frustrated dog owner approach the counter five years ago to return a dog bed that had been ripped to shreds.

Yes. That dog owner was me.

With sweaty palms and a racing heart, I approached the counter and told a very kind looking woman that I wanted to exchange a dog bed for a new one. My two year old Boston Terrier had chewed through it one day, just like she has done with every single bed we have ever bought her. But this was an L.L. Bean dog bed. I had spent way too much money to have to sit on my couch every night and see its torn, pathetic, chewed holes staring back at me.

I looked into her sad customer service eyes, while she stared back at me, wearing her neatly pressed, green, company issued oxford shirt and she asked me that dreaded question, “Do you really feel that the product didn’t live up our standards of quality?” I paused. And I lied. “Yes,” I said. This would have been the correct time for the catholic guilt to kick in, but it didn’t. It wasn’t strong enough. I bold faced lied to this kind woman and told her that this dog bed should have been able to withstand the relentless chewing of my spastic puppy.

This is where Bill would have said, “You have got to be kidding me.”

So to the kind folks at L.L. Bean. I am sorry. It is because of people like me that you had to end a centuries old policy. I only did it once, but I am sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there are people out there who were repeat offenders, sucking the life out of the very kind people who work behind your return counters day in and day out. These soulless moochers cost your company hundreds of millions of dollars a year in lost revenue. And I was once one of them.

So I praise this decision. The people whining and complaining about it can just quit their moaning and come to the store and buy a pair of boots for pete’s sake.

I happen to own a pair of those iconic boots that hipsters across America wear ironically, and with their flanel shirts and “boyfriend” jeans, as if to say “Look how rugged I look in these. I’ve probably never done a days worth of hard labor in my life.” And these people have probably never even been to Maine. Maybe just in the summer. Maybe.

I will proudly wear those boots for years to come, until the the leather is properly broken in and the rubber is pliable and molded to my feet. And when they start to leak and my feet can no longer bear the cold and the wet, I can simply do what Bill learned when he brought his decades-old pair into the store for potential replacement. It’s what my mother should have done all those years ago.

For a nominal fee, I can have them re-soled.