The Amish Are in Business
Reprinted from FultonMontgomery.com magazine, by Michael Magie

One visit to an Amish farm will be enough to show you that they do not do business in the way you probably expect-and to show you exactly what your own expectations are. It is a kind of retail business the Amish run; they sell goods and product, like a combination department store and grocery. You can buy vegetables from their garden during the summer. You can buy quilts, or furniture, or even fire wood from some of them. But they sell these commodities in their own way-a way which is an integral part of their very distinctive way of life. I learned all this myself on a visit to an Amish farm near Stone Arabia not long ago.

We were not invited into the house exactly; certainly not welcomed. We were permitted to enter. If we had business with them-as presumably we did; why else would we be intruding ourselves on them?-we could be expected to walk in, disregard the rest of the family going about their lives without paying us the least mind, and follow the woman upstairs to where she had quilts in a huge stack on a bed. The house was not specially prepared to do a retail business. Nothing suggested the usual fawning over "the customer". The place was reasonably clean, but had none of the false sheen and artificiality of many retail outlets. It was their home, and they were living in it as they customarily did, with great practical good sense and without particular fuss. It was summertime, and flies were buzzing in the unscreened windows and dying on the floor; but you could tell they would be swept up when it was time to sweep. Meanwhile it was time for business. If you were ill at ease, you could leave. If you were of a mind to buy, she would tell you the price, and you could buy. We stood uneasily around while my mother and sister looked over the quilts as the woman flipped through them. No one was saying anything much. On this visit nothing was bought, but the woman seemed unconcerned; we might return, or others would. We walked back down the stairs, through the hot busy kitchen again and out into the yard, and drove away.

This was a bit of Amish business. Our discomfort during our visit was our own doing, and was only our problem. The Amish family, secure in a life lived in their own strict and steady way, were not disturbed or discommoded by such visits, but with utter simplicity took them in their stride. The Amish are often described as schooling themselves to honor all work equally and to live with a kind of serene acceptance of each day, each moment as it passes, accepting both joys and hardships without according them special intensities or excitement. Their funerals, for example, are said to be simple gatherings in the home to mark a person's passing. There are no eulogies, no flowers, no adornments. The death is acknowledged, the dead person is laid in a plain casket and buried in home ground, and a simple headstone is later added to the grave. The family we visited seemed to treat out visit, and everything else that happened that day, in exactly the same way as such a funeral; this has happened, this is what we do, and now we turn to the next thing to be done.

The Amish way of doing business has these same qualities of steady, unexcited (unhyped), practical attention to the task in hand, each day being used to accomplish what a day can accomplish, and each day's accomplishments being accorded the same quiet honor of acceptance. You may have seen Amish parents or children standing quietly beside the road in Palatine Bridge or at the parking lot near Dunkin Donuts on the arterial in Johnstown, offering-but not hawking-whatever the season allowed them to offer: flowers, or garden produce, changing from late spring into autumn. If so, you will have noticed that they stand very quietly, and with a patience that seems astonishing to us as we rush past on our errands. In the same quiet way they also sell quilts, as my family discovered, and furniture, often made without power tools-without nails, moreover; and some of them sell lumber which they have milled themselves from their own trees, usually in the olden ways, without the assistance of power equipment.

The Amish pay taxes on their earnings and their property, like the rest of us-except for the Social Security tax, from which they are exempted because they refuse to take any of its benefits. They refuse to take anything from the government, except things, which cannot be avoided-like paved roads-and they pay the taxes for such services, just like anyone else. It is said of them that when they buy a farm, they buy it forever. It is not intended for purposes of speculation, to enrich them by future sale at an inflated price. It is where they will stay. They will still be there-the family passing the farm to its children and grandchildren-still living the same pattern of life. They are the exact opposites of entrepreneurs scrambling energetically, even frantically, to maximize benefits and profits in the short term. The Amish are a steady-state community, and they manage a steady-state economy, walled off as much as possible from the various profit frenzies and quick growth measures which mark the larger American economy in which most of us spend our days running as fast as we can go. It is easy to imagine an Amish man pausing to reflect over a question about his plans for the growth of his farm business. "Plans for growth?" he might at length reply; "you mean, not just growing our corn and beans and animals, but having the whole farm grow larger? But how would we tend it properly? And besides, isn't that what cancer is-such growth as that?"

A friend reports that he has always found the local Amish, in the neighborhood of Stone Arabia, from whom he has bought a goodly amount of camp furniture over the years, to be extremely reliable, and fair, but "tough business people." He also says, however, that prices for Amish goods have risen in recent years, apparently because they have found they can command much better prices from catalog business and "upscale Adirondack shops" than they were accustomed to ask from shoppers visiting their homes, as my family did. Moreover, it is easy now to locate websites featuring Amish wares for sale. It would appear that even the stern and steady Amish are responsive to market forces when these benefit them without changing their way of life. It is hard to know whether to be amused or saddened by this trend.