At the end of the summer of 1993, a reporter for the Camden Herald went around Camden, Maine, asking business owners how the season had gone. Several of them wanted to talk about the new Wal-Mart in nearby Rockland.
One of them was R.H. Reny, the man who started Renys. He was 67 years old, and he sounded more amused than worried. Here’s how the Herald reported it on September 2nd, 1993:
“I’ve seen a lot of the big ones come and a lot of them go,” he chuckled. “I’ll be around long after they’re buried, laughing over their graves.”
If you live in Maine, you know Renys. If you don’t, it’s a family-owned chain of 19 department stores, all in Maine. It has a slogan, “Renys, a Maine Adventure,” and a jingle most Mainers know by heart. So was its founder right?
Who was R.H. Reny?
The R.H. stands for Robert Henry. Friends called him Bob, but so did everyone who knew his son Robert. So in this story, the founder is R.H., and Bob is his son.
He was born in Biddeford, in southern Maine, on March 23rd, 1926, and grew up at 13 Orchard Street, the son of Edward Henry and Grace (Reilly) Reny. His father was a local businessman, civic leader and police commissioner, according to a profile of Reny published on centralmaine.com for his 100th birthday. He had three brothers, John, Paul and Richard, and a sister, Anne.
He graduated from Biddeford High School in 1944, the first Biddeford student to qualify for the Navy’s V-12 college program.
According to his obituary in The Herald Gazette on July 28th, 2009, the Navy sent him straight to Dartmouth College, where he finished a four-year program in just two years. After Dartmouth he shipped out with the Navy and made it as far as Greenland before the war came to an end.
Back home, he went to work at R.H. White, a Boston department store (no relation, despite the initials). By 1948 he was in Damariscotta, a small town on the Damariscotta River in Midcoast Maine, as general manager of the Senter department stores there and in Boothbay Harbor.
A raise, and then a rent increase
The family tells the story this way, as The Maine Mag recounted it. Reny rented a room from the local Senter’s store manager, who was also his boss. After a year he asked for a raise and got it, and then his rent went up by the same amount. That was enough for him (can you blame him?), and he decided to strike out on his own.
He opened his first store across the street from Senter’s, on Damariscotta’s Main Street, on October 6th, 1949. He paid for it with a GI loan and his own money. Opening day sales came to $181.22, according to the centralmaine.com profile.
Selling out of a Hudson
That first winter almost sank him. Damariscotta’s customers were mostly fishermen, and in January they weren’t working, so they weren’t shopping.
So Reny loaded merchandise into his old Hudson and drove around the peninsula, selling door to door. His son John told The Maine Mag that his father didn’t sell much on those trips, but he “drank a lot of coffee and ate a lot of pie.” The people he met that winter came into the store in the spring.
In the middle of that lean first winter, on February 25th, 1950, he married Carolyn Denny. Her father, Edward Denny, was the Round Top Farm general manager who started making Round Top Ice Cream in Damariscotta in 1924, according to the Lincoln County News. Their son John was born in 1951, and two more sons, Bob and Mike, followed.
The second store opened in Bridgton in 1952, and Reny drove three hours between the two (that’s a long drive). Gardiner came in 1954, Farmington in 1957, Dexter in 1958 and Madison in 1960, according to the centralmaine.com profile.
How Renys buys
Renys never tried to be a regular department store. It buys name-brand closeouts and previous-year models and sells them cheap. You’ll find no fake markdowns and almost no sales.
A sign in the company’s office, The Maine Mag reported in 2015, puts the whole philosophy in one line:
If you buy something right, sell it right. Don’t try to make an extra buck off it.
Hundreds on the sidewalk in Camden
In May 1981, Renys came to Camden. The store took over the former IGA grocery building in the Camden Marketplace. On opening day, the Camden Herald reported on May 21st, 1981, “hundreds and hundreds of people” crowded the sidewalk for half an hour before the doors opened.
Both sons had grown up in the business. According to the Press Herald, John started working in his father’s stores at age 5 and Bob at 7.
Here comes Wal-Mart
In the 1980s the big discount chains arrived in Maine. When Ames and Rich’s opened, John Reny told The Maine Mag, business dropped 20 percent at first.
Then came Wal-Mart. In 1991, Renys asked Camden for permission to add 7,400 square feet to its store. By the summer of 1992, with a Wal-Mart about to open in Rockland, the Herald reported on August 13th that the company said it needed the extra space to compete with the newcomer.
The zoning fight took more than a year. The store sat in a zone where that kind of expansion wasn’t allowed, so Renys first had to get the zoning changed, which voters approved in June 1992. Then the zoning board sent it back for more detailed drawings.
On September 3rd, 1992, the Herald reported that Renys had cleared what was likely the biggest hurdle in its yearlong effort to expand. It still needed site plan approval from the planning board, and Wal-Mart was opening in Rockland that November … the clock was ticking.
“Laughing over their graves”
A year later, the Herald checked in. On September 2nd, 1993, under the headline “Camden Businesses Down, But Definitely Not Out,” reporter Liz Crockett talked to merchants about a slow summer.
R.H. Reny, identified in the paper as Robert Reny, Sr., said the thing he missed most that year was rainy weekends. When it rains, he explained, the tourists aren’t out on the water. “They’re in here shopping.”
Even so, he said, his Camden store had done reasonably well in July and August, with sales up despite the weather and despite Wal-Mart’s arrival in Rockland the fall before.
Reny and Bill Dickey, who owned the Camden clothing store Haskell and Corthell, each told the paper the same thing, in what the Herald called “literally identical statements”:
“There are only so many dollars in the area, and if they are spent in Wal-Mart they can’t be spent in our shops.”
That’s when Reny made his prediction about the big ones and their graves.
So who’s laughing now?
Wal-Mart, to be fair, is still here. But as John Reny told The Maine Mag in 2015, Grant’s and Rich’s, the chains that tried to beat Wal-Mart at its own game, are gone. Renys didn’t try that. As John put it, “you cannot out-cheap cheap.”
Renys also kept most of its stores downtown. In 2019, Maine Preservation honored the company because 11 of its 17 stores at the time were downtown, and it occupied 13 historic buildings.
Eat dessert first
Every year on March 23rd, R.H. Reny’s birthday, the stores serve their employees ice cream, according to the centralmaine.com profile. It’s in honor of one of his favorite lines: “Life is uncertain; eat dessert first.” How great is that?
Away from the stores, he was president of the Maine Merchants Association, which named him its Retailer of the Year in 1981, and chairman of the Maine Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He sat on the board of Central Maine Power and the Small Business Administration’s national advisory council, and in 1988 he was named Maine’s Entrepreneur of the Year.
R.H. Reny died at his home in Damariscotta on July 24th, 2009, at 83, about ten weeks before the company’s 60th birthday. In his spare time, his obituary said, he liked to grow corn and sell lobsters in Round Pond, but what he loved most was telling stories.
Five years before he died, in 2004, his oldest son, John, had taken over from him, with Bob alongside. The third generation has since joined them: John’s daughter, Faustine, and Bob’s son, Adam.
The family is behind the stores’ most famous four words, too. That slogan came from Bob’s wife, Mary Kate Reny, in the late 1990s. “She came up with it, scribbled on a napkin,” David Melville of Dirigo Marketing, who wrote the five-note tune, told centralmaine.com in 2025. The jingle has run on Maine radio and TV every day since February 2011.
For two very different Maine businesses, take a look at Toy Len Goon’s family laundry in Portland and Alvin Lombard’s log-hauler factory in Waterville. Both stories take you inside the work behind the business.
The last laugh
He would have loved what came next. In the last few years, Renys has been moving into the very buildings the big chains left behind.
In April 2024, Renys opened in Bangor in the old Christmas Tree Shops, which had closed in 2023 when that chain went bankrupt. Hundreds of people waited outside in rain and snow (in April, no less), the Bangor Daily News reported.
In April 2025, Renys opened in Waterville in a former JCPenney. And on October 9th, 2025, it opened its 20th store, in Augusta, in the space Big Lots used to rent.
Not every move has worked. Renys closed its downtown Portland store on December 30th, 2025, after 15 years, bringing the count back to 19. But 77 years after R.H. Reny opened the doors in Damariscotta, there are still Renys stores across Maine, the family is still running them, and he’s still laughing.
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