COALVILLE — Jim Blonquist knows a thing or two about employment longevity.
Jim, who will turn 63 this week, has been opening the same door to the same building to do the same job for the past 45 years straight.
That’s quite the remarkable run, rendered all the more remarkable when you consider the job was supposed to last three months.
Back in the summer of 1970, right after Jim graduated from North Summit High School, his parents, Chet and Dorothy, were keen on sending him off to college in the fall.
Taking a full-time job during the summer at the Summit Merc — Coalville’s general store — made sense in so many ways: It would help him pay for tuition, it would keep him out of trouble, and getting hired was a cinch — because his dad owned the store.
Jim already knew the Merc’s every nook and cranny. He started filling shelves when he was 8, and at 12 he was put in charge of tending the coal furnace, for which he was paid $50 a month.
The store suited him; school did not. “My parents wanted me to go to college,” he says. “I didn’t. I’d had enough of school.”
So when September came?
“I never left the place; somehow I conned ‘em into letting me stay.”
And stay. And stay. And stay.
Nearly half a century later, he is still going strong and so, not coincidentally, is the Merc, a Coalville institution that turned 107 years old this spring.
The business was incorporated as the Summit Furniture & Mercantile Co. in March 1908, housed in a new $15,000 building with tall ceilings and wood floors that still stands proudly on Main Street. A handful of local residents owned stock in the enterprise, but the Merc’s primary backers were Swedish immigrants Axcel Blonquist and his brother Alfred, Jim’s grandfather.
Alfred’s sons Mel and Chet, Jim’s uncle and father, took over ownership as the second generation. When Mel retired in the ‘60s, Chet bought him out and ran the store until the January day in 1981 when he died of a heart attack on the job at age 71.
Suddenly, Jim and his brother, Spug, just 28 and 34, were in charge.
A few years ago, Spug, now 69, reduced his presence to two days a week — “the two easiest days of the week,” according to his brother — and Jim was left to push on solo.
Jim could reduce his hours too — he is the boss after all — but he has no plans for that.
“Here’s the point I’m to now,” he explains. “I don’t have to prove nothing to nobody. I said I wanted to get it to 100 years, and that’s come and gone (way back in 2008). I’m still here ‘cause I think I’d go stir crazy otherwise.”
That’s the Swedish stoical side talking.
The softer side comes out when he adds, “I like it here. I know what I’m doing, I’m comfortable doing it, and I kinda like helping people.”
Therein lies the secret, no doubt, to the Merc’s staying power; the reason half the town still shops there for groceries, hardware and clothing when Wal-Mart and Smith’s and Home Depot and half a dozen other big boxes are a mere 20 freeway minutes away in Park City.
The times, and the merchandise to a large extent, have changed, but the Blonquist way of doing business hasn’t.
“Have what people need and don’t gouge ‘em,” Jim says, summing up the Merc’s mission statement even though it’s never been written down, put in a frame or, for that matter, called a mission statement.
Need a pair of Levi’s? Need a sprinkler part? Need a cowboy hat? Need fresh cuts of rib-eye steak trimmed while you watch? Need groceries boxed up and delivered to your house because you’re 87 and shut-in? Need people who call you by your first name when you walk through the door?
That’s what the Summit Merc offers: old-fashioned service in a new-fashioned world.
In Coalville, it’s a formula that still works … and so does Jim Blonquist.
Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Mondays.
Email: benson@deseretnews.com