SALT LAKE CITY — This coming Friday, the Mr. Mac clothing store closest to you won’t open until 8 a.m. and will not be open at all on Thanksgiving night.
Which is ironic, given all the Thanksgiving weekends Mr. Mac opened earlier than everyone else.
It’s been over a month now that Mac Christensen hasn’t been with us. The man who would be a first ballot inductee into the Utah Entrepreneur Hall of Fame, if there was one, passed away Oct. 11 at age 85, surrounded by his family and his legacy of outfitting more missionaries than the Spanish court.
A self-made businessman who parlayed a job selling ties at ZCMI into a two-pant suit empire, with stores up and down the length and breadth of Utah, Christensen, better than most, understood the art of the sale.
He sold for less so he could sell more. He treated customers like family. And if everybody else had the day off, he didn’t.
Mac’s sons Spencer and Stuart run the Mr. Mac flagship store in the City Creek Center. On the eve of Thanksgiving week, they reminisced about their dad inventing Black Friday before anyone ever thought to call it that.
“We used to open on the Friday after Thanksgiving at 7 a.m.,” said Spencer, 58, who began working for his dad when he was 13, starting out in the Kearns Building in downtown Salt Lake City. “We did the same thing on Labor Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day — anytime people had the day off. We’d open early and have what we called door crasher sales.”
For years, those door crashers set Mr. Mac apart, back in the pre-internet days, before big box stores upped the ante by opening earlier and earlier, spilling into Thanksgiving Day itself, until everyone started doing it.
“There isn’t the draw to opening early there once was,” said Stuart, 54. “But there’s no question Mac was ahead of his time.”
His sons noted that the man who never quite got around to finishing his college education once he started selling those ties at ZCMI also never quite got around to writing a formal employee handbook.
Their father was more of a lead-by-example kind of guy.
“Three dimes is better than a quarter,” was one of his favorite sayings, said Spencer. “By that he meant you can sell one item and make a quarter or sell three items and make three dimes. He’d rather make the three dimes.
“That meant pricing the merchandise where the customer could afford to buy more than one.”
“He also operated by the theory, ‘You don’t sell just one time,’” said Stuart. “He wanted customers for life. You weren’t a customer, you were family. He had a natural ability to put people at ease, to build relationships that lasted.”
These days, the brothers said, they regularly wait on third-generation customers whose grandfathers came in to Mr. Mac 50 years ago to buy their suits, belts and ties.
Since Mac’s funeral, Spencer and Stuart have heard a constant procession of tale after tale from customers about their dad. The same goes for their brothers Scott and Stan, who manage other stores in the chain.
“Everybody has a story about Mac,” said Stuart.
Looking ahead, the plan for the Christensen brothers, who for all intents and purposes have been running the Mr. Mac stores ever since 1997 when their dad turned his attention to service for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is to continue doing it like Mac did it, as far as that’s humanly possible.
“Four of us isn’t enough,” said Spencer, smiling. “He cast a big shadow. His memories are all over the walls. He was a friend to everybody. We’ll have to see how we carry on into the future. But as far as what he put into our heads and our kids’ heads about how to treat people, that will remain intact.”
But being the first to open on the Friday after Thanksgiving, that will have to stay in the past.