Big day yields nary a hitch for mall chief

By all appearances, Bruce Soper really was seated at a Thanksgiving table in New Hampshire on Thursday.

His wife and his in-laws could swear, in fact, that he was right there with them throughout the day, partaking of the feast and the conversation and the football.

The truth is, however, that while Soper’s body might have been on hand for the festivities, his mind was not. It was many miles away to the north, roaming the Bangor Mall, obsessing about the thousand things that could go wrong the next morning when the doors opened on what is traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year.

For Soper, who replaced Roy Daigle as the mall manager less than three months ago, getting everything ready for his first kick-off to the Christmas season in Bangor was a little like preparing to host the biggest social gathering of the holidays while also coordinating the battle plans for a D-Day invasion involving thousands.

“Yes, all Thanksgiving I was thinking about the next day – not what could go right but what could go wrong,” Soper said during a stolen few moments on Friday. “My wife did accuse me of being distant.”

On this day of reckoning, this annual bellwether for an anxious retailing world, the gala shopping event that was two months in the making promised to be a roaring success. The most ardent of shoppers began arriving at the mall at 5 a.m., two long, frigid hours before the doors opened. By midday, the mall was teeming with people, all coursing through the place like a river, flooding the food court and spilling off into festive little tributaries as friends and families stopped to exchange greetings and compare their gift-buying progress.

“This is absolutely fantastic,” Soper said with undisguised enthusiasm. “It’s like running a miniature city, and it’s all been going smoothly.”

All except for the air-handling unit that had to be fixed earlier, that is, and a mix-up caused by a notice in the morning paper that mistakenly invited supporters of George W. Bush to gather with their signs for a Friday afternoon rally at the main entrance to the mall, instead of at the Burger King across the road. Considering all that could go wrong, Soper was having a pretty good day.

“I was the assistant manager at the Maine Mall before this, so I’ve had five years of developing this kind of battle plan,” said Soper, who lives in Manchester, near Augusta. “I’ve got my skills fairly honed. We started preparing for this day back in October, getting the holiday schedule set. We had to consider the possibility of an early snow that ight have thrown off the balance of things. Where do we put the snow banks? Do we have enough personnel, and security and maintenance and housekeeping to keep it going?”

Yet no matter how long he’s been in the business, Soper still has a difficult time explaining exactly what it is about the dawning of the day after Thanksgiving that induces such a shopping passion in millions of Americans.

“The lines outside at five in the morning, the crowds? No, I really can’t tell you what causes it,” he said with a laugh. “But there is definitely a psychology at work that makes this day like no other. It’s become a unique custom. People no longer stay at home with the family on this Friday. They would rather get together for the social involvement of shopping. They’re even more cheerful than they were on Thanksgiving, in fact, because there’s no stress. But on Dec. 23, the Saturday before Christmas, well, you won’t find these same cheerful faces at the mall. And I’ll be out there shopping with them.”

Tom Weber’s column appears Wednesday and Saturday.