The Prices Were Right

Though the last store closed in 2002, TG&Y lives on the hearts of Oklahoma bargain hunters.

BY CAROL MOWDY BOND

OFTEN CHEEKILY REFERRED to as “Turtles, Girdles, and Yo-Yos,” TG&Y five-and-dime stores helped mold America’s lifestyle consciousness throughout sixty-seven years of existence.

Though the acronym actually stood for the founders’ last initials—Rawdon

E. Tomlinson, Enoch “Les” Gosselin, and Raymond A. Young—the last of the three men was perhaps the most instrumental in the founding of TG&Y. Born in Stillwater in 1904 as one of eight children, Young was picking cotton by age six.

Throughout his poverty-ridden childhood, traveling peddlers often helped break up the monotony.

Forerunners to small variety stores, wandering salesmen visited the Young farm with wagons loaded with everything from tonics to calico. Young’s mother gave peddlers a bed for the night in return for a few items she chose from their rolling mercantiles. Naturally, when Young needed money to pay his college tuition, he peddled door-to-door merchandise. After graduating from Oklahoma A&M with a degree in commerce and marketing in 1924, he soon went into merchandising and worked for S.H. Kress & Co., a five-anddime store chain.

At one point, some TG&Y stores had cafeterias so customers could shop, dine, and then shop some more.

In 1935, Young met fellow variety store owners Tomlinson—a Kansas expat living in Frederick—and Gosselin from Cordell. The trio wanted to purchase goods at wholesale prices so they could pass the savings along to their customers. That same year, they founded Central Merchandise Company in Oklahoma City. The first TG&Y store opened in Norman shortly thereafter.

Though the chain’s first stores were in the Oklahoma City metro, they became staples of rural communities and expanded into urban centers and suburbs when malls appeared during the 1960s. TG&Y Family Centers also emerged and averaged forty thousand square feet. By 1966, the brand mushroomed into the sixth-largest mass-merchandiser in the nation. Shoppers found TG&Y stores in 930 locations in twenty-nine coast-tocoast states by the late twentieth century, with the giant selling approximately $2 billion annually. Through the decades, several buyers took TG&Y’s reins until the final stores closed in 2002—also the year Young died.

But the iconic stores were more than the chain’s catch phrase: “Your best buy is at TG&Y.” They were also about relationships and experiences. In 1962, fifteen-year-old Ardmore native Bob Herriott began his fifteen-year TG&Y career as a stock boy, climbing to manager and beyond. The cheapest TG&Y item Herriott recalls is penny candy. And the highest-priced?

“We sold $1,500 pool tables and motorcycles,” Herriott says. “We had whatever you thought you had to have. We even had an orangutan from the Oklahoma City Zoo as part of a promotion.”

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By 1927, Young co-owned a five-anddime store in Pauls Valley. With a simple philosophy—“Have what people want at a price they can afford to pay”—he launched R.A. Young Co. 5¢ to $1.00 Store in Kingfisher in 1928. Within seven years, he’d expanded to eight rural towns— farmers needed quality products at low prices.

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Though TG&Y stores may be long shuttered, those three letters and the unique shopping experiences they provided will linger on in many Oklahomans’ memories for much longer.