Walmart conquered America to become the country’s largest discount chain, but before it took the crown, the company first had to overcome Oklahoma City-based rival TG&Y.
At its peak in the 1970s, TG&Y operated about 1,200 stores in 36 states states stretching from California to Florida while Walmart was far behind with just 125 stores, mostly in smaller communities.
A decade later, however, TG&Y was in decline and Walmart took the lead and never looked back. In 2002, the once venerated TG&Y disappeared altogether, breaking the hearts of longtime customers and employees.
Former employees say the chain had everything going for it until new owners did everything possible to kill it just as Walmart’s founder Sam Walton was trying to catch up. But even before then, some former TG&Y employees look back at the chain’s growth and wonder if it grew too fast.
“TG&Y’s problem was they were growing faster than they could find help,” said Bob Herriott, who worked for the retailer from 1962 to 1986. “If TG&Y had kept growing correctly, there would never have been a Walmart.”
Herriott said he knew both TG&Y leader Ray Young and Walmart's Walton. When Herriott started as a stock boy, the chain had grown to 275 stores and had opened its first larger family center stores at 15th and Broadway in Edmond, SW 74 and Pennsylvania Avenue, and SW 29 and May Avenue.
Young was the guiding force behind TG&Y, starting as a farmboy who graduated from Oklahoma State University with a business administration degree.
From there he rose up through the ranks of Kessege stores (the early day version of Kmart) and then started his own small chain of five-and-dime stores. TG&Y was started when Young merged his stores in 1935 with those of Rawdon E. Tomlinson and Enoch L. "Les" Gosselin.
Ultimately, Tomlinson ducked out of the deal early on, and Gosselin was in and out of the business for the first decade or so. But Young stayed firmly in charge, even after the company was sold to an out-of-state wholesaler in 1957.
Successive corporate takeovers left TG&Y executives to operate independently, and at one point the chain was under the same corporate umbrella as a string of Ben Franklin variety stores owned by a young Sam Walton.
Early on, Young and Walton had an agreement to respect each other’s territories, which Walton noted in his biography dated back to when each region was dominated by one variety store chain. The arrangement, Herriott said, was a gentleman’s agreement similar to the one between the Brown family that owned 7-Eleven stores in central Oklahoma, and Tulsa-based QuikTrip founder Chester Cadieux.
Retailing was changing rapidly, however, as shoppers switched from downtown to the suburbs. The family center concept was a success, and it wasn't too long before developers were competing to place a TG&Y store, along with an adjoining C.R. Anthony's clothing store and IGA grocery, as anchors of their suburban strip shopping centers.
The TG&Y chain continued to grow as a network of stores run by fathers and sons, brothers and cousins.
Lynn Nash, started as a draftsman with TG&Y in 1954 when the chain had grown to 125 stores in six states.
“I don’t know how many stores had managers with brothers as managers at other stores,” Nash said. “And it wasn’t uncommon at all for someone to grow up and work in the store where their dad worked.”
Nash advanced to become the company’s architect, overseeing construction of stores across the country. Young retired in 1970 and it wasn’t long before the company began to lose control of its operations to the corporate umbrella, Household International.
The company experimented with branding and even attempted to change the stores’ names to “AIM for the Best.”
“When I was still working in the early '80s and I went to Chicago with my boss,” Nash said. “While up there, he talked to a friend in the insurance department at Household. After he got off the phone, he said the strategy was now to drive down the value of TG&Y to the point that they could sell it.”
The AIM for the Best experiment was costly for the chain, and it was abandoned after a year or so with a change in top leadership. A controversial firing and interrogation of employees suspected of kickbacks and theft led to more bad headlines. In 1982 the chain, long a moneymaker, lost $16 million.
Several former employees interviewed by The Oklahoman say there was mismanagement, first under Household International, and more so when it was sold to the owners of the McCrory variety store chain in 1986.
“The common perception is Walmart drove TG&Y out of business,” Nash said. “That's not how it happened.”
The McCrory's takeover devastated TG&Y's Oklahoma City operations. The chain had about 720 stores at the time. McCrory cut more than 8,000 employees, closed 205 stores, including 23 of the TG&Y stores in Oklahoma. And then it attempted to wipe out the TG&Y name altogether, replacing it with McCrory.
Larry Morgan, who started as a TG&Y stock boy in 1972, observed a change in the company’s approach to people as out-of-state executives bean to take charge.
“TG&Y was more personal than stores today,” Morgan said. “When you went in, people knew you by the name because people shopped there so much. You go into a Walmart and there is no personality, and you can’t find anyone to help.”
Morgan said new bosses with McCrory informed employees what they were going to buy and not let them tell the company what they wanted. Young’s approach had been to find out what customers need and to then match the product mix with what they wanted.
“It changed overnight,” Morgan said. “I moved to the McCrory side, and we started shrinking the stores. Their thinking was TG&Y was too big.”
After seeing sales drop at rebranded stores, the company quit renaming the remaining TG&Y stores. Some lingered into the 1990s, but the damage was done. Some of the closed TG&Y stores were taken over by Walmart.
The entire McCrory company finally collapsed in 2001, and the last stores were closed in 2002. Former employees still share memories online and have, from time to time, held reunions.
“How many families did TG&Y support?” Herriott said. “How many teens got their first car because they got a paycheck at TG&Y? How many couples got married after working together at TG&Y?”
Jerry and Joyce Crews are among those couples, having met at a TG&Y variety store in 1955 and marrying a year later.
“They had a candy counter that had all types of bulk candy,” Joyce Crews said. “We roasted our own peanuts and popped our own popcorn.”
The Crewses still reflect fondly on their time at the stores, remembering how women would work during the day shift and oversee sales and the ordering of merchandise. Teens would work the night shift and take on tasks not involving inventory.
Morgan wonders how much longer TG&Y will be remembered.
“You used to talk to somebody and they’d say they started at TG&Y, it was where they got their first job,” Morgan said. “Now, you can say TG&Y to these younger people, and they say ‘What? Who?’”
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