VALDOSTA — Tunison Office Furniture, which has been a staple of the 100th block of North Ashley Street, will be closing its doors at the end of the month.

Mary Tunison, who owns the company, plans to retire. She will turn 79 in December.

“I am retiring and going to the house,” Tunison laughed.

Tunison’s retirement will mark the end of a 51-year history of the Tunisons owning businesses in the Downtown Valdosta.



51 Years Ago

“My late husband (Jim) had a business right where the county building is, which used to be Magnolia Street, and that was in 1959,” Tunison said.  “From there, he did other things and then we moved to Patterson Street. We were there at Penny Pinchers on Patterson and then we moved to the ’Dosta Theatre and then moved here.”

The Penny Pinchers was a home-improvement store. Next door was a sandwich shop called The Pinchers Porch.

“Then we moved to the ’Dosta and turned it into Tunison Office Furniture,” she said.

The transition from The Penny Pinchers to Tunison Office Furniture was due to the fact that the Tunisons received all of their merchandise from places such as Sears and Montgomery Ward.

“They decided they would open their own stores so they didn’t want to sell to us,” she said. “

That was before anybody came up with discounted stuff. That’s what we were. We were discounted catalog soft goods store. So we didn’t have a source to keep up with that. We had to go to regular retail buying and      it was not lucrative that way.”

At that time, a man from New York with used office furniture came to the Tunisons and the couple began buying supplies from him.



Closing Shop

At the end of August, Tunison plans to retire after 51 years of running businesses.

“(I’m) gonna close the store and hopefully sell everything out. I have two employees and I hope to find positions for them so that they’ll have work,” she said.

While Tunison is saying until the end of August, she wants to at least sell everything by Labor Day.

She chose the end of the month for several reasons.

“Everybody in my family is trying to get me to close instead of putting it off, putting it off,” she said. “So once I finally decided I would do it, I just said ‘OK, let’s go now.’”

Tunison is also planning on selling the building the store is located in. To get rid of inventory, the store is having a sale.

“Everything we’ve got I’ve cut way back, drastically,” she said.

While she’s seen an improvement in sales, most of it had it has been generated by ads in the newspaper.

“I’ve had, not a big improvement but improvement, and most of it has been because of the ad I had in the paper,” she said. “I’ve had a good response from Florida, I always have. Florida, the people that live in Live Oak, Lake City, south of the Florida line. It’s amazing how many people we’ve sold to in Florida. So many of them come here to Wal-mart or the mall, which they don’t have, so it’s convenient to come buy from us. We’ve always had a lot of Florida traffic.”

 Tunison said the thing she’s going to miss most is the public.

“So many customers look at something and it’s just really what they want,” she said. “That’s interesting. Some people can say, well, yeah, OK. Some customers will come in and want a desk and will see one and will go, ‘That’s exactly what I want,’ and that makes me feel good, when people find something that they really want.”



Retirement

In Tunison’s office is a map of the world dotted with push-pin tacks marking places that she has visited through the years.  

“It took 45 years to go to all of these places,” Tunison said. “(I’ve been) around the world twice, for three and a half months. I’ve spent three and a half months on the African continent. I really like traveling.”

After retirement, she hopes to travel more.

“I hope to travel and spend more time with family, grandchildren, that kind of thing,” she said. “I’d like to go to Scotland and back to Belgium. I’ve been to both but I’d like to go back to both.”

Tunison said she has several favorite places that she’s been, including South Africa.

“I love South Africa really well and I love China,” she said. “There’s so many places that I love. It’s hard to say really what (is my favorite). The biggest surprise was probably South Africa. It was just wonderful. We were not expecting it to be that good. I thought China would be good, but it was a lot easier to get around than I thought it would be. We’re very lucky.”

Among the places she hasn’t visited is Alaska.

“My husband and I would say that we would go to Alaska when we were too old to do anything else,” she laughed.

She plans on traveling again if she can talk people into going with her.



Tunison Office Furniture

110 N. Ashley St.

Valdosta, Ga.

Phone: (229) 247-1760