Raffkind’s: 99 going on 100

By George Schwarz
The Amarillo Independent

George Raffkind did more than inherit a clothing business. It’s actually in his jeans — er, genes.

The owner and now patriarch of the store that bears his family’s name is a third-generation haberdasher.

While in the midst of the 99-year anniversary, he said he isn’t sure what they’ll do for the 100th.

“We decided a year ago to start 99 because most business don’t make it this long. So we might as well get a little leverage out of it,” he said.

The current recession has affected the business. Numbers are down for the year but still above 2007; and, 2008 “was an exceptional year.”

A year ago, oil was $150 a barrel and for his customers in the oil and gas business it was a good thing. They had more money than they had ever had. It’s hard to make the same numbers in June 2009 as in June 2008, so he has scaled back inventory and projections, he said.

Raffkind’s is in a nationwide group with other independent retailers — stores in California, Florida, Massachusetts and Louisiana — that report data to each other. Those other stores saw declines last September, right after the stock market cratered.

“We had a great year last year and we had a great year last year all the way through Christmas, even after the stock market crashed.”

While part of the family history is cloudy, he said, the story is that his grandfather, who had emigrated from Russia in 1910, founded the business.

His grandmother had an uncle who had a store in Levelland.

“And how they ended up in Amarillo, I’m really not sure,” Raffkind said.

Neither grandparent spoke English. But his grandfather found a vacant store on Fourth Avenue and started sweeping it out. The building owner came by and somehow they negotiated a lease. That’s when he started the dry goods store, selling work clothes mostly to railroad workers and cowboys.

He held on to the business through the Great Depression, surviving on a lot of bartering.

Raffkind’s parents both went to Amarillo High, graduating in 1942, although they didn’t date then. They married after his father got out of the Marine Corps after World War II.

“And my dad ran the business,” he said.

They were on Fourth Avenue, then Taylor Street, then Polk Street; then they bought a building at Fifth and Polk and the store was there until the early 1970s.

“In the early ’60s, the biggest part of our business was the air base and we gave the airmen credit,” he said. “All they had to do was come in and have a military ID and we would open up an account. We had all these form letters that said ‘Dear Commanding Officer’ and if these guys didn’t pay, you just sent that letter to the commanding officer and we’d get paid.”

Being a credit clothier was the biggest part of the business, but when the base closed in the mid-1960s, things were not good.

Raffkind said that, as a high schooler, he didn’t feel the downturn as much, and he credited his father with saving the business through hard work and being a good manager.

“I mean, my dad did a lot of the things that, right now, we have three or four people doing — my dad did all by himself. He typed the statements by hand, he typed the checks like this,” Raffkind said, poking his two index fingers into the desk like a hunt-and-peck typist.

His father opened a store in Western Plaza in 1968. After graduating from the University of Texas in 1973 with a degree in marketing, the younger Raffkind came home to work in the store.

Raffkind said that while growing up, he never really thought about taking over the family business, but in the back of his mind, he thinks he did. Taking over the business became clearer in college, when he worked at a clothing store in Austin, doing very well as a salesman.

“I did real well there and came to the realization that I did like the business and I had a job here,” he said. “Looking back, if I had it to do all over again, rather than going from Austin to Amarillo, I would have gone from Austin to New York and worked for Bloomingdale’s or Brooks Brothers, just to find out how somebody else does things.”

“I worked side by side with my dad until ’82, when Westgate Mall opened and we went out there,” he said.

He said his father was progressive, believing the store needed to be at the new place. The mall was a new experience for them because they cut a small business in two, but with twice the expenses because the rent was higher there.

“We could no longer be just an old man’s clothing store because that wasn’t the customer that was at the mall, anyway,” he said.

That also triggered the need to modernize, implementing new technology.

In fact, the biggest way the clothing business has changed is the technology, like other businesses.

“When we used to sell a shirt, we’d mark it down manually. The technology we have now to track our numbers and to keep up with our inventory has helped the business immensely, but it has also made the world a lot more competitive.”

Clothing manufacturing has also changed, he said.

American manufacturers are having a hard time competing with foreign companies, he said, citing the automobile industry as an example.

“We get a lot of sportswear made in China, and I hated it for a while, but that’s the way life is,” he said, adding that some of the manufacturing is returning to the United States.

“We lost the textile business years ago.”

A few of the big names are still made in the United States — Robert Talbott, Hickey-Freeman, Oxxford, and Hart, Schaffner & Marx suits.

America needs to figure out a way to compete, he said.

They left the mall in 2002, but had established the Georgia Street location in 1994 in the space next to the current location. The lease at the mall was expiring and, after 20 years, it was time to leave.

“Our employees are like our family so whenever we make a decision, it’s really hard to do anything when it comes to laying people off, so what we did was, we built twice as big a store over here and we’re open nights and we’re open weekends,” he said. “We did that so we could keep these people employed.”

There are eight full-time employees and the move has worked out “great.”

The unique thing about his business is the employees and their longevity. One has been with the store 33 years.

“We take care of our employees,” he said, offering benefits that many small businesses do not.

It benefits having young people work for him and they help the store reach younger customers.

“We try to stay on the edge of the markets,” he said.

He said the store is classic, or traditional, because he is traditional in what he believes is proper dress. But the misconception is that the store is expensive. but it’s no more so than Dillard’s.