For five decades, T&R Grocery has served generations of customers while becoming a beloved fixture of the Sipsey and Empire communities.

Words by Jenny Lynn Davis | Images by Nick Rizzo

The sign out front says T&R Grocery. Around the Sipsey and Empire communities, it hardly needs to.

For generations of customers, the longtime gas station and country store has simply been “Randy’s.” The place to stop for gas on the way to the lake, pick up something for supper, grab live bait before a fishing trip, or find an unexpected plumbing fitting when nowhere else nearby has one.

That a business bearing the initials of Tom and Randy Harris has gradually become known by his name alone is something Randy does not take lightly.

“I feel honored and humbled by what people do for me,” he says.

His wife, Becky, has watched that relationship grow over decades. She describes the store’s customers as fiercely loyal and the kind of regulars who have come to feel that T&R belongs to them, too.

That sense of ownership — not in the legal sense, but in the way communities claim the places that become part of their lives — has been building for 50 years.

T&R Grocery opened April 2, 1976, after Randy’s parents, Tom and Bebie Harris, purchased an existing store from longtime owner Cecil Parker. Parker stayed on for the first month or two, helping a young Randy learn the customers who came through the door.

Tom was still working in the coal mines, so keeping the store going became a family undertaking. Bebie was integral to the store’s early years; she, Randy, and his sisters divided the work during the day, and Tom came in after finishing his shift at the mines.

“I’d open in the morning and work until Mother got there around 8:00,” Randy recalls. “Then I would go home for breakfast and come back and keep working. Everybody pitched in.”

The store itself was smaller then. There were two gas pumps before an unleaded pump was eventually added alongside them. Randy remembers roughly 20 coal miners gathering there before work to drink coffee, smoke, and talk. The smoking was so common, he says, that the ceiling had turned yellow.

It was a different era, but some of the relationships formed in those early years lasted for decades.

Randy had already gotten an introduction to the grocery business as a teenager. At age 16, while cleaning brick for a construction job, he was summoned to the local Bruno’s Supermarket, handed an application, and quickly put to work. When he protested that he did not have a tie, someone found him a clip-on.

“I never did wear a real tie,” he jokes.

What did stick was the work itself. Five decades later, Randy’s affection for the business is still obvious.

Asked whether he still loves it, he does not hesitate.

“I do. I really do.”

By the mid-1980s, around the time Randy and Becky married, the younger couple had begun taking a larger role in T&R, and the business has remained a family affair ever since.

Several family members still pitch in at the store when they are available and needed. Randy remains there more often than not, even when other employees are present – a reflection of how thoroughly T&R has become part of his daily life.

In 50 years, of course, the business surrounding T&R has changed considerably.

The store once carried a full line of groceries and sold far more staples, such as milk and bread, during a time when customers had fewer places nearby to shop. Today, Randy sees a broader cultural difference, too.

“Years ago, people slowed down,” he says. Now, customers are more likely to know precisely what they need, get it, and keep moving.

But one thing, the Harrises say, hasn’t changed: customer loyalty.

They’ve earned that loyalty in both big and small ways.

T&R still stocks an eclectic mix of groceries, bait, hardware, and other necessities – the kind of inventory that can rescue someone from an inconvenient problem without a drive into town. 

The Harrises also occasionally pump gas, check oil, or carry purchases outside for customers who have difficulty getting out of their vehicles. They also make a handful of deliveries for people who need them.

“That’s what I like about the store,” Randy says. “The friendship and the community service.”

That role became particularly visible in April 2011.

The tornadoes that tore through Alabama that month heavily impacted the Harrises and the surrounding community. Their own home was damaged. Becky was at home with their sons, and Randy was inside T&R when the storm hit. He remembers hearing it approach, taking cover with two other people inside the store, and emerging moments later to a landscape transformed by downed trees and debris.

Yet by the following day, T&R was open again.

Without electricity and amid widespread devastation, people brought ice to the store for distribution. Randy and Becky helped provide neighbors with ice and water, and when familiar customers didn’t have money, the store wrote down what they took and let them leave with it. At the same time, the Harrises were sending workers to help clean up other people’s properties, even as their own home still needed attention.

Eventually, volunteers who had traveled into the area to assist with recovery turned their attention toward the Harris home as well.

“We received so much help, too,” Becky says.

In many ways, it was a concentrated example of the relationship T&R has had with its community for decades: the store taking care of its neighbors, and its neighbors taking care of the family behind the counter.

Some of those relationships are deeply meaningful. Others are just plain funny.

Becky jokes that they could have written a book if they had kept track of every story they heard over the years. One longtime customer, Ricky Ricardo Dill, is known for delivering the same joke again and again.

“He’ll say, ‘I saw something last night I just can’t get over,’” Becky recalls.

She knows her part: “What is it?”

“The moon.”

“He’s always been a character!” she says. 

Those encounters are part of why the evenings remain Randy and Becky’s favorite time at the store. Morning customers are often racing toward work, but by late afternoon, people have more time to linger at the counter and talk.

And after five decades, there is a lot to talk about.

Keeping T&R going has not come without sacrifice. Randy and Becky acknowledge that running a family business meant fewer vacations and less time away, particularly after Tom died. Still, when Randy is asked what makes him proudest after 50 years, his answer is not a sales figure, an anniversary, or even the survival of the store.

“My children, grandchildren, and my wife,” he says. “We’ve been very fortunate.”

That dedication has shaped Randy’s family as much as it has shaped the store. His oldest son, Luke, describes him as a friend and mentor throughout the community, including across generations of loyal customers, and as an example of what commitment to family, community, and work can look like. Retirement has come up, but those closest to Randy have a hard time imagining him staying away from T&R for long.

He sees another problem.

“If I retire, then I work for my wife,” he jokes.

Becky laughs and admits she has a few projects in mind.

For now, both are looking less toward retirement than toward what might come next for the community they call home.

Randy hopes to see renewed growth throughout the Sipsey and Empire areas. He and his sister have talked about ways their generation might help improve the community, and Randy and Becky would like to see neglected properties cleaned up and put back into use. 

Most of all, they want T&R Grocery to remain.

Fifty years after the Harris family took over the little store, Randy still talks about the business like someone who never quite separated his work from the people and place he loves.

“It gets in your blood,” he says. “You can’t get out of it.”

Perhaps that explains why, after all these years, so many people in the Sipsey and Empire communities seem to feel much the same way about the store.

Officially, it is T&R Grocery.

Around here, it is Randy’s. 78