Category:Two Guys From Harrison, Allentown, Pennsylvania

Two Guys From Harrison was a chain established by two brothers from Harrison, New Jersey, in 1946. The chain opened a store on the 7th Street Pike (now MacArthur Road) in Whitehall Township in 1957. It was located about five miles north of Allentown in what was then a primarily rural area.

Two Guys, as the store was commonly called, was the first large major retail outlet on MacArthur Road. It was built on a 94-acre site purchased earlier in the year for $230,000. To accommodate crowds, the store had a 4,000-car parking lot.

Besides its location, Two Guys was unique in a number of ways. It was essentially an early "Big Box" retail store which sold a wide variety of products, from clothing and toys to sporting goods and music. It also had a grocery department that was larger than most supermarkets at the time. All of the store's items were also heavily discounted in comparison with prices charged by most stores in the region.

In addition, Two Guys had longer hours than other stores, with Monday-Saturday business hours from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Most stores at the time were closed at night except for certain evenings, usually Mondays and Thursdays. Even more unusual was the decision of Two Guys owners to open on Sundays, from noon until 6 p.m., in opposition to Pennsylvania's "Blue Laws", which prohibited the retail sale of most items other than food.

In the late 1950s, Two Guys became the target of litigation brought by Lehigh County district attorney Paul McGinley regarding its Sunday hours. At one point, over 70 of the store's employees were arrested. The case eventually went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the state ban on Sunday sales in an 8-1 decision.

It was Two Guys that heralded the shopping strip in Whitehall Township. With the Whitehall Mall, North Mall and Lehigh Valley Malls opening on it over the next two decades. Along with the malls, many individual businesses and strip shopping centers were built along both sides of the road. It was the traffic generated by the shopping on MacArthur road that led to the road improvement from what was, at first, a two-lane road from Allenton (PA 145) into the multi-lane highway which exists today.

Over the decades, increasing competition led to the Two Guys chain becoming less profitable. In 1980 the Two Guys stores were sold to real estate investor Steven Roth. Roth saw that the land that the Two Guys stores were located on was worth more than the stores themselves. He began the process of liquidating its Two Guys outlets by closing the stores and leasing the land to other companies. The Whitehall store closed in December 1981. In 1982, the Two Guys chain itself was liquidated.

In the years since, the Two Guys store in Whitehall was subsequently torn down and the land redeveloped into a shopping center. However it's legacy remains with the growth of MacArthur road shopping district today. Along with the shopping, more and more residental development grew Whitehall into a large suburb, along with and growing the small bouroughs in the township.