Look for the tall, stepped concrete-and-glass building with its narrow glass tower and big nautical Gay Dolphin sign built into the facade.
This place has the cheerful nerve to call itself the nation’s largest gift shop, and honestly... it makes a decent case. By twenty eleven, the Gay Dolphin covered about twenty-six thousand square feet and carried roughly seventy thousand items. Owner Justin “Buz” Plyler said it held more merchandise than Sears Roebuck in its heyday, and more than a Walmart Superstore. That is either retail poetry or a mild cry for help.
Justin Whitaker Plyler and Eloise Plyler opened the original shop here in nineteen forty-six, right beside the old Kiddieland amusement park. Justin wanted a whimsical nautical name, so Gay Dolphin it became. Then Hurricane Hazel hit in nineteen fifty-four and destroyed the first store. The Plylers rebuilt on the same site, starting near the beach and expanding upward and outward over the years. If you glance at the exterior photo in your app, you can see that layered, almost puzzle-like profile more clearly than you can from the sidewalk.
One reason the place feels like a maze is wonderfully practical: the store has four stories but ten levels because Justin Plyler could not afford to remove the hill between the street and the beach. So instead of flattening the land, he let the building work around it. A budget problem turned into a business model.
Inside, the Gay Dolphin grew into about fifty themed sections, called coves. One is an Elvis Cove, complete with a life-size Elvis Presley for photos. Another specialty corner, Trader Bill’s Shark’s Tooth Cove, rents space inside the building. Tom Pierce, who had fifty-six years of experience in that trade by twenty twenty-five, can even turn your own shark teeth into jewelry. The inventory has always leaned delightfully broad: seashells, Myrtle Beach T-shirts, brushes for bald men, noisy seat cushions, even at one point a life-size cigar store Indian and a fountain with three dolphins for seven thousand dollars.
One of the great Gay Dolphin traditions is the wall of name tags. Co-owner Michelle Plyler said it carried about three thousand names, updated every year using the Social Security Administration list of popular names. If your name was missing, the building once offered a strange little consolation prize: you could climb the circular steel stairs in the tower for free, while everyone else paid one dollar. For years, people went up for the rooftop view from what was once the tallest building in Myrtle Beach. The tower also held the Wonder Falls, a set of oil-rain displays - moving liquid sculptures that created the illusion of waterfalls and fed a wishing well below. When the pump broke in the early two thousands and no one could replace the parts, that odd marvel vanished. Insurance concerns finally ended tower climbs in two thousand six.
Buz Plyler started working here at age eight, doing the jobs his father disliked, and later bought merchandise himself, sometimes from bankrupt suppliers at a discount. That scrappy instinct helped make the Gay Dolphin the first tourist shop here to stay open year-round. The Plylers even lived in an apartment at the top of the building for forty-five years, which is commitment with excellent stock access. If you check the sign photo on your screen, you’ll catch that playful seaside spirit Justin wanted from the beginning.
If you feel tempted to go inside, it generally opens every day from nine thirty in the morning until eleven at night. The Gay Dolphin turned souvenir shopping into local folklore. When you’re ready, continue on toward the Goddess of the Sea.
