All I've seen are 2k3 era photos online, but I found this very 1982-3ish by the looks of this photo:
Thank goodness TMNT wasn't around during the "4-bit era" as I once called it or we would be laughing at those games to this day like ET and Star Wars fans still do. Gaming has sure come a long ways since then and hard to believe that those games cost $18-$35 when new (around $40-$80 when adjusted for inflation!), considering you can get most for around a buck a piece for 2600s in an eBay lot. Let's say it's 1987 in the Transformers aisle as posted above, and say you wait at the store without feeling tired. Just imagine that one day in early 1988 that a portion of the Transformers aisle is replaced by a few TMNT figures, and then in 1989 more stuff is replaced and around half of the aisle is TMNT stuff, and then in 1990 with Transformers dead at the time, the entire aisle is nothing but TMNT! 1990 and 1991 was basically when you saw the most TMNT merchandise in the aisles, with 1992 similar to 1989's with a few Batman/Spiderman/Xmen appearing. Then came 1993 and the Power Rangers as I could recall pretty much overtook where the TMNT stuff once stood (there was still a bit more TMNT than Power Rangers that year from my memory), then 1994 and 1995 basically reduced TMNT to a small section/clearance bins with Power Rangers dominating, and by the the time we hit 1996, the TMNT section was all but gone, showing the shift in trends. It's still easy to figure out which stores sold TMNT merchandise just by looking at the tags in your collection or online.
Also, people often forget how difficult it was to find certain items, particularly in smaller stores during the early years with high demand.