So, Toys R Us Closing...

[drawkcabi]

It's not like Toys R Us didn't put most of the mom and pop toy stores out of business when they emerged to supremacy years ago, but for people like me who have childhood memories wrapped up in the store, and for the people losing their jobs, and the idea of leverage buy outs in general, it's all still pretty sad and pretty shitty.

Another bit of yesteryear fading away and it instigates another nostalgia trip by yours truly. Scot didn't do his Daylight Savings Time Sucks thread this year, we need something to break the monotony and celebrate tradition. Consider yourselves forewarned...

 

Saturdays in the 1980's...
My mom would take me to the Toys R Us in Lanham, Maryland. It was a little on the dingy side but back in the day it always had the goods! 

You would go in and make a sharp left and were corralled kind of like a maze through the area the Toy R Us Gods wanted you and your parents to see first. All the seasonal novelty stuff, tee-shirts, candy, gumball machines, that kind of thing. 

Then you'd make it to the far left wall was just stacked with board games. I know it couldn't have been more that 7 or 8 feet high, but thinking back on it as a kid, the memories make it seem like it was 100 feet high with all the classic board games there ever were and new board games based on whatever was currently popular in movies, TV, music, video games, books, or even food.

Then there was an electonics and video games section, but my best memories are right during the mid 80's when they video game industry was still recovering from the crash. There were things like the Nintendo game and watches and a whole bunch of the miniature arcade games, the Coleco Donkey Kong, Frogger, Pac-Man, etc. Original table top electronic games, video game/calculator watches, Atari and other pre-Nintendo console video game cartridges, computer stuff and robots like Omnibot. 

The mid section of the store had all the bikes and big wheels and rocking horses and toys you could ride.

The back of the store was the pre-schooler section with the Mr. Potato heads and Fisher Price stuff along with the kids and young adult books, Dr. Seuss, Judy Blume, all that.

But there were two ailses...just two ailses in that whole big store...that were the real sweet spot. It was all I cared about getting to, I made straight for those aisles zipping through the maze that was put there seemingly only to torture me, begging my mom all week to take me to Toys R Us and now I was there and they were making me work just that little bit harder to get to where I knew Valhalla awaited!

Transformers! G.I. Joe! He-Man! Go-Bots! Voltron! Mask! Thundercats! Super Powers! Secret Wars! Along with the fading dominance of the vintage Kenner Star Wars and the toylines they thought were going to be big but failed big time like Dune and Sectaurs or just barely didn't measure up to what else was out like Wheeled Warriors or Robotix.

There were imports of just about every Japanese robot/space toy that had a cartoon show in Japan, many of them big, heavy, and die cast metal. Garidian, Godmars, Super Dimension Century Orguss, we had no idea what the hell they were, never seen the cartoons, but damn they looked cool! And Transformers/Go-bots knock-offs like Converters or Variables. I had the Transfomer Reflector as a kid, but I didn't have to send away by mail for it, I bought it at Toys R Us, it wasn't in a Transformers box, but I knew it was Reflector.

These aisles were just OVERFLOWING with everything I could ever want as a kid. If I went too far one way things turned pink and I'd end up in the girls' toys aisles, too far the other way and things went all Legos and Construx and Lincoln Logs, or Hotwheels, Matchbox, racecar tracks and stuff, or the WWF toys (not WWE back then) or the movie/cartoon/TV Show tie-in toys of Terminator, Aliens, Predator, Rambo, Rocky, Karate Kid, Knight Rider, Dukes of Hazzard, A-Team. Stuff I either didn't care for or were a notch or three down on my idea of coolest toys.

I remember one fateful Saturday, going to Toy R Us and right to the golden aisles and searching through the G.I. Joe figures carded on pegs. Bazooka, Bazooka, Cobra Soldier, Shipwreck, Bazooka, Crimson Guard, Dreadnok, Bazooka, Footloose, Televiper, Bazooka, Bazooka...then I saw it... I couldn't believe it but it was there...Snake Eyes!!! Version 2.0 with the ball jointed head, ninja accessories, and Timber! It was like winning the lottery.

Another time, it was the Saturday just before Christmas 1985. My mom gave up on the idea of surprising me with the G.I.Joe U.S.S. Flag seven foot long aircraft carrier because she needed my help to buy the mammoth toy. She took me and my too friends. We bought the Flag and then when we got out to the car we discovered it was too big for the trunk of my mom's Cadillac. So there my friends and I rode on the way home, the three of us in the back seat with the ginormous box at an odd angle and stretched across all our laps.

Happy times. Happy memories. 
Times change though. It's sad and a shame how it happened, the people that had to and have to lose their jobs, I wish it wasn't so. But I also think even if the store could survive, what was once so special about it, so memorable about going there, is lost to the past no matter what.

[Relic]

Have you ever used Amazon? If so, you directly contributed to this happening. How long until Amazon puts ....well...everyone out of business?

[drawkcabi]

29 minutes ago, Relic said:

Have you ever used Amazon? If so, you directly contributed to this happening. How long until Amazon puts ....well...everyone out of business?

So it had nothing to do with Bain Capital buying the company and leveraging it for all the money they could get out of it? They did the same thing to Kaybee Toys in the 90's, Amazon sure was going strong then.

The world changes and most of the time corporate short-sightedness and greed are big factors in a company's downfall. A company that wants to can find ways to adapt and reinvent itself and maybe it survives, but even if it does it's never the same.

Toys R Us is somewhat equivalent to Blockbuster Video. Blockbuster Video came around and every small mom and pop video store couldn't compete. It was business but still kind of shitty when Blockbuster did that and kind of shitty when Toys R Us put out the mom and pop toy stores. Then Netflix comes and bye bye Blockbuster. I contributed to Blockbuster's downfall when I switched to Netflix years ago and I still subscribe to it and happy it's around like it is in these times. I still have fond memories of Blockbuster Video just like I do of Toys R Us and I miss it, but I know it's not a practical business for this day and age.

I still think a smart, inventive, and enthusiastic to stay in business company could keep brick and mortar book stores and toy stores among others around in a hybrid way with technology and internet in modern business practice, but...I don't know.

 

and Walmart and Target are stepping it up against Amazon. Prices for common goods are consistently better there than on Amazon. I hardly ever by from Amazon anymore after checking with those two. Amazon has been focusing more lately on being a streaming service and their original programs and movies, but I know they are still a Goliath in online shopping.

So not everyone will be out of business. You'll have Pestilence Amazon, Famine, Walmart, and Death Target.

until Satan Disney buys them all

[HexMachina]

6 minutes ago, drawkcabi said:

So it had nothing to do with Bain Capital buying the company and leveraging it for all the money they could get out of it? They did the same thing to Kaybee Toys in the 90's, Amazon sure was going strong then.

The world changes and most of the time corporate short-sightedness and greed are big factors in a company's downfall. A company that wants to can find ways to adapt and reinvent itself and maybe it survives, but even if it does it's never the same.

Toys R Us is somewhat equivalent to Blockbuster Video. Blockbuster Video came around and every small mom and pop video store couldn't compete. It was business but still kind of shitty when Blockbuster did that and kind of shitty when Toys R Us put out the mom and pop toy stores. Then Netflix comes and bye bye Blockbuster. I contributed to Blockbuster's downfall when I switched to Netflix years ago and I still subscribe to it and happy it's around like it is in these times. I still have fond memories of Blockbuster Video just like I do of Toys R Us and I miss it, but I know it's not a practical business for this day and age.

I still think a smart, inventive, and enthusiastic to stay in business company could keep brick and mortar book stores and toy stores among others around in a hybrid way with technology and internet in modern business practice, but...I don't know.

 

and Walmart and Target are stepping it up against Amazon. Prices for common goods are consistently better there than on Amazon. I hardly ever by from Amazon anymore after checking with those two. Amazon has been focusing more lately on being a streaming service and their original programs and movies, but I know they are still a Goliath in online shopping.

So not everyone will be out of business. You'll have Pestilence Amazon, Famine, Walmart, and Death Target.

until Satan Disney buys them all

Amazon, proud to be one of America’s eight companies!

 

[HexMachina]

Something a bit more substantive now.

Toys’R’Us was part of what I would call a Big Day Out for me and my family. My mam worked Monday-Friday, my dad is self employed and generally works 6 days a week, alternating every other week as to whether it is a Saturday night or Sunday day he had off. So we didn’t have a lot of time all together at the same time due to work when I was younger. Added to that, Toys’R’Us was, while not exactly “far” away, long enough that we didn’t just pop over on a whim. 

So it came to be a thing that once every two months or so, we would all get up on a Sunday morning, nice and early. We’d walk the dog together, then come home and have dippy egg and soldiers (with marmite, obviously) for breakfast, then pile into the car and drive to the metro centre, ready for shops opening at 11. We’d spend the morning shopping in there then take a walk over the road to the retail park and Toys r Us. Such fond memories. I remember my favourite part was seeing the bikes and cars and trikes etc out on display in the aisles. I could happily have spent hours in there just drinking it all in. But, we weren’t well off. I was limited to one toy per visit, and that was only if it was a reasonable cost, and I had not behaved like a little shit for the past two months. I still recall the Happy day I brought Mouse Trap home at long last  

And after Toys R Us, we would all drive home and have a big Sunday’s dinner and muse over our purchases for the day.

 

[Larry of the Lawn]

Most of that shit ends up in landfills or the ocean anyway.  Too bad people will still keep buying tons of trash.  

Anyone who advertises products to children should be hung in the streets.

[Shryke]

5 hours ago, Relic said:

Have you ever used Amazon? If so, you directly contributed to this happening. How long until Amazon puts ....well...everyone out of business?

Not really. Toys R Us was still doing fairly solid afaik. Turning a profit, they had something like 20% of the toy market. There's no reason they should have gone under.

Except, you know, Bain Capital. Who snapped up TRU in a leveraged buyout like 12 years back or something in that range and loaded like 5 billion dollars worth of extra debt onto the company, the servicing of which basically ate their profits. Romney's buddy Dave Brandon was also running the place, which is always bad news since his specialty is running things into the ground.

TRU was certainly impacted by Amazon but what killed the company was Romney-style financial industry fuckery. They bought the place on loan, ran up the stores credit and now they gonna loot the place. It's a bust out but it's legal.

[Spockydog]

2 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

Most of that shit ends up in landfills or the ocean anyway.  Too bad people will still keep buying tons of trash.  

Anyone who advertises products to children should be hung in the streets.

*almost chokes on coffee*  

[Darth Richard II]

Amazon had nothing to do with it.

[Jace, Extat]

4 hours ago, Spockydog said:

*almost chokes on coffee*  

He's right

[Iskaral Pust]

The $5bn debt load was undoubtedly a factor because it meant the company had less flexibility to weather the storm that hit their industry:

- Walmart has waged a price war on toys for several years because their retail line is broad enough to absorb it, but not so for Toys’R’Us.

- Parents buy (kids want) fewer toys now.  Electronic games, apps, social media, etc claim a larger share of wallet and a larger share of time.  Just take a look at Mattel’s stock price over the past decade — and nothing to do with private equity.

- Toys’R’Us and Babies’R’Us were classic mid-level retail, but retail has significantly bifurcated in recent years into very cheap or else very expensive & frou-frou.  The demand for mid-level has reduced a lot.

- Toys’R’Us was excluded from some of the most successful/profitable toys over the past decade as LEGO, American Doll, Disney (Star Wars, Marvel, princesses, etc) and similar opened their own chains of stores to retail directly and deploy vertical integration. 

- A huge amount of toy shopping, especially around Christmas, shifted to Amazon. 

- Big box retail generally has seen a huge drop in foot traffic.  Shopping habits have changed.  Look at Sports Authority and Best Buy too.

- Kids liked shopping at Toys’R’Us; a lot of parents were less enthused.  It’s a lot of cheap, plastic, schlocky crap.  Once a kid is in there, they see a million garish things they want that the parent knows they’ll play with for only a week.  Parents preferred to shop online where they wouldn’t have kids acting like crack addicts, and where they could look for higher quality toys (in manufacture and content).

I hate that private equity owners loot their companies for fees before there are profits (because the investors in the private equity fund are being looted too), and I hate that they use all the debt just to buy the company and milk it, not to invest in improving it.  But Toys’R’Us would have been in steep decline anyway.  Perhaps not bankrupt but definitely at risk.

A lot of retail was bought out by private equity before the financial crisis, back when the ever-growing consumerism and the strength of underlying real estate assets made it seem like a sure thing.  Several have collapsed already and many more will soon.

 

[Darth Richard II]

For the longest time, I remember TRU charging ABOVE MSRP for their LEGO sets. Of course you could pay for there yearly discount card and get a discount down to actual MSRP, but that fooled nobody and I think someone here locally even sued them for misleading advertising.

[Alarich II]

I won't shed any tears over them. They sold mostly crap, killed many small retailers as well and I have no childhood memories of it, because my parents loathed their stores and never went there. As an adult I was horrified at the unloving and uncaring way they presented their plastic shit.

To me it's just one crappy retail-chain less in the world, no loss at all.

[Shryke]

10 minutes ago, Alarich II said:

I won't shed any tears over them. They sold mostly crap, killed many small retailers as well and I have no childhood memories of it, because my parents loathed their stores and never went there. As an adult I was horrified at the unloving and uncaring way they presented their plastic shit.

To me it's just one crappy retail-chain less in the world, no loss at all.

No, it's 33,000 people without jobs.

[Spockydog]

1 hour ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

He's right

Bet your fur he's right.

[PetyrPunkinhead]

 

13 hours ago, drawkcabi said:

It's not like Toys R Us didn't put most of the mom and pop toy stores out of business when they emerged to supremacy years ago, but for people like me who have childhood memories wrapped up in the store, and for the people losing their jobs, and the idea of leverage buy outs in general, it's all still pretty sad and pretty shitty...

Happy times. Happy memories. 
Times change though. It's sad and a shame how it happened, the people that had to and have to lose their jobs, I wish it wasn't so. But I also think even if the store could survive, what was once so special about it, so memorable about going there, is lost to the past no matter what.

Like you and @HelenaExMachinaI have very fond memories of TRU. I loved going to Toys R Us as a kid and bringing my kids there years later.  K&B Toys was a smaller version, but they went under a while ago, too. They were often overpriced compared to Wal-Mart, but there's still something completely awesome about a giant store dedicated solely to toys and kids. It made you feel special going there as a kid because you knew it was just for you.

A lot of blame is being put Amazon and the convenience of online retail competition, and rightly so. And the handling of the debt by the company is also to blame. But I think, in part, the parents are to blame, too. Shopping for kids is too often "just another hassle." These parents have forgotten the truly magical experience of being a child and spending time with their parents or grandparents in a physical place literally filled with endless possibilities for play and imagination. Even if you only came out of the store with a $5 toy, the time spent there with people who cared enough about you to spend time with you there was priceless, It's not just a retail chain of stores that's closing because for a lot of Americans it's an entire cultural experience that's going away.

[drawkcabi]

9 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

Most of that shit ends up in landfills or the ocean anyway.  Too bad people will still keep buying tons of trash.  

The stuff kids actually want and cherish, that stuff stays around a lot of the time. Kids grow up and as long as their parents don't throw them away, when kids get to "that age" they usually they give them to younger siblings or relatives or kids of friends (see Toy Story 3) or donate them to Goodwill and places like that. Maybe they'll still keep a select extra extra special few in a cedar trunk (or two) that they drag with them from home to college to their first apartment to their first house using it/them as a coffee tables or stacked as a night stand but every now and then on rare occasions when completely alone they pull out the key they put on a Tamagotchi key chain open up the trunk, lie down on the floor relive old memories, and have an old fashioned play session exactly like they had when they were a kid...erm, um, just as an example  

Also toys become valued by collectors as they get older and some make a hobby of either recreating that toy collection they had as a kid or finally having the one they always wanted or some combination thereof. 

The junk stuff yeah, and I agree too bad they keep putting it out and people keep making it. I remember as a kid I never wanted an Optimus Prime blowing bubbles kit or a Voltron flashlight. I wanted the real toys.

Quote

Anyone who advertises products to children should be hung in the streets.

Here I disagree with you. I don't believe in helicopter parenting and I associate this with that. Kids who are shielded all their lives from being advertised to, never learn that the x-ray specs they wait so eagerly to get are pieces of crap that don't work in the slightest, that pumps in their Reboks won't make them jump higher, that Ironhide and Ratchet look nothing like they do in the cartoon, they don't even freaking have heads!!! - when they become adults are woefully inadequate to be responsible consumers.

The goal behind advertising to children and the people who do it are evil, but a useful evil.

 

11 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

Something a bit more substantive now.

Toys’R’Us was part of what I would call a Big Day Out for me and my family. My mam worked Monday-Friday, my dad is self employed and generally works 6 days a week, alternating every other week as to whether it is a Saturday night or Sunday day he had off. So we didn’t have a lot of time all together at the same time due to work when I was younger. Added to that, Toys’R’Us was, while not exactly “far” away, long enough that we didn’t just pop over on a whim. 

So it came to be a thing that once every two months or so, we would all get up on a Sunday morning, nice and early. We’d walk the dog together, then come home and have dippy egg and soldiers (with marmite, obviously) for breakfast, then pile into the car and drive to the metro centre, ready for shops opening at 11. We’d spend the morning shopping in there then take a walk over the road to the retail park and Toys r Us. Such fond memories. I remember my favourite part was seeing the bikes and cars and trikes etc out on display in the aisles. I could happily have spent hours in there just drinking it all in. But, we weren’t well off. I was limited to one toy per visit, and that was only if it was a reasonable cost, and I had not behaved like a little shit for the past two months. I still recall the Happy day I brought Mouse Trap home at long last  

And after Toys R Us, we would all drive home and have a big Sunday’s dinner and muse over our purchases for the day.

 

 

3 minutes ago, PetyrPunkinhead said:

I'm not sure I can reminisce 

I loved going to Toys R Us as a kid and bringing my kids there years later.  K&B Toys was a smaller version, but they went under a while ago, too. They were often overpriced compared to Wal-Mart, but there's still something completely awesome about a giant store dedicated solely to toys and kids. It made you feel special going there because you knew it was just for you. Hopefully the smaller shops won't go out of business, too.

A lot of blame is being put on Amazon and the convenience of online retail, but the parents are to blame. Shopping for kids is too often "just another hassle." These people forgot the experience of spending time with your parents or grandparents in a physical place literally filled with endless possibilities for play and imagination is truly magical. Even if you only came out of the store with a $5 toy, the time spent there with people who cared enough about you to spend time with you there was priceless, It's not just a retail chain of stores that's closing because for a lot of Americans it's an entire cultural experience that's going away.

You guys get it.  

[PetyrPunkinhead]

16 minutes ago, drawkcabi said:

...You guys get it.  

 

[Yukle]

I think toys were finding it hard to compete with video games. Looking around my house, there are a lot more toys than most other kids have, because neither of my kids is allowed to use a console yet. Our rationale is that if they're bored, we'd like them to stimulate their own creativity. They're both fairly young, so it's not as though it makes much difference. There's a bit more tidying up than there'd normally be, as they experiment with using dolls as paintbrushes, trying to swap the arms of Batman and Spiderman and so on... and the dreaded abandoned lego block left out which I always step on.

Toys are also very expensive! And they're planned-obsolescence means they're made of plastic. They're strong, but brittle, and even dropping a plastic Buzz Lightyear from the height of a toddler's reach will probably break it.

I can sympathise with parents who find toys too expensive to buy. It's very hard to know which toys your children will like for long periods and which they'll tire of quickly. They tend to return to a few old favourites.

The only reason we've been able to afford so many is a combination of hand-me-downs and raiding the local op shop once a week. We go each time after our weekly shop. If we find that our kids haven't played with something in ages, we clean it and donate it back, unless it's broken.

There are no doubt many things that caused Toys R Us to crumble, but I wouldn't be surprised if one is the slowdown of sales from parents who can't afford to keep buying such expensive toys.

[Yukle]

22 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

I was limited to one toy per visit, and that was only if it was a reasonable cost, and I had not behaved like a little shit for the past two months. I still recall the Happy day I brought Mouse Trap home at long last  

And after Toys R Us, we would all drive home and have a big Sunday’s dinner and muse over our purchases for the day.

 

We do that with our kids now! My younger one isn't quite a stage where he can fully understand, but my older does. It's usually in the lead-up to a birthday or to Christmas.

Sometimes we just go if they ask us. We'll say if we're buying or not buying anything before we go in, and they just love to wander around and touch everything.