So, Toys R Us Closing...

[Relic]

15 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

Amazon had nothing to do with it.

Begging your pardon, but Toys r Us disagrees. I'm sure that as an expert in these matters you;ll ignore the following, but here it is anyway. 

 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/03/15/toys-r-us-liquidation-amazon-target-walmart/427209002/

""This year, however, was different," Toys R Us said. "As a result of a general decline in toy sales, competitors had full product offerings through the end of the holiday season and same-day and two-day delivery guarantees eased customer fears regarding online shopping.""

 

[Seli]

My main memory of Toys'R'Us is when they tried to enter the Dutch market, huge store with lots of things I'd never seen before. Of course they never stood a change against the deeply embedded local chains running many smaller shops, and ended up selling the stores to one of them (the one now owning all big remaining chains here).

Still the same fuckery of leveraged buy-outs has destroyed or nearly destroyed local brands/chains as well. It should really be illegal.

[Shryke]

3 hours ago, Relic said:

Begging your pardon, but Toys r Us disagrees. I'm sure that as an expert in these matters you;ll ignore the following, but here it is anyway. 

 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/03/15/toys-r-us-liquidation-amazon-target-walmart/427209002/

""This year, however, was different," Toys R Us said. "As a result of a general decline in toy sales, competitors had full product offerings through the end of the holiday season and same-day and two-day delivery guarantees eased customer fears regarding online shopping.""

 

Have you read the rest of the thread?

Of course the people busting the place out are not gonna admit they are what killed the store.

[Alarich II]

22 hours ago, Shryke said:

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

I wonder how many people lost their jobs because of TRU, but nobody cared because these were just small family owned stores. In the end that's just the way things go, companies come and go, people lose their jobs, they find new ones and in between you have a decent social security net - maybe not if you are American, but in that case you have freedom and you can find peace in the knowledge that the bank can't take that away from you, even when they foreclose your mortgage.

Anyway, even though the figure sounds like a lot, it is not even on the same scale as a factory closing 1000 well paid manufacturing jobs in one community. The job loss is so spread out that it doesn't really affect local economies. Especially since most of the stuff they sold, was not sourced locally but manufactured in China and the factories there will sell their stuff to Amazon and Walmart just as readily as they did to TRU. The people working in the retail stores will probably just move on to Walmart or some other retail job, or maybe use that as an opportunity to get out of retail.

[Darth Richard II]

7 hours ago, Shryke said:

Have you read the rest of the thread?

Of course the people busting the place out are not gonna admit they are what killed the store.

There are 100s of articles on the net explaining what actually caused TRU to close. Almost all of them start with a bit explaining how its NOT amazon, and it was basically the heavy debt and the fact that the people who ran TRU were evil shitbags. OF course TRU isn;t goign to say "lol we ran this into the ground".

Er, I'm agreeing with Shyke here, stupid quote function.

[drawkcabi]

2 hours ago, Alarich II said:

I wonder how many people lost their jobs because of TRU, but nobody cared because these were just small family owned stores. In the end that's just the way things go, companies come and go, people lose their jobs, they find new ones and in between you have a decent social security net - maybe not if you are American, but in that case you have freedom and you can find peace in the knowledge that the bank can't take that away from you, even when they foreclose your mortgage.

Anyway, even though the figure sounds like a lot, it is not even on the same scale as a factory closing 1000 well paid manufacturing jobs in one community. The job loss is so spread out that it doesn't really affect local economies. Especially since most of the stuff they sold, was not sourced locally but manufactured in China and the factories there will sell their stuff to Amazon and Walmart just as readily as they did to TRU. The people working in the retail stores will probably just move on to Walmart or some other retail job, or maybe use that as an opportunity to get out of retail.

Agreeing with you here.

I reject the "you shouldn't have given Amazon your business" guilt trip. I consider myself a most of the time responsible consumer all the time aware consumer, I could do better, but I'm cause here, or if I am, I'm way down on the list and if TRU had better management that actually wanted to stay in business and not just raid the piggy bank, they could have found ways to keep getting my $$.

What I will own up to is not involving myself much in government's role in business. Not demanding enough of my politicians. Corporate raiding should be a crime, monopolies should be broken up, more laws that eliminate tax loopholes should be enacted, punishments/disincentives for taking money out of the country and put into foreign banks, there should be more regulations in business practice in general and it's my responsibility to demand this of my politicians, ask and vote for laws that support this. 

I'm far more a part of contributing to this happening by being so politically apathetic for much of my life than by buying things and using Amazon.

[A True Kaniggit]

I haven't been in a Toys R Us in years. But the one near here is having its liquidation sale Thursday. I might go by and see if there's anything nice to get my niece. 

[Shryke]

19 hours ago, Alarich II said:

I wonder how many people lost their jobs because of TRU, but nobody cared because these were just small family owned stores. In the end that's just the way things go, companies come and go, people lose their jobs, they find new ones and in between you have a decent social security net - maybe not if you are American, but in that case you have freedom and you can find peace in the knowledge that the bank can't take that away from you, even when they foreclose your mortgage.

Anyway, even though the figure sounds like a lot, it is not even on the same scale as a factory closing 1000 well paid manufacturing jobs in one community. The job loss is so spread out that it doesn't really affect local economies. Especially since most of the stuff they sold, was not sourced locally but manufactured in China and the factories there will sell their stuff to Amazon and Walmart just as readily as they did to TRU. The people working in the retail stores will probably just move on to Walmart or some other retail job, or maybe use that as an opportunity to get out of retail.

Less and not all at once in an economy where retail is struggling. Your original post wanted to make this about "one crappy retail chain". But it's not. It's about a TON of people losing their jobs all at once. And all because the financial sector has been busting out retail stores for profit at the expense of working class people.

But hey, I'm sure it's easier to just pretend this is only about Amazon and that no one will suffer because of it.

[Stego]

On 3/17/2018 at 2:18 PM, Darth Richard II said:

Amazon had nothing to do with it.

Since year after year I would window shop there and then order the toys I wanted to buy on Amazon, I have to question your opinion on this. 

[Iskaral Pust]

1 hour ago, Shryke said:

Less and not all at once in an economy where retail is struggling. Your original post wanted to make this about "one crappy retail chain". But it's not. It's about a TON of people losing their jobs all at once. And all because the financial sector has been busting out retail stores for profit at the expense of working class people.

But hey, I'm sure it's easier to just pretend this is only about Amazon and that no one will suffer because of it.

There's a lot more context needed to this point.  The US economy vastly over-built the retail sector.  Our retail square foot per capita is multiples of what you get in the rest of the developed world.  The two decades preceding the financial crisis were an orgy of ever-expanding consumerism with negative implications for the environment, land use, labor productivity & wages (both very low in retail), household finances and the focus of capital investment (and, I would argue, the culture of the country).  It is a good and healthy thing to see the retail sector contract back to a more sustainable level.  And although I feel very bad for individuals losing their jobs -- NOTE: far, far more jobs have been lost in recent years in retail than in manufacturing or mining, but you'll never hear Trump mention that -- I am at least comforted that they are losing their jobs at a time when it is easier to find a replacement job than any time in the past decade, and that if they didn't lose them now they would surely be losing them very soon anyway.  And it would be worse if they all lost them at the same time, rather than spread out over several years.

It's not a good idea to try to protect an unsustainable sector in order to avoid the short term pain of job losses.  That's the kind of thinking that eventually led to worldwide recessions in the 1970s and gave us the backlash of Thatcher and Reagonomics in the 1980s.  I'd prefer we deal with reality on a measured basis and not swing from one ugly extreme to another.

I don't like how private equity firms generally exploit their acquired companies, but I also believe that a super-cycle in retail was underway regardless.  The over-expansion and subsequent contraction in retail happened to public-traded companies just as much as private ones.  It's more a case that private equity was over-confident about the super-cycle being a new normal.

This thread focuses heavily on childhood nostalgia, not the practical worldview of adults.  All of those nostalgic Toys'R'Us kids could have kept shopping there but they didn't.  Nostalgia is a cheap and generally inaccurate sentiment.

[drawkcabi]

40 minutes ago, Iskaral Pust said:

This thread focuses heavily on childhood nostalgia, not the practical worldview of adults.  All of those nostalgic Toys'R'Us kids could have kept shopping there but they didn't.  Nostalgia is a cheap and generally inaccurate sentiment.

I would have kept shopping at Toy R Us if:

1) I was financially strong enough to support a continuing toy collecting hobby

2) Toys R Us adapted their business to be more diverse and more successful in current times.

It's possible to wax nostalgic being wistful and melancholy while still accepting the inevitability and practicality of a situation.

[Alarich II]

4 hours ago, Shryke said:

Less and not all at once in an economy where retail is struggling. Your original post wanted to make this about "one crappy retail chain". But it's not. It's about a TON of people losing their jobs all at once. And all because the financial sector has been busting out retail stores for profit at the expense of working class people.

But hey, I'm sure it's easier to just pretend this is only about Amazon and that no one will suffer because of it.

First of all, I never pretended that this is about Amazon, second: I doubt your assertion that TRU destroyed less jobs than it created. I'm sure you have some details ready on that point, but until I've seen it, I remain sceptical.

Third, of course this is about one crappy retail chain, and not even a particularly big one either. This horrible, horrible job loss is not even a tiny blip on the radar in the current economic environment and the big picture here is just that: one crappy retail chain that relies on low income tertiary sector jobs in the West and even worse manufacturing jobs in the Far East is going out of business because it's owners were a bunch of greedy assholes. 

But hey, I'm sure it's easier to pretend that any job is better than no job - after all, who would do the shitty minimum wage retail jobs if we didn't scare the proles with a healthy dose of suffering, right? I bet if all the good employees of TRU had just agreed to work for an even lower wage, they could have kept their jobs a little longer and the vultures could feed a little longer on this walking carcass.

[Darth Richard II]

4 hours ago, Stego said:

Since year after year I would window shop there and then order the toys I wanted to buy on Amazon, I have to question your opinion on this. 

It's not my opinion. It's been covered in numerous articles on numerous web sites.

[Darth Richard II]

3 hours ago, drawkcabi said:

I would have kept shopping at Toy R Us if:

1) I was financially strong enough to support a continuing toy collecting hobby

2) Toys R Us adapted their business to be more diverse and more successful in current times.

It's possible to wax nostalgic being wistful and melancholy while still accepting the inevitability and practicality of a situation.

TRU had been known as a terrible place to shop in general for a long time. They turned into stale lifeless warehouses where the employees had zero training on what they were actually selling, was mostly filled with junk, and charged over retail price for a lot of items.

 

Edit: To put it in simpler terms: TRU has been a shit store for a long time.

[Larry of the Lawn]

4 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

<snip>

This thread focuses heavily on childhood nostalgia, not the practical worldview of adults.  All of those nostalgic Toys'R'Us kids could have kept shopping there but they didn't.  Nostalgia is a cheap and generally inaccurate sentiment.

Well said.  While I can appreciate the value of a fondly remembered childhood experience, the retail industry in the US was a bloated vestige of colonialism and cheap labor over seas.  When I think about how pretty much every retail chain has tried to cash in on religious holidays (almost inspiring  in a way) and to make appeals to nostalgia to create customers for life I have little sympathy for the death of such a corporation.  

It sucks that a bunch of jobs were lost, and I have extra sympathy for retail employees as it's largely a thankless, underpaid job that is prone to mass exploitation on the part of the employers.  That being said, it's not like this came out of nowhere.  And I wouldn't lose any sleep over Hobby Lobby suddenly going under either.  

 

 

[drawkcabi]

Yep, I can't argue that it didn't became a shit store chain or anything else about retail in general and I wouldn't want to.

The people who lost their job still have my sympathy though, and I can't change the fact that I got the warm and fuzzies going there as a kid.

At one time it was something special.

 

[Darth Richard II]

Oh I remember going there as a kid too, but going there as an adult LEGO collector ruined all the fuzzy memories.

[Guy Kilmore]

It is also interesting that KB Toys is looking to reopen

 

[Shryke]

7 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

There's a lot more context needed to this point.  The US economy vastly over-built the retail sector.  Our retail square foot per capita is multiples of what you get in the rest of the developed world.  The two decades preceding the financial crisis were an orgy of ever-expanding consumerism with negative implications for the environment, land use, labor productivity & wages (both very low in retail), household finances and the focus of capital investment (and, I would argue, the culture of the country).  It is a good and healthy thing to see the retail sector contract back to a more sustainable level.  And although I feel very bad for individuals losing their jobs -- NOTE: far, far more jobs have been lost in recent years in retail than in manufacturing or mining, but you'll never hear Trump mention that -- I am at least comforted that they are losing their jobs at a time when it is easier to find a replacement job than any time in the past decade, and that if they didn't lose them now they would surely be losing them very soon anyway.  And it would be worse if they all lost them at the same time, rather than spread out over several years.

It's not a good idea to try to protect an unsustainable sector in order to avoid the short term pain of job losses.  That's the kind of thinking that eventually led to worldwide recessions in the 1970s and gave us the backlash of Thatcher and Reagonomics in the 1980s.  I'd prefer we deal with reality on a measured basis and not swing from one ugly extreme to another.

I don't like how private equity firms generally exploit their acquired companies, but I also believe that a super-cycle in retail was underway regardless.  The over-expansion and subsequent contraction in retail happened to public-traded companies just as much as private ones.  It's more a case that private equity was over-confident about the super-cycle being a new normal.

This thread focuses heavily on childhood nostalgia, not the practical worldview of adults.  All of those nostalgic Toys'R'Us kids could have kept shopping there but they didn't.  Nostalgia is a cheap and generally inaccurate sentiment.

I agree with both your posts. I'm not in favour of protecting TRU here or retail in general. I'm just saying we need to be honest about the role played by the leveraged buyout here, how that effects the outcome of this (especially who gets paid and who gets fucked) and how the collapse itself impacts a LOT of people's lives in very negative ways that didn't necessarily have to happen to this extent without the intervention of the financial industry. And that this situation reflects a larger issue with how the american economy (and other economies too to greater and lesser extents) is operating on a larger scale.

Basically, this situation didn't need to go down this way if at all and as it does I don't see one crappy retail chain going down, I see a whole lot of working class losers and a small number of very rich winners.

 

Also, zero nostalgia for TRU from me. We never really shopped there when I was young. Been in there more times as a parent getting baby stuff then I ever was in as a kid. Hopefully the buyout of TRU Canada goes through, the stores are useful up here.

[Tears of Lys]

On ‎3‎/‎17‎/‎2018 at 9:01 AM, 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.

I'm with you, kid.  Plastic crap.