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Toys R Us To Close All 800 of Its US Stores (washingtonpost.com)
Toy store chain Toys R Us is reportedly planning to sell or close all 800 of its U.S. stores (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), affecting as many as 33,000 jobs as the company winds down its operations after six decades. The Washington Post reports: The news comes six months after the retailer filed for bankruptcy. The company has struggled to pay down nearly $8 billion in debt -- much of it dating back to a 2005 leveraged buyout -- and has had trouble finding a buyer. There were reports earlier this week that Toys R Us had stopped paying its suppliers, which include the country's largest toy makers. On Wednesday, the company announced it would close all 100 of its U.K. stores. In the United States, the company told employees closures would likely occur over time, and not all at once, according to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.
The last time I had to be in one, its was like a KMart from 20 years ago, poor, uncovered fluorescent lighting, drab interior, no nothing staff, Smyths seems to be the better version these days
They died due to greed from owners and investors:
"KKR, Bain and Vornado purchased Toys "R" Us in 2005 in a $6.6 billion leveraged buyout, but more than $5.3 billion of the purchase price was paid using debt."
8 billions of debt, at least 5.3 purely due to the buyout. Maybe their future wouldn't be so good with Internet, etc. but it's not what killed them today, the leveraged buyout did.
In this case it is deliberate bankruptcy. The 80s corporate raiders never retired, they became private equity firms. They buy companies and let them fail under the weight of debt servicing (the debt being serviced, for good measure, was incurred in order to buy the company). The only people who lose are the complete idiots who finance these takeovers -- oh, and everyone who works at the company in question.
Their toys are mindless un-fun corporate shit.
My kids are always bored there. We've found much more fun toys at Target, not to mention Amazon.com, whatever you think of both companies. We bought a potato-driven clock and a home-terrarium kit on Amazon.com for under $10 each that the kids enjoyed. They get TinkerCrate which they also enjoy, and I consider it expensive at $29 a crate. But walk into a Toys'R'Us and all you can get is 8" plastic action figures in garish colors for $49.99 each.
Toys'R'Us should be called AMillionFlashyBrandedOverpricedActionFigures'R'Us.
At least near us, the two stores had no science kits, no craft stuff, no learning toys to speak of, no building toys to speak of, no creative toys of any kind. The best section were bikes and skateboards in the back. The rest is literally wall-to-wall action figures from cartoons that my kids have never heard of because cartoons are so twenty years ago and we don't have TV. They are much more interested in apps than in TV.
Toys'R'Us is selling toys from decades ago—thousands of them, all the same, and for 4x what they ought to cost.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I grew up in rural northern Wisconsin on a farm 10 miles from a town with 800 people. It had a Sears and Roebuck store. Well no goods just a catalog order center, along with 15+ actual stores on main street. Once a year the new Sears and Roebuck catalog came out and in the fall came the Sears and Roebuck Christmas catalog and that was the object of childhood dreams.
;) Some brick and mortar will survive in urban areas. But the real retail sales numbers will be online sales. Especially in rural America, online sales (Amazon) is the new Sears. Sears could have done it, but they did not see that vision of an online future. Like most entrenched old players. They got to comfortable. An upstart had to come in with a new vision.
;)
Sears another old company that is dying
Just my 2 cents
Must've been ten years ago because my daughter was four, a couple weeks after Christmas they wouldn't let her exchange a duplicate toy with a copy of the receipt because her grandmother (300 miles away) was the purchaser.
Everybody involved was pissed or upset except for the smarmy clerk who was delighted to disappoint by enforcing corporate policy. I hope she got a promotion and stayed with the company.
Since then she's had an Amazon wishlist and sometimes gets Walmart gift cards. Because both of them (especially Amazon) do a petty good job with customer service.
Toys R Us will say that Walmart and Amazon killed them - but in reality they self-destructed.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
ToysRUs was always expensive and a dreary place. I knew that even when I was a kid. I did not care then because *TOYS*. KayBee was more fun to be at. Several of the toy stores around me are actual fun to be in. A ToysRUs was always a warehouse of toys. When you are a kid you see toys. When you get older you realize what it is. Even the checkout in most of them feels like you have just checked out a can of beans from an underground bunker instead of buying something cool.
Nostalgia was not what I would call going there. It was more about 'con parents into getting me overpriced lego set'.
It's called austerity. With the gutting of the middle class to feed the insatiable rich (can never ever have too much), there is very little money left to buy expensive toys and thus the economy implodes. Perhaps the can be an interesting measure of a countries economy, how much they spend on toys for children per capita, would be some interesting results, pretty much gaurantee the US would not be in the top ten.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
My mom used to work at Children's Palace (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_World), which was a competing toy store in the 80's. Toy R Us would build their stores right next to them to try to put them out of business. When the weekly flyers came out for sales on things like baby food and diapers, Toys R Us would send their employees over to Children's Palace to buy up all the sale items in the flyer so that they were out of stock, causing angry customers - many of whom were low income. Toys R Us minions would sometimes just throw away the merchandise in the trash outside the store after their raids. My mom had a lot of stories about their guerrilla retail tactics. Toys R Us eventually won out and Children's Palace went out of business, but my parents never let us go there. Bankruptcy couldn't have happened to a more deserving company, albeit 30 years too late.
It is a shame. It kinda is surprising, as toys are, as you point out, one of the few things left where in-store sales and browsing works best.
I say kinda, because the reasons are actually fairly well known and have nothing to do with Amazon or the Internet. TrU was bought a few years ago by an asset stripping private equity group. They essentially buy a business with the help of a massive loan, saddle the purchased business with the loan, and then extract every penny they can until the company cannot pay back the loan, and then it's bankruptcy, liquidation, and onto the next target.
And it's all legal. So a bunch of people are losing their jobs because some jackasses figured out how to "borrow" money you have no intention of paying back. We need stronger powers for bankruptcy judges in this country, but good luck getting them when the executive is basically the people who pull this shit, and congress is basically a bunch of people owned by the people who pull this shit. .
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.