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| The Death of Toys R Us and what it will mean. |
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| wp34:
My kids are old enough they played with toys and we loved taking them to Toys R Us to shop. I still shop there occasionally for gifts. I get why they are going away but it still makes me sad. |
| vwalbridge:
--- Quote from: Ian on March 16, 2018, 04:47:42 pm --- --- Quote from: vwalbridge on March 16, 2018, 04:28:55 pm ---Toys R Us has been around since what? ...the 50's? They had 70 years to under their belt and just now they couldn't get their debt sorted out? Pfft....I don't buy it. The timing of EVERYONE shifting to online retail is just too coincidental. Talk to any parent and the last thing they want to do is take their kid into a toy store. LOL! If I can buy my kid a toy from the comfort of my own home on my ipad in the middle of the night, without my kids screaming at me and other kids running around and without paying sales tax and get free shipping...you bet I'm going to do that. It's not like Toys R Us invented toys. It's not like they brought anything proprietary to the toy shopping experience. They just sold the same toy you can get anywhere else and John Q Public finally woke up and figure that out. --- End quote --- Great video explaining how it all went wrong... Skip to the 7 minute mark to get into the issues due to the closure. I will say I am very saddened that my kids wont get the joy I had going to Toys R Us for a treat when I was a kid. But then again, Toys R Us was a bit different in the 80's. --- End quote --- Yea, that sounds like a really complicated way of just saying "they were not making money". It's not like all the people at Toys R Us woke up one day and were like "Gee wiz! What happend? Why did all of the complicated acquisitions and buyouts suddenly threaten our business!?" Companies can operate with debt...so long as they continue to make money. It's the "making money part" that Toys R Us wasn't doing. lol Again, if it wasn't Toys R Us' fault...and they were just a victim of circumstances...then another entity would have swooped in to save them because the "brand name" is valuable....but NOBODY did. That right there is your answer. Everyone else sees the writing on the wall when it comes to selling toys that can be literally bought anywhere now. Faster, easier, and cheaper. If the concept of brick and mortar toy stores is something that people want, then it shouldn't have failed. Better yet, someone would have saved them. (or at least saved the name/brand) |
| DaOld Man:
I recently bought a X-Wing lego set for my gran daughters birthday. (She loves legos and star wars, cool kid). Anyway I went to Toys R Us and they only had one box on the shelf, and it looked like it had been opened. Lid was scotch taped closed. I decided not to take a chance on it missing some parts, so I went to Walmart to find a different toy. Walmart had the exact same set for 10 dollars cheaper. It wound up in the cart. |
| dkersten:
VR will replace toys in the next decade anyway, so it doesn't really matter... I see it this way: Everything consumer based will end up coming down to three ways to purchase: Online through massive distributors like Amazon, through the big box stores like Walmart, and through the niche one-off small businesses. The specialty chain is dying and will not make it, nor will the medium sized retailers. Those businesses are just where people go to see stuff before they buy it online any more and their fate is already written. But small single owner/operator stores for products we all grew up buying at the local mall or at some no longer operating regional chain are doing really well these days. A buddy of mine has a toy store here, and about 70% of what he sells is vintage stuff to adults. He also carries some new stuff, but really only items that may become collectible or are hot sellers right now, like quad copters. He is devastated at TRU closing because he is so passionate about toys and has fond memories of shopping at places like it as a kid (even though the ToysRUs here didn't open until we were parents) and he sees the toy industry losing big on this one. But he will probably benefit from them closing on a business level. It doesn't really matter, in 20-25 years he will be closed because the current generation of kids won't have toys they are nostalgic about, their nostalgia will be for handheld devices with "old" technology like LCD screens and like lithium ion batteries... Nobody will care about plastic stuff in 25 years. Personally, I'm surprised it took this long for them to close. That place made its entire year on Christmas and I never once saw more than two cars in the parking lot the other 11 months of the year, and they are on a major street right next to WalMart with a regional consumer base of over a quarter million shoppers. I only took my kids about 3 times over the years, because as it was said, they were too damn expensive for something my kids would play with for a week before dumping in the toy box with the rest of the junk. |
| pbj:
All that vintage stuff is about to collapse. Once the baby boomers start dying en masse, so will all those antique junk stores. I go into them every so often, and I’m the only one under 65 to be found. Oh well, another one from my childhood in the dustbin alongside CompUSA, Circuit City, Incredible Universe, Funcoland..... |
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