Back in September of last year, toy retail chain Toys-R-Us filed for bankruptcy. At the time, everyone across the internet, in their complete lack of comprehension on how anything works, proclaimed the end of the company, and began wondering when stores would start closing.
This wasn’t the case at the time – far from it. As I covered in the article “The Internet Doesn’t Understand The Toys-R-Us Bankruptcy” the company was going to attempt to solve their financial issues over the 2017 holiday season.
That attempt failed, and after early in 2018 stating they would close 180 of the over 700 US stores (an event which actually didn’t happen) , things stayed quiet until the past week, when rumors from “insiders” surfaced on financial news sites saying the company might be preparing for liquidation.
Operations were normal, of course – even last night, at a local store, things proved perfectly normal as I went in to exchange my rewards points and get a game for cheap. If I didn’t know better I wouldn’t think anything of it, however, knowing what I do, from the inside, I could feel in the air how it really felt like the beginning of the end.
As I woke up today, the rumors proved true. United States store operations are ending, and for many who think back nostalgically to their youth and days of enjoying going to the store as a child and getting a new toy or a game it’s a blow to that forever young part of us. For others, of course, this means a lost job, for some people who I personally know this means not only a lost job, but the end of a career.
There are many reasons why this actually happened, though. Some people who seem to think they are being edgy because, that’s cool, want to scoff at this event by saying “Toys-R-Us hasn’t been relevant in years” which is far from the case. The Babies-R-Us branch of the brand has been a staple in resources for a new parent, and indeed was a major aspect of the companies business structure on a whole, usually being enough on it’s own to keep any given store profitable in the 9 months before the Christmas season!
Toys-R-Us also carried products that simply weren’t available anywhere else, beyond the internet, and for those people who prefer to buy stuff in a “brick-and-mortar” location proved to be the place to actually see the items in person and make a purchase decision, or to hope to find items that quickly sell out online and aren’t available in other stores.
The internet still is critical to the story of just how this happened – Toys-R-Us was somewhat late to adapt to online sales, and still never quite figured out how to provide an edge above sellers like Amazon, and this sadly compounded other issues with poor money management.
I’ve got so much more to say about Toys-R-Us: this article is just a start for me to say what I want to because I have quite a few stories relating to and opinions regarding Toys-R-Us, as from 2014 till September of last year, I worked there.
I wouldn’t normally outright discuss a former employer by name, but since United States operations are looking to end soon, there is no harm in letting out that bit of info. I was actually planning to come back to the company after a break, but it looks like that isn’t the case. I guess that’s a good thing for me in some ways, to have left when I did, but it wasn’t like I left out of dislike of the job. Far from it, I actually rather loved it. I just needed a break, for reasons I’ll detail in the near future. I didn’t expect the company to go under in less than a year, though.
More to come, as always…