Brick and Mortar stores saw an increase of only 1,6 % percent during this time. Slice Intelligence reported an increase during that same period as 20%. According to Adobe Digital Insights, online e-commerce increased by 11% in 2016 compared to 2015. Online shopping is a big reason for the Apocalypse. The reasons for these closings are multiple. The Retail Apocalypse is the closing of numerous North American brick and mortar stores, especially large chains from 2010 onward. There were numerous reasons for the fall of TRU. The new stores are 10,000 square feet, roughly 1/3 of the size of the old stores TRU closed last year. On December 7, 2019, TRU Kids opened another retail store in Houston, Texas. On November 27, 2019, TRU Kids opened a retail store in Paramus, New Jersey. In January of this year, TRU emerged from bankruptcy as a new company called TRU Kids. On June 29, 2018, TRU shut down all of its remaining U.S. The debt caused it not to improve its in-store experience and fall further behind Wal-Mart and Target. Because of its debt, TRU was paying $ 400 million annually just to service the debt. It lost $ 126 million in the spring quarter of 2016. TRU reported a net loss of $164 Million in the spring quarter of 2017. TRU hadn’t made an annual profit since 2013. TRU also hoped to pay suppliers for the upcoming holiday season and improve its badly dated operations. The idea was that bankruptcy would help the company deal with its 5 billion in long term debt. On September 18, 2017, TRU filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. TRU sold 18,000 different toys at 1,450 different locations. At the height of TRU’s powers, it controlled 25% of the world’s toy market. The toy market was a 500 million toy industry in 1950, TRU helped turn it into a 12 billion industry in 1990.
The jingle sounded something like this, “I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys R Us Kid!” Everybody who was a kid in the ’80s and ’90s can probably recite that jingle by heart. In the 1980s, TRU ads started featuring a catchy jingle.
#CHARLES LAZARUS CHRISTMAS TV#
TRU started running TV ads featuring Geoffrey the Giraffe in 1973. The kids would ask their parents for the toy, and TRU benefitted from the whole experience. More and more families had a television in their homes, and toy manufacturers were making television commercials appealing to kids.
Department stores that relied on the seasonal toy sale boost realized they couldn’t compete with the year around toy demand, TRU created and serviced. Mom and Pop toy stores soon started going out of business because they couldn’t match the pricing or deep inventory of TRU. Think of Barnes and Nobles, Best Buy or Staples, all of these companies are considered category killers. This advantage turned TRU into a “category killer.” A category killer is a company that so thoroughly dominates its retail category, that it drives all of its competition out of business. TRU bought and sold so many toys that it was able to negotiate to buy goods cheaper than its competitors. Lazarus was able to buy these products cheaply and in bulk. Japan started to produce inexpensive toys like tin robots, tin cars, and stuffed animals. In the 1950s and 60s, Japan started to rebuild its economy post World War II. TRU had rows of toys laid out next to each other, grocery store style. All the other toy stores in existence at the time were small, family and only carried a limited line of toys. The world had never seen such an experience before. TRU was mainly a supermarket-style store for toys. Lazarus designed the logo for TRU, which featured a backward “R” to give the impression that a child wrote it. This store opened in 1957, in Rockville, Md. It took a while, but Lazarus finally got the bright idea to open a store selling toys exclusively. After adding the toys, Lazarus got requests to sale toys for older children. Soon, Lazarus started receiving requests for baby toys from customers. The era was the baby boomer era, so not having repeat customers was a problem. The problem with baby furniture stores is that once a couple has more than one child, they don’t buy new furniture, they just pass the furniture down to the new kids. Lazarus founded a baby furniture store in Washington, D.C., called Children’s Bargain Town. What exactly happened? Find out that and all the mistakes made in this primer on TRU. As an adult with no kids, it was sort of surprising to found out TRU was shutting down all of its U.S. Better yet, you would beg your parents to take you to TRU post-Christmas day to spend all that Christmas cash you accumulated. If You’re an 80’s baby like myself, you can remember browsing the aisles of Toys R Us (TRU) and wishing for the toys Santa would deliver on Christmas.
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