The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Toys’R’Us is planning to close 200 more stores. This is in addition to the 180 stores that were already announced previously. The company that Geoffrey built hasn’t yet confirmed nor denied TWSJ‘s report. If you’re not a subscriber, you won’t be able to get past the registration wall, but this article from The New York Times sums things up pretty well. The announcement of the 180 stores came out late last year and you don’t have be a psychic to realize that the perception that the retail giant going under would have hurt holiday sales performances. I suppose the timing for filing for bankruptcy couldn’t have been delayed a few months, but now the holiday season has come and gone, the numbers are dictating that additional measures will now need to be taken for the company to stay afloat. If what TWSJ is saying is true, closing 200 more stores is just heartbreaking. That’s approximately 4,500 more jobs lost.
I have very fond memories of TRU during my teens and early twenties. It’s where I got most of my video games from. It might have been the only store that had rows and rows box art in plastic sleeves where you had to take the paper ticket with a bar code out from behind the game art to the register. Once paid for, you took your ticket to a mysterious window where someone would disappear for a minute and come back with the actual physical copy of whatever game you bought.
Going back even further in time, it was also the first place I ever saw a LEGO set in my life that didn’t come in a McDonald’s Happy Meal. I remember feeling overwhelmed at just how big some of those sets were. But being a kid with no source of income and having cheap parents, buying a big set was never a possiblity. Maybe that’s why, I buy so much LEGO now. Because I can. No doubt there are more than just a handful of us AFOLs that hear about a store closing and the first thing that comes to mind is “discount LEGO”. Such is the reality of this hobby, and life in general I suppose.
