All stores in the US and UK are closing. And on top of that, the founder just died today. Ouch.
I still remember the wall of tickets where I'd buy Super Nintendo games after saving up my allowance for what felt like ages. I also fondly recall the Virtual Boy that was bolted to a counter, it almost made me throw up several times because I insisted on continuing to play well after I started feeling clammy.
Our local Toys 'R' Us was in a shopping complex, so I'd get my Mom to drop me and my brother off there while she went shopping, and I'd beeline it to the SNES kiosk and hope that they had a decent game playing. I'd also stare at all the games and make a mental list of what I would get for Christmas. The wall of games felt like it stretched on forever, with all those paper slips. And right around the corner was the wall of action figures. The Spawn figures came with comic books but they never restocked the original figures after the first run, and I missed out on some of the story.
To really sad items the death of the founder and the store
It made the news here maybe a week ago, about the store closures over in the USA and there was hope those businesses here might survive. I hope so. We have a competitor larger in size called Toyworld with around 150 stores compared to the 30 Toys 'R' Us nationwide.
I worked there when I was going to college. I have a funny, kinda, story from toy's r us. I used to work electronics with another guy named Rob, my name is also Rob. One time, some guys were attempting to steal playstations by opening the boxes and stuffing them down their pants. To their credit, we never saw them doing it but we knew something was up and went to check the boxes after they'd moved away from that area and confronted them about the empty boxes we found. They gave us back the playstations but then bolted out the store and we chased them through a parking lot but never caught them.
Not long after, I graduated from college and left toys r us and he also left. A few years later I returned to that town and went to a club, this would have been around 2002 and I ran into an old co-worker from toys r us. This guy was pretty cool, very talented musician and he worked the stock rooms. He seemed really surprised to see me then he was very happy and couldn't believe I was alive. Apparently, the other rob had committed suicide and everyone that worked at Toys r Us believed it was me that was dead. So it was a bitter sweet moment when he found out I was still alive as it meant the other Rob was dead. Still though, pretty odd moment to run into people who think you're dead.
they really did this to themselves, poor poor corp leadership and unenforced standards.
their biggest mistake imo was to remove alot of the big name brands and replace them with vastly inferior "house brand" generic crap, they did that about 10 years ago.
the customers will have no choice!!
even tho noone wanted it they kept pushing it because of the "unbelievable margins!!"
