If you wanted to buy children’s toys until a few years ago, you’d walk into one of a thousand-plus Toys R Us stores, wander through aisles stuffed with Lego sets or Barbie dolls, and depart with a purchase in hand.
Like Blockbuster, Toys R Us declared bankruptcy a few years ago, shutting down swaths of its stores after failing to adapt to the new landscape. Blockbuster held on with a single storefront that remains in Oregon. And now Toys R Us is ready for its comeback.
As of early October, Toys R Us exists again, but it exists only in cyberspace.
This Christmas season, however, Toys R Us products will appear in the flesh, at new and improved Toys R Us stores.
“Our U.S. strategy is to bring back the Toys ‘R’ Us brand in a modern way,” Richard Barry, the CEO of Tru Kids, said in a statement to CNN Business.
Since its founding in 1957, Toys R Us had become as iconic as a red Radio Flyer wagon. But fewer children over the past decade could identify as a “Toys R Us kid,” as the stores found it harder to compete with the prices at Walmart and Amazon.
But now that the website is up again, Toys R Us plans to get its stores back, too. The company will open one location in Texas and another in New Jersey by the end of the year, with 10 more locations planned to open in 2020.
Toys R Us may have tanked in 2017 thanks to both crushing debt and the rise of online shopping, but now the company hopes to make up for its past failures, providing what it should have all along: an experience that online shopping cannot offer, which is allowing children to enjoy a “playground-like environment” where they can try out toys before they bring them home.
