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Tru Kids and the "Comeback" of Toys R Us (VIDEO SCRIPT)
🕑 Added 2019-06-24 17:01:01 +0000 UTC
Readers, it’s been over a year since Toys R Us closed their doors for good here in the United States.
Like a lot of you, I also had fond memories of the times I went to Toys R Us being an event as a child
It was just as rare and exciting to me as going to Chuck E Cheese as a kid. Mostly because the ones closest to me were in the same shopping complex.
Nowadays, the Chuck E. Cheese is still there.
The Toys R Us on the other hand...is something else entirely.
(Clip of the Michigan Avenue Toys R Us) This is some bullshit...
However, we’d soon find out that the closing of all these stores wasn’t the last we were going to see of Toys R Us
/Because following the closing of their large stores, Geoffery’s Toy Box -- small pop-up stores that appeared all across America inside Kroger grocery stores -- appeared in over 600 locations during the winter holiday season of 2018/ http://fortune.com/2018/11/02/toys-r-us-kroger-geoffreys-toy-box/
Now what made this experiment possible in the first place -- which I assume went pretty well given what the rest of this video is about -- was due to a couple of things
One: After liquidating their american stores, pretty much everything associated with the Toys R Us name was going to go up for auction once everything was said and done.
That included Toys R Us, Babies R Us, even their mascot Geoffrey the Giraffe
That auction was cancelled in October and placed under a new company, named Geoffrey LLC,
/with a new plan to bring Toys R Us and its affiliated brands back to the limelight with the aforementioned pop-up store experiment being one of their tests to see if it’s possible./ Geoffrey LLC - Business Insider
Then later on down the line, one of the investors realized that naming their new company after the mascot of the chain they’re trying to revitalize was probably... a bad idea
/So instead, they decided to name the company TRU Kids instead./ https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2019/02/12/toys-r-us-is-making-a-comeback-as-tru-kids-with-a-modern-customer-approach/#1f2c076571e5
With TRU being an abbreviation of Toys R Us. So that’s...better? (Shrugs)
With the existence of TRU Kids, Toys R Us and Babies R Us as subsidiaries, all of Toys R Us’s exclusive toy lines and even Geoffrey the Giraffe are tucked away in its house as of late January of 2019
With the company being run by former global chief merchandising officer of Toys R Us Richard Barry...and OTHER former Toys R Us executives. Which is the part that immediately has me concerned.
And considering what they’re about to do and how the brand got into the mess that they got into in the first place, I have every right to be
Because what they’re about to do is bring back physical Toys R Us store
/Aiming for a relaunch near the winter holiday of 2019, Tru Kids is gonna bring back Toys R Us to America in one form or another. They’ll be doing both physical and online stores with the plan to open a minimum of 2 for the former before expanding to 6 to start off/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-21/toys-r-us-back-from-the-dead-will-open-u-s-stores-in-2019
What has me interested in the decision specifically are the changes to the stores and how they’re going to work
The first big change is that they’re going to be 1/3rd the size of a TRADITIONAL Toys R Us, so something along the lines of a CVS or a Wallgreens. Rite-Aid if ya nasty.
The second one is that they’ll have designated play areas in their locations this time around, which...I THINK they had before? I honestly can’t remember to save my life, but I’m sure it would be a welcome...change
They’ve also stated that they’ve learned from their mistakes in regards to keeping up with how business is handled in the modern day and make themselves up-to-date with the use of technoloy, which is one of the things that mainstream media LOVES to say was the main thing that led to Toys R Us’s initial downfall.
Spoiler Alert: It wasn’t.
I mean, yes; the company definitely could’ve benefitted from keeping up with the Jonses as far as making their customer experience as easy as the likes of Amazon and Target. Yes, I said Target as opposed to the other obvious chain because fuck them.
But we also have to take into consideration that even if the company WANTED to get a better understanding of those things in order to properly compete when they were alive, they couldn’t. Because no money was being properly invested back into the R Us companies due to the investors from its leveraged buyouts only caring about getting a proper return in their investments
Which is why while I’m stoked to hear these plans for Toys R Us’s return via TRU Kids, it being run by an individual who used to be a part of Toys R Us in the past
Utilizing the more modern approach of shopping in order to properly appeal to customers
And the decision to downgrade in store size while realizing the appeal of going to a Toys R Us being the EXPERIENCE and first and foremost focusing on THAT
It’s the presence of OTHER former Toys R Us executives in TRU Kids’ court that leaves me worried that while they SAY they learned from their mistakes on the matters that mainstream media SAY was the cause of Toys R Us’s demise, they’ll once again succumb to what was TRULY the cause of Toys R Us’s demise
Seeking out investors and/or buyers that only really care about seeing a proper return in their own investment and don’t really care about whether or not the business thrives once they got theirs
It’s no different than having people around you that only wanna reap the majority of the rewards of your labor when the only help they contributed was the bare minimum or less
Those are called leeches. And despite what they initially brought to the table, if you keep them on you long enough, they will eventually drain you dry
So if TRU Kids have TRULY learned from their mistakes, that means they now know better than to let people, businesses or companies into their fold that don’t care about what they’re trying to establish, are only in it for themselves, and aren’t willing to be a true ride or die and contribute more than just the bare minimum.
Just like you should be if you’re in the same situation.
