And Toys r Us's electronic toy section is fuck-awful. Overpriced outdated shit.

But people don't go to many specialty big box stores anymore, and TrU didn't keep up with the times, much like Borders and B & N, and lots of other retail stores.

Want video games? Go to GameStop or Amazon.

Board games? Target know sells a huge amount... or Amazon.

Bikes? Target, bike stores, Amazon.

Stuffed animals... that's right. You don't need a huge specialty store.

They were always messy, and didn't keep up with the times, and after putting lots of mom and pop places out of business, Amazon, Target, etc. is now doing it to them.

Aside from the obvious and much more significant impacts in the economic arena, my biggest problem with this fact is there's hardly anyplace in the smallish city I live in to actually TRY ON a pair of men's jeans or dress pants!!

when I buy things.

I end up returning 90% of the clothes and forget shoes. The whole experience is costly, takes time and is frustrating when you have to return something. NOT WORTH IT!

I'm convinced that clothing makers take into account return rates and fit their factories to suit the sale channel, putting inferior products into the online channel. Examples: Levi's 501 jeans bought online are a lighter material with less stitching even though they contain the identical product number and tags. The weave used on shirts and underwear is less dense in the online versions, wearing out faster. The factories are well aware of return rates in different channels and optimize their profit by taking advantage of the fact that people are less likely to return a product bought sight-unseen (or unfelt.) That's why I never buy clothes online. The retail channel will always contain the best content and workmanship because, otherwise, they'll never make it off the sales floor in the first place. In fact, the retailer probably won't even carry their merchandise.

Read many articles on this prior to the holidays. Leveraged buyouts followed by the standard prescription of selling off assets and rearranging and piling on debt that the leveraged business can't pay.
Here is one story:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/09/toys-r-us-another-private-equity-casualty.html

Private Equity Greed: A Plague on Retail Businesses

Likewise, Pam and Russ Martens don’t mince words when they describe the underlying cause for this year’s wave of retail bankruptcies in their Wall Street on Parade post, How Many of 2017’s Retail Bankruptcies Were Caused by Private-Equity’s Greed?

According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, there have been 35 retail bankruptcies this year, almost double the 18 retail bankruptcies of last year. The filing by Toys ‘R’ Us this week was the latest.

What many of these retailers have in common is that they were taken private in leveraged buyouts (LBOs) by private equity (PE) firms. Toys ‘R’ Us, Payless ShoeSource, The Limited, Wet Seal, Gymboree Corp., rue21, and True Religion Apparel were all LBOs. Gander Mountain can also be included in this list if you reach back to its 1984 LBO. Far too many LBOs are simply asset stripping operations by Wall Street vultures who load the company with enormous debt, then asset strip the cash from the company by paying themselves obscene special dividends and management fees.

It is easy to blame online shopping as the culprit. Most of these businesses have online presence. Nope, it is the Mitt Romneys of the world that are the ones to blame.

The supposed justification for doing an LBO is burying a struggling company under a mountain of debt will force it to tighten up its operations. This is almost as big a lie as "cutting tax rates increases tax revenues."

The real point is to cause shutdowns and spin off the parts that actually make money, at a tidy profit, only for those doing the buy out.

It never actually helps the company being bought.

This is complicated but I'll explain.

During the first LBO heyday of the 1980s, the primary funding source was high-yield bonds. Michael Milken of Drexel started out buying what were called "fallen angel" bonds - paper issued as investment-grade that had been downgraded for whatever reason - and made a lot of money. He realized he could make even more money writing bonds that started out bad - the riskier a bond is, the more interest it pays. He then decided he could make more money than that by promoting these things as a way to raise a ton of money to finance a corporate takeover. (Israeli-born corporate raider Meshulam Riklis coined the term "junk bond." He was with Milken one day looking at the paper Milken was buying as fast as his little fingers could go, and told Milken, "Michael, these bonds are junk!" Milken told him, "yeah, but they pay interest and you can buy 'em at a discount." )

Then the feds threw Milken in the hoosegow and barred him from the securities industry for life. With that one imprisonment fully half the junk bond issuance went away, and that industry collapsed. They needed a new kind of investment, and someone you know found it.

A guy named Mitt Romney, he of the raider shop Bain Capital, discovered he could sell a "derivative" based on home mortgages and do what junk bonds used to. The name of it is "collateralized debt obligation." They worked as advertised but had a big problem: the safer a mortgage is, the harder it is to put in a CDO you're going to use to buy a company. You MUST have mortgages that will fail in this thing because a big part of the revenue stream from a CDO is from the "credit default swap" payments you receive when one of the mortgagees in your CDO goes into foreclosure. And what's the easiest way to assure yourself of mortgages that will fail? Umm...getting loan officers to convince bus drivers they can afford $400,000 McMansions that are financed with adjustable-rate interest-only mortgages?

That one really made me mad cuz they were right by my house and had good baby dolls

Oh well, I guess the newly unemployed can retrain for the flourishing coal mines!

had previously been a Woolworth's decades ago and they eventually closed that Toys R Us 7 years ago. The KB not far from there had already closed what would now be 10 years ago.

I grew up with Kiddie City but all that was left of those stores closed 25 years ago.

a business, then toss it and the people affected aside.

The spotlight needs to increase on these vile practices.

Thanks for doing just that.

This is an aspect of DU that I admire - digging under the surface to find the real truth of the matter.

be sentenced to prison next month. I admit it, I find great delite he got his bail revoked for adding like a .... Shkreli.

how what Shkreli did is actually part of systemic abuse.

http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/reich/article/Shkreli-con-man-or-just-a-brasher-corporate-6717908.php

without so much as a mention of the Vultures.
So they gut many old line companies and the public is all ready to blame Amazon.

Took my granddaughters shopping there two Xmas's ago.

Some of the same stuff we bought was at Walmart for about half the price.

Idea, venture capital, Wall Street funding, big box stores everywhere. Then people get tired of the junk they're
trying to push on the public, sales decline, and the whole process implodes. Then bankruptcy. Stiff the lenders, collect investment bank advisory fees, and go public again, laden with debt. It's a process that hollows out the company financially, and leaves public shareholders with peanuts. When the final belly-up happens, private equity firms (think Wall Street again) buy the carcass, jack up prices to juice the profits, then sell it off at a profit. Shareholders of the public company are usually left with nothing.

Without the financing, none of these chains would exist in the first. It's all about the profits.

You want value? Go to a mom and pop store. Especially for restaurants. How do they make money? Charge the customer 20 times the cost of ingredients, pay their employees chicken feed.

Is it any wonder people are in debt, broke, scraping by? The system just bleeds you.

But I can't really find toy stores anymore. I don't blame kids. When I was in the toy department at Target over Christmas (which by the way, I hate how it's all arranged by commercial tie-ins, but that's a separate issue), I had fun watching the kids in the aisles. They still get it.

For example, they have a whole section devoted to Disney Princesses (I can't speak to other toys since that's what my nieces are into).

Since they closed mine, I haven't shopped there.

It's insane with these kinds of places with what they have to put into it.

I live in a small town of about 25,000 and we've had a really great main street revival the last decade or so. Lots of new restaurants and shops, no chains or anything. But there's one section near the busy main intersection of it where it's been vacant for upwards of six or seven years.

Nobody will rent it because the rent that's being asked for it is just too high to make sense for a host of reasons. Building owners price out startups and like and the tax laws make it so that it's in their interest to keep it unoccupied and lose money than to make less than they're asking.

Their stores went downhill years ago.

It was a great place to get things like games (even if you don't have kids, which I don't), and to get birthday presents, etc., which I'd far rather pick out myself than buy online. And this year, when my niece and nephew put out their lists, I really, really wished it was still there.

They replaced ours with a Nordstrom Rack, which I hate.

It turned me off from working retail. That said I liked the job but the parents were awful because the newest toy wasn’t available and they took it out on me. Kind of sad the end of the era..

Friggin hedge funds killed the giraffe Geoffrey.

There is a Target right across the street from the Toys R Us near my house. It sells the same stuff, for less.