Not only do most people shop online now, most toys are also online. I imagine most parents put money into TV shows, video games, iPhone apps, etc.
Toy stores can be a destination. Provide a compelling experience for parents and kids alike. It's easy to imagine a space where kids get to play with toys hands-on, and parents get to judge for themselves whether they think they're appropriate in terms of fun and quality—something you can't do online.
Make the adult experience a mixture of café and Apple store, and give the kids a safe "penned in" experience like IKEA does in their kids' section. Parents will enjoy the respite, and kids will beg to go. And of course, once they get there, they'll cajole their parents to spend more money. Never underestimate the power of a child in a store.
IKEA has nailed the brick & mortar experience, even though most of their products could easily be purchased online. Toys 'R' Us merely had to abandon their hubris and old thinking, and they could have killed it.
Instead, they languished with a chain of dirty, disorganized, depressing stores, ill-treated and unmotivated employees, and no vision.
They didn't have to die, but their leadership and strategy did.
If people were invited to come play with toys, they'd just do it for free, enjoy the day, and buy it online after. Your other ideas just seem like... free babysitting? It's not like parents are going to shop for toys while their kids are babysat for free.
I agree the stores aren't great now... but they were working with insane debt and a dying business model.
I don't think it's impossible to sell toys (see: Disney), but it's really hard to do it when you're trying to pivot something like Toys 'R Us with no money to spend and nowhere to really go.
+ There aren't many kids anymore.
Thanks~
My son, now 8, has been hot and cold with toys. I think he'd rather just run around with the neighborhood kids and engage in mock battles with makeshift swords and such. He liked my old Star Wars toys for awhile, and we even bought a few new ones to add to that stuff, but lately those things are sitting in a big bin in the basement. He was/is a Lego nut and has tons of Lego sets in his room and I am hoping he doesn't totally lose interest in building the sets and making up his own. If he loses interest I'll have about a zillion Lego sets to sell on CL.
It saddens me that kids aren't kids very long because I enjoy playing with him but my free time is so tight and I am often so harried that it is hard to just say "I'm going to dig through these bins and find parts so we can rebuild this set together." He'll be leaving for college one day and I'll have these huge regrets! My son's other big obsession is Nerf guns--those have been an enduring pastime for him, but one can only buy so many Nerf guns before saturation is reached as they are often huge and bulky items that don't store well. Still, much fun, especially in the dark winter months.
The only other toys that had any lasting impact for my kids were the expensive wooden Thomas trains when they were 3-4 years old. I guess my son liked Hot Wheels for awhile and we still have a large parking garage thing in our family room that probably is getting dusty right now. That thing comes out when the slightly younger neighbor kids come over.
I felt like last Christmas was really expensive and yet we didn't really buy them much of anything really good and I told my wife I'm not doing that again just to have the appearance of a lot of gifts. If they aren't going to play with stuff, they aren't getting it because our house is too full of unused junk as it is. I'd rather take a trip to Disney or maybe skiing.
The underlying price of the real estate to the revenue brought in by a toys-based sales funnel simply makes these locations untenable to flog products that can be sourced online for cheaper. You need a hell of a lot of sales volume to keep up, and online took away enough volume to starve these models.
The parenting culture is also wise to the models that are built around "hook 'em young and get them to insist on instant gratification". Look inside parenting forums and you'll see a shift in shopping habits, where toy stores are deliberately and consciously avoided precisely because parents are annoyed at the effects.
Personally, I'd rather see more parents teaching children through involvement in daily activities than throwing more toys (including computer and video time) at their children. We're "over-toyed", over-retailed, and "under-practicum'd".
The kids now play with the boxes, turns out they didn't even need the toys.
This. I have a few kids of my own and make a point to never go with them to toy stores - they go crazy from looking at all the possible options and end up being unhappy because no matter what we end up buying, there is a gazillion things we ended up not getting.
Much better to get ideas from wherever (window shopping, other kids, forums, etc) and buy online - free no hassle / screaming delivery.
Even if you end up getting not the "perfect" toy they would have picked, it's a superior shopping experience for the adult.
It was the private equity investors who loaded it up with debt in order to cash out who doomed it.
You don't have a hope in hell of adjusting to market changes when your funds are tied up paying off the loans your owners made you take on in order to fund their takeover.
I’m not sure to what degree you can focus on elaborate experiences for stores that are in every shopping mall.
The main factor is that we live in city centre and don't own cars, so 40 euro (or whatever it is) for shipping compares favourably to getting a taxi or a short-term car hire like car2go, gocar, etc.
TBH I even like visiting Ikea sometimes but ordering online solves the whole "this is going to chew up a whole Sunday afternoon" problem too.
A lot of third party IKEA resellers on Amazon exist because of this (they basically run to the local IKEA to fulfill an order with better low volume shipping options).
They don't, at least in the UK. You pay a variable charge depending on what is shipping.
Shipping rates are approximate and calculated by weight/volume & retail value of the order.
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/store/homeshopping/shipping_calcu...
Maybe it's changed, or that info is wrong.
Normal intuition would say that maybe the company could enter bankruptcy, wipe out that debt, turn the bond holders into the new owners, have the owners issue stock for a debt free company and sell the stock to pay off a fraction of the money they owed. That would seem like a rational approach that would maximize utility for at least owners and employees.
The problem apparently was that bargaining and brinksmanship destroyed the company before such a result could be considered.
Toy aisles and toy stores are frequently populated by exhausted parents standing around while their children entertain themselves checking out the toys. The kids are happy enough. The parents are content just to have a few minutes to themselves. Toy retailers typically try and dissuade this behavior.
Meanwhile indoor playgrounds/play centers are a huge and growing business. They are happy for parents to unleash their children while they make their money from entry charges, selling cups of coffee to the parents and snacks for the kids.
Despite having a huge inventory of toys play centers never actually sell toys that I have seen. Tearful children have to leave their new favorite ride on racing car (or whatever) behind when they leave.
There's a mom and pop place like this near me. They rented an old dead big box store (I remember shopping there when it was a Circuit City) and filled it with bounce houses and arcade games.
They charge $10/kid admission. Adults are not allowed in the bounce houses, and they've got an area set up with tables and free WiFi for the parents. They'll charge you $3.79 for a soda, so overpriced for sure but not quite movie theater or ballpark pricing.
My son begged to have his birthday party there this year. The parties have to be the big revenue driver, as it was $300 for twelve kids' worth of Domino's Pizza and use of a party room for an hour.
That business model appeared not to work in the 90s, because they all closed down, I wonder why. Unsustainable business model? Good business model but taking on too much debt? Kids get bored after a couple visits and don't come back? Rising rents? Admission prices too high?
Around me there was a Discovery Zone and there was two more independent ones that opened up around the same time as Discovery Zone and closed a little after too. From what I could gather, seems like the business model just didn't work, at least not at the time.
For those of you outside the US or too young to remember: https://youtu.be/33QpqR-fN0c
The DZ locations, at least where I lived, were in prime spots, and it was a time when they couldn't build strip malls fast enough to keep up with demand.
Now you've got an oversupply of dead big box stores and not enough ideas of what to do with them.
People are terrible calculating sunk cost, and I'm pretty sure that the pre-paid $15 admission credit makes a $29 toy look like a "steal", even if you could buy it on Amazon for $24. In fact, I'll bet most parents would be hard-pressed to leave the experience without buying something for every child.
Like corporate bookstores, theater chains, music stores you got the same selection at all their million outlets in the country.
Perhaps it's just me that was tired of the same-ol' same ol' or maybe the public became tired of it as well.
The owners knew it and sold while it was still possible to sell. The buyers gambled that they could cut costs fast enough to compete, but they lost the bet.
Was it moving more effectively into online sales? Or alternate business lines altogether?