Toy stores
Toy retail consolidated twice: first into category-killer superstores, then into Walmart, Target and Amazon. The chains here were casualties of one wave or the other, and in most cases of the debt put on them along the way.
Post-mortems in Toy stores
Toys “R” Us
1957 – 2018
The store that invented the toy superstore was still selling $11.5 billion of toys a year when it failed. Nearly every dollar it earned from operations went to interest on its own buyout.
KB Toys
1922 – 2009
The toy store in the mall. It had 1,322 stores when Walmart started selling the season’s hottest toys below cost, and a buyout that had already taken about $120 million out.
Kiddie City
1957 – 1993
The company that made Lionel trains sold the trains and kept the toy stores. It went through Chapter 11 twice in nine years trying to keep up with Toys “R” Us.
FAO Schwarz
1862 – 2015
The toy store from “Big.” A small catalog retailer bought it with notes and stock in 2002, went bankrupt twice in 2003, and the name has been sold three more times since.
Zany Brainy
1991 – 2003
A toy store with carpets, a reading corner and nothing violent on the shelves. It nearly doubled in size in one year by buying Noodle Kidoodle, lost $80.7M, and was in Chapter 11 five months after that Christmas.
Child World
1962 – 1992
A Massachusetts toy supermarket with castle turrets and a roller-skating panda, and for years the No. 2 toy chain in America. Squeezed by Toys “R” Us and loaded with its parent’s debt, it stopped paying its bills in December 1990 and liquidated in 1992.