{"id":42719,"date":"2018-03-17T03:00:06","date_gmt":"2018-03-17T07:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=42719"},"modified":"2020-11-18T20:42:49","modified_gmt":"2020-11-19T01:42:49","slug":"toys-r-us-did-for-toys-what-borders-and-barnes-noble-did-for-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/03\/17\/toys-r-us-did-for-toys-what-borders-and-barnes-noble-did-for-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Toys \u2018R\u2019 Us did for toys what Borders and Barnes &#038; Noble did for books"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We have lived through the golden age of the big box store, and the less-fit are now going to the wall. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/view\/articles\/2018-03-15\/toys-r-us-closing-the-mass-toy-culture-it-created\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Virginia Postrel<\/a> looks at the history of Toys&#8217;R&#8217; Us and how it changed the toy market:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I wasn\u2019t a Toys \u2018R\u2019 Us kid.<\/p>\n<p>By the time the big box wonderland arrived in my hometown, I was a 25-year-old business reporter living 900 miles away. So instead of conjuring up memories of dolls, bikes and video games, the chain\u2019s imminent demise reminds me of what the world was like before it arrived: Most toys were available only around Christmas and even then the choices were limited unless you lived in a big city. We got my doll house in Atlanta.<\/p>\n<p>Toys \u2018R\u2019 Us changed that. \u201cThey got a million toys at Toys \u2018R\u2019 Us that I can play with,\u201d boasted its famous jingle. \u201cThe selection \u2014 more than 18,000 different toys in every store \u2014 is almost inconceivably vast,\u201d wrote David Owen in a 1986 <em>Atlantic<\/em> article on the toy business. &#8220;There&#8217;s an enormous opportunity in America if you&#8217;re willing to make a commitment to inventory,\u201d founder Charles Lazarus told him.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed there was.<\/p>\n<p>What Toys \u2018R\u2019 Us did for toys, Home Depot and Lowe\u2019s did for hardware; Best Buy and Circuit City for electronics and music; Borders and Barnes &#038; Noble for books; Bed, Bath and Beyond and Linens n\u2019 Things for home goods; and Staples, Office Depot and Office Max for office supplies. The rise of category killers in the 1980s accustomed consumers of all ages to unprecedented variety and choice\u2014in any season and just about any locale. In less populated areas, Walmart filled in the gaps.<\/p>\n<p>By internet standards, the selection Owen termed \u201cinconceivably vast\u201d now looks paltry. \u201cI stopped by my local Best Buy to do research, and found they stock something like 30,000 different titles,\u201d I wrote in 1999. Looking at that text today I wondered if the number was a typo. A mere 30,000? Surely there was a missing zero. Or two.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We have lived through the golden age of the big box store, and the less-fit are now going to the wall. Virginia Postrel looks at the history of Toys&#8217;R&#8217; Us and how it changed the toy market: I wasn\u2019t a Toys \u2018R\u2019 Us kid. By the time the big box wonderland arrived in my hometown, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,25,13],"tags":[374,71,1401],"class_list":["post-42719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-economics","category-usa","tag-children","tag-debt","tag-toys"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-b71","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42719"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61618,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42719\/revisions\/61618"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}