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Toys R us was a first of its kind mega retailer, that helped make some toys the memorable classics that were cherished and loved. Toys like, Mr. Potato Head, Barbie, Stretch Armstrong and the Easy Bake Oven.
The rise and fall of Toys R Us is a story of demographics, and also cultural and retail business transformations in the United States and across the globe. Once a retail juggernaut, the store dominated the entire toy industry—and children’s imaginations—by driving its competitors out of existence. Toys R Us was the quintessential ‘right place at the right time’ American success and failure story that took decades to play out.
Let’s take a look at how it all began, its wildly phenomenal success, its downfall and what the future might hold for the mighty Toys R US brand…

Remember when you could walk into this giant Toy retail store and find rows and rows of virtually any toy you wanted? Maybe you were a kid who loved going to Toys R US and getting that special toy you had you heart set on… Or maybe you brought your kids there and bought them the latest Lego set or Barbie merchandise?
Well… all that went away in the United States after June 29, 2018 when, as the result of a bankruptcy proceeding, all US retail locations were shut down after 70 years of operation.
In 1948, a man named Charles Lazarus had recently returned from military service in World War 2 and wanted to open a business. He was convinced that there would be an explosion in birthrates as servicemen returned home from the war and wanted to start families and those families would need baby furniture products. His instincts told him that the timing was right to open a baby furniture store in his father’s bicycle repair shop in Washington DC. Soon thereafter, he moved on to open his first stand alone store and called it “Children’s Bargain Town”. He primarily focused on sales of strollers and baby cribs during his store's first few years in business and began selling toys when he realized that baby furniture was durable and didn’t encourage much repeat customer business whereas toys did.
But Lazarus wanted to grow his business and had the notion that he could build a massive toy store modeled after a supermarket that could be filled with every toy in existence. This was a bold and innovative concept at the time, as most toy stores were small and family-run, and only carried a limited line of products.
In 1957, he got out of the baby furniture business, renamed his company Toys ‘R’ Us and created the first ever big-box toy store in Rockville, Maryland.
Here’s an interesting fact; The Toy R Us name borrows its last 3 letters from that of the founder’s last name.
Over the next several decades, Toys "R" Us, headed by Lazarus, expanded to suburban shopping areas across the US. The new megastore approach to toy selling distinguished it from every other toy store in existence. Most toy stores were small and family-run, and only carried a limited line of products. Lazarus’ stores, on the other hand, were orders of magnitude larger than their competitors, and presented a smorgasbord of thousands of different toys. The store designs and layouts were paradigms of retail efficiency. While other toy shops had display cases and decorative interiors, Toys ‘R’ Us had concrete or tile flooring and rows of toys laid out next to each other in a supermarket style of product presentation to maximize space allocation. The store’s bare-bones appearance didn’t seem to matter to consumers, who flocked to the stores and bought up toys by the millions.
The company expanded and built new stores in every major retail market throughout the United States and beyond. This coincided with the rise of the baby boomer demographic cohort that created the demand for toys. The conditions for the supply of toys were also favorable for the Toys R Us business model. As Japan rebuilt its economy after World War 2, it began to produce inexpensive toys, like tin robots, toy cars and stuffed animals which Toys R Us purchased cheaply and in bulk to fill his stores with. As Toys R Us scaled up, they bought and sold so many toys that they were able to negotiate wholesale purchase contracts for far better terms than their competitors could achieve. This made Toys ‘R’ Us into what retail historians recognize as the first “category killer”—a company that so completely dominates its retail category that it drives most significant competition out of business.
Another fortuitous circumstance that helped Toys R Us build its mighty brand and market strength was the advent and proliferation of television as an early mass entertainment, information and marketing dissemination media platform. As television became commonplace in..

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