Goodbye TRU?

[Goaliebot]

This would suck; WalMart have not been very good for stocking or discounting toys for a while in my opinion. Without TRU they would be our only B&M option...

[Dark Rage]

Originally Posted by Ironwave

I won't be surprised if Walmart closes in a few years, it's always under staff. Every time I go to a Walmart, it's a challenge to find a clerk and it takes me 30 to 40 mins to find one, like I have only that to do all day.

Walmart is far from ever going bankrupt. Them being understaffed is one of the reasons they're so profitable. I'm sure their employees get minimum or closer to minimum wage, some of them aren't really that bright.

Originally Posted by Xtreme987

I don't even bother most of the time to find an employee @ either Walmart or TRU. When I did find someone it's always the same answer anyway "All we have is already out on the shelves and/or pegs". Usually an excuse cuz there too lazy to go in the back to look, so if I don't see what I'm looking for in my first or second round of the store then I leave & go somewhere else.

They might not be able to, I don't think it's reasonable for an employee to try to dig through a whole truck to just look for a new case of transformers. They'll shelve it when they shelve it.

[Sureshot22]

Yup. There is no chance Wal-Mart is going to go bankrupt. Not in my lifetime anyhow. They make money big-time even if they didn't sell toys at all.

[pandaprime]

So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy9_lfjQopU

[Chigimus]

Wow, that was a bit of a sad surprise to read about, especially when viewed from a local perspective, the TRU locations around here have never given me the impression that they were struggling. Inventory was usually plentiful, the period of time it took to replenish stock seemed pretty average, and traffic has usually been consistent as far as I could tell. In contrast, TRU has never reached the ghost town level of business or lack of stock the way Sears has degraded to be now currently, or the way Zellers went out, or how mismanaged Target Canada was.

That said, it was initially hard to say if this article is limited just to the US market or not but a little bit of research into their financial reports will show their numbers do indeed consolidate both domestic and international production results.

From their corporate site (not their web store), "Today, merchandise is sold in 880 Toys“R”Us and Babies“R”Us stores in the United States, Puerto Rico and Guam, and in more than 780 international stores and more than 245 licensed stores in 37 countries and jurisdictions."

With just a little under an hour digging around their financial records and comparing quarterly results over the last 3 or 4 years, it's not the first time they've been in this much debt and really, I think the real story might be just that they want some financial advice as to how to better manage their debt as they haven't seemed to make much progress digging out of that $400M hole for a few years now. They only seem to just be able to hold it steady enough from growing much larger. I think it would be best to wait for Q3 results to be announced on Sep.26th before anyone should have any real cause for concern.

Originally Posted by Ironwave

I won't be surprised if Walmart closes in a few years, it's always under staff. Every time I go to a Walmart, it's a challenge to find a clerk and it takes me 30 to 40 mins to find one, like I have only that to do all day.

Originally Posted by Dark Rage

Walmart is far from ever going bankrupt. Them being understaffed is one of the reasons they're so profitable. I'm sure their employees get minimum or closer to minimum wage, some of them aren't really that bright.

Originally Posted by Sureshot22

Yup. There is no chance Wal-Mart is going to go bankrupt. Not in my lifetime anyhow. They make money big-time even if they didn't sell toys at all.

+3. Hell-mart isn't going away anytime soon at all. Love them or hate them, you can't deny that they do a pretty good job with their min-max ratio.

[protoform_ironhide]

Walmart is a very strong retailer. I don't see Walmart going down anytime soon especially in Canada, they don't have many strong competitor against them here. Maybe Amazon will be their competitor in the future? As they have plans taking over the world =P

However I am not surprise if Toy's R Us going downsize or even bankrupt though, it will eventually happen sooner or later as technology advancing. It's sad, but that's the reality =(

[justprime]

Started when they stopped carrying full lines ,cut store in half and no stock ...mp10 fiasco a few years back and the current limited release of brands in both number and wave for example..i used to be a regular shopper
..almost daily ..on the hunt almost never now I for one will not miss ...maybe Hasbro will finally get off it's duff and either buy them out(a Hasbro chain store) or provide an affordable online service as for me umtill Hasbro goes down the bankruptcy path I'll shop online retailers or at con....

[Longshot]

Sad about TRU... But Walmart on a scale of success (country wise) from what I know goes like this:
1.) UK
2.) Canada
3.) USA
Apparently, Walmart has found a lot of success in Canada and tries to replicate some of that success in the US. One aspect of this is when you have problems locating Walmart staff it's because Canadian Walmart upper management (each country is given a certain amount of leeway by Walmart to operate as profitably as they can) found that having staff during daytime hours was optimal and scaling it back to barebones for the evening made sense.

[xueyue2]

It's not a surprise at all, and more major retails might go down the same path because of e-commerce. People are buying more and more stuff online, so big retail like Bay, Sears, TRU will go bankrupt sooner or later because of losing market share to Amazon, ebay, etc.

If you check US version of Walmart.com, it's actually very much like Amazon, smaller shop can sell stuffs on walmart.com with very low or free shipping.

[Pascal]

I still wonder who's TRU's main competitor in Canada, Amazon.ca and Walmart both have a shit toy selection and rarely have deals worth mentioning.