Goodbye TRU?

[xueyue2]

Originally Posted by 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.

TRU need to compete with the whole world right now, not only Amazon.ca or Warlmart, people like me used to buy hundreds of toys each year from TRU stores, right now for most of my transformers I buy from Japan, Ebay, Aliexpress, (maybe Taobao later). I probably only spent $50 this year at TRU.
And if the rumor about Canada Customs raise the import tax-free limit from 200 to 800 become true, things will only get worse for stores like TRU.

[Pascal]

The average parent doesn't import toys from Japan or China. Collectors are a tiny minority.

[MitchPoer]

Originally Posted by Pascal

The average parent doesn't import toys from Japan or China. Collectors are a tiny minority.

This
As a collector TRU has a good share of my hobby money but as a father it also received quite a lot of money from me. Of course selling a couple of deluxes to a collector is not much next to the new parents that goes there to biy a crib, stroller, car seat and a thousand other things for a newborn.

[Dark Rage]

I can only imagine a good chunk of their dent is in their inventory or overhead, including staff, rent or property tax, utilities, etc. They have big stores = big costs to maintain them. They may decide to downsize, but the TRU express stores have like to no inventory selection, so it's a catch 22

[xueyue2]

Originally Posted by Pascal

The average parent doesn't import toys from Japan or China. Collectors are a tiny minority.

You are right, but don't forget the new parent are younger, they are more incline to search and buy deals online than old generation parent. Overall the trend is more and more people buy things online than go to big, more costly department stores.

[Pascal]

As fas as toys are concerned in Canada, there are no real deals to be made online, unless you're into KOs and high-end collectibles, what TRU, WM and Amazon don't sell. It's still more convenient to walk into a store and just grab what you want, possibly on sale, with the guarantee that you can still easily return and exchange it or get a refund if it doesn't work. Parents in their 20s-30s still shop for the same toys as us parents in our 40s.

[MapleMegatron]

I am really curious as to how this affects Canada since the toy landscape is completely different here. Toysrus doesnt have much competition in Canada for what they sell with Walmart stocking far less toys and our Amazon.ca not really having much worth talking about. I know that Walmart is the biggest toys seller in the US but I do not know if that is the case in Canada too. I once asked TRU staff and they said their operations were entirely independent of ToysRUs corporate in the US so I dont really know what to make of all this , concerning us, and how exactly independent it is.

I could see a case like A&W Canada where the canadian division was purchased from the main corporation and run independently.

[Scrapper6]

Originally Posted by 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....

I don't even know what you're talking about.

Stopped carrying full lines? WTF? They've always carried full lines.

Cut the store in half? Babies are always being born, in order to keep afloat the parent company decided it was time to open up their niche market a bit and try and get new parents in to make profits.

MP10 Fiasco? I'm sorry, but the retailer has no control over what the fucking distributor gives them or how bad the scalp-bait such items as MP10 actually are.

Limited releases? I have no clue what you're going on about, everyone is having problems with distribution right now, it isn't just TRU, everyone is having problems getting product to store shelves and whole swaths of lines vanish quickly because kids, scalpers, parents, collectors and the like are going nuts buying up whatever little scraps they can find.

And you'd better miss them if they go, because if they go then the only option available to us will be Wal-Mart, and they don't fucking give a rats ass about their customers, they sure don't cater to adult collector bases on such a grand scale. When's the last time you found a Wal-Mart exclusive in a Canadian retail store? I never even saw the recent Shocktrooper at retail anywhere or the Scariff Stormtrooper Leader, or whatever the fuck it was called.

If they had them they only had them through their website and not everybody uses Wal-Mart.ca because TRU still accepts Paypal while Wal-Mart's online shit store won't give it the time of day.

And you're deluding yourself if you think a toy manufacturer wants to have retail presence diminished or reduced in a country, Hasbro isn't going to step in and start operating Hasbro brand retail stores, the entire point of Wal-Mart, TRU, Amazon and the rest is that they pay money to Hasbro to stock their products, they don't want to have the added costs of maintaining, operating and controlling their own retail stores to eat into their profits.

I for one do not want to see TRU go, sad to say I have very little control in how that goes, so I'm praying and hoping that we won't see the end of that retail giant for at least another ten years or so. But again there's very little I can do in that regards besides continuing to shop with them and use them over Wal-Mart whenever I can.

TRU is currently the largest supplier of LEGO and Mega Bloks in the retail environment right now, Wal-Mart doesn't give a shit about Mega Bloks they cater to LEGO, but they don't keep sets around very long because they rely on the fast return on investment. TRU has older products still, which might hurt them honestly, but if you can't afford something for a year or so you can at least maybe still find one at a TRU, unlike Wal-Mart who moves it out so fast it's gone before you know it and LEGO retires stuff constantly, without TRU or some smaller outlets you'd be left having to rely solely on the secondary market, meaning 3 times the cost for an item that only costs 25$ currently at retail.

[Omegatron]

In my opinion this is cause for concern but not, yet anyway, a guarantee that TRU will disappear because:

- They have a lot of debt but also some cash on hand so they may be able to restructure without going bankrupt.
- They have a plan it seems that involves getting out of leases and the like, which sounds possible and lot better than say the Sears argument of "we'll figure it out one day".
- Even if they file for bankruptcy it will be Chapter 11 where the goal is for a business to "propose a plan of reorganization to keep its business alive and pay creditors over time".

Now, I don't know if this will work, I don't think it will with Sears but it has worked with various airlines in the past so who knows?

All we know at the moment is changes are afoot and ToysRUs will be a bit different in the future.

[steamwhistle]

TRU is a specialty store. It's a convenience store for toys. At least, that's what it was when it opened. They overpriced their items to give people the convenience of going to one place, and having a good chance of finding what they want. It opened at a time when shopping online was not an option, and it was far more difficult to find the cheapest price for an item, and price-matching was relatively non-existent, so charging a few extra bucks went unnoticed and uncontested.

If TRU wants to restructure, they need to increase their onLine presence and basically turn their stores into a showroom and then manage sales via an online-catalogue-shopping-type format -- a combination of Ikea and Consumers Distributing (CD).

Order ahead online or in-store with the old CD-style slips (or a more modern in-store electronic kiosk), and then have staff retrieve items from the back-of-store.

This format will also help lower costs. Then, if they want, they can dedicate more floor space to displays for "hot" current products, and maybe even provide a play area of sorts so kids can test drive bicycles, power wheels, slides, drones, play tables, etc...