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[rip] Toys R Us

H

Hawkeye10

Buttermilk Man
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Per reports mostly because they were loaded up with unmanageable debt by hedge funds, which meant as was with case with Sears and Kmart there was no money to invest into the stores to fend off Amazon and Walmart and the like. Taking the kids to Toys R Us was such a big thing for us over the years, it was great fun, it is a real shame that future kids will never know this experience. The worst part is that this did not have to happen, this was caused primarily by greed and incompetence.

Word is that Sears and Kmart are next...this summer or at the latest after Christmas....same sort of thing, great companies run into the ground by those who own them.

After that JCP, the stock is down to $3, pretty clearly they have too much debt and too little rev to make it.
 
We used to be better?
 
Hawkeye10 said:
Per reports mostly because they were loaded up with unmanageable debt by hedge funds, which meant as was with case with Sears and Kmart there was no money to invest into the stores to fend off Amazon and Walmart and the like. Taking the kids to Toys R Us was such a big thing for us over the years, it was great fun, it is a real shame that future kids will never know this experience. The worst part is that this did not have to happen, this was caused primarily by greed and incompetence.

Word is that Sears and Kmart are next...this summer or at the latest after Christmas....same sort of thing, great companies run into the ground by those who own them.

After that JCP, the stock is down to $3, pretty clearly they have too much debt and too little rev to make it.
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So you're telling me The Rebellion didn't have a plan to save Toys R Us?
 
To improve the company, the board of directors installed John Eyler (formerly of FAO Schwarz). Eyler launched an unsuccessful, expensive plan to remodel and re-launch the chain. Blaming market pressures (primarily competition from Walmart and Target), Toys "R" Us considered splitting its toy and baby businesses. On July 21, 2005, a consortium of Bain Capital Partners LLC, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) and Vornado Realty Trust invested $1.3 billion to complete a $6.6 billion leveraged buyout of the company. Public stock closed for the last time at $26.74—pennies from the 68-week high, but far short of its all-time high of almost $45 in fourth-quarter 1993 and its five-year high of $31 in Q2 2001. Toys "R" Us became a privately owned entity after the buy out. However, the company still files with the Securities and Exchange Commission (as required by its debt agreements).[25]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toys_"R"_Us#Company_history

From what I have read the debt from the LBO ensured the company would not be able to turn a profit
 
Lord Tammerlain said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toys_"R"_Us#Company_history

From what I have read the debt from the LBO ensured the company would not be able to turn a profit
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And you know that the hedge funds who killed Toys R Us probably did so at a profit, as with Lampert over at Sears/Kmart though those books are such a mess nobody is sure how he comes out in the end though the speculation is that he killed those companies to cash in for himself the real-estate.
 
It was such a magical place when I was a child. Kind of sad.
 
sorry to see them fail. Children's Palace and Toys R Us were two of my favorite stores when i was a kid. haven't had a chance to read up on this one yet. did some capital investment company swoop in, bleed them dry of assets, and is now preparing to sell off the shell that remains? that happened to my childhood grocery store chain this past year.
 
For private-equity firms, a common exit strategy is to cash out their investment in an initial public offering. In 2010, the owners of Toys R Us filed plans to raise eight hundred million dollars in a stock sale. Those plans fell through, and now Bain, K.K.R., and Vornado stand to have 1.3 billion dollars in equity wiped out, according to Bloomberg, which added that the three owners partially offset those losses by collecting four hundred and seventy million dollars over the years in fees and interest payments from Toys R Us. At the time of its Chapter 11 filing, Toys R Us estimated its debt at more than five billion dollars. It was paying four hundred million dollars a year to service that debt—far more than it was spending on its stores and computer systems.
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https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-toys-r-us-succumbed-to-its-nasty-debt-problem

But the thing to know is how much actual money did these hedge funds put into the company....did they make a profit by killing this company?

Yes the grand swindle that they had planned failed, but did they still come out ahead?

Does anyone in the DP Brain Trust know the answer?




EDIT: does "Injected $1.3 Billion in equity" mean "injected $1.3 billion of their own money"?
 
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Hawkeye10 said:
Per reports mostly because they were loaded up with unmanageable debt by hedge funds, which meant as was with case with Sears and Kmart there was no money to invest into the stores to fend off Amazon and Walmart and the like. Taking the kids to Toys R Us was such a big thing for us over the years, it was great fun, it is a real shame that future kids will never know this experience. The worst part is that this did not have to happen, this was caused primarily by greed and incompetence.

Word is that Sears and Kmart are next...this summer or at the latest after Christmas....same sort of thing, great companies run into the ground by those who own them.

After that JCP, the stock is down to $3, pretty clearly they have too much debt and too little rev to make it.
Click to expand...

On the flip side, I don't know how it is elsewhere but in Tucson we have a few really cool local toy stores that carry creative, quality stuff. I stopped going to KB years ago and never was much on Toys R Us. I absolutely love the little places we have here. They remind me of when I was a kid and the owners can actually give me great ideas for gifts.
 
Lutherf said:
On the flip side, I don't know how it is elsewhere but in Tucson we have a few really cool local toy stores that carry creative, quality stuff. I stopped going to KB years ago and never was much on Toys R Us. I absolutely love the little places we have here. They remind me of when I was a kid and the owners can actually give me great ideas for gifts.
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I never found those, when we lived at Ft Huachuca once a month we made a trip to Tucson for Costco and often one of the big book stores and Toys R Us. Olympia has one smallish store like that, that replaced the toy store (2014) that went out of business in the same location.
 
Lutherf said:
On the flip side, I don't know how it is elsewhere but in Tucson we have a few really cool local toy stores that carry creative, quality stuff. I stopped going to KB years ago and never was much on Toys R Us. I absolutely love the little places we have here. They remind me of when I was a kid and the owners can actually give me great ideas for gifts.
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I would love to see a return of the small local stores, where people try to give good service and develop a relationship with the community.

Wall-mart and the like has destroyed those in every small-town community area they build in. But those places were great to shop in and added local flavor to the economy.
 
By 2005, as competitors ate into its profitability, Toys R Us hired Credit Suisse and found a buyer: a consortium of private equity firms*KKR and*Bain Capital, which had experience in retail, and*Vornado, the real estate investment firm. The three firms put in $1.4bn in cash, split equally, and borrowed over $5bn to finance the transaction.
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https://www.ft.com/content/02a5edbe-9d93-11e7-8cd4-932067fbf946

So they lost money.

Good.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
I never found those, when we lived at Ft Huachuca once a month we made a trip to Tucson for Costco and often one of the big book stores and Toys R Us. Olympia has one smallish store like that, that replaced the toy store (2014) that went out of business in the same location.
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Admittedly, you have to look for them. One is on a primary road but if you don't know what you're looking for you'll miss it as it's in an older strip center. The other is on a secondary road and, again, there's no big sign pointing it out. There are a couple of other places as well (including an old fashioned general store in the hokey western town/steak house/amusement park) but the two I'm thinking of are just awesome.
 
Here in Central Ohio ToysRUs and BabiesRUS have been closing stores for years. We were down to two ToysRUs and two BabiesRUs . One on the Eastside of Columbus and the other was North at Polaris in Lewis Center. But both stores seem to do a good amount of business online.

I look at online shopping the replacement of the mail catalog. J.C. Penney, Sears, Montgomery Ward, .....when I was young, and even my kids looked through the catalogs and made their wish lists for Christmas. Now the grandkids check things out online. I don't think online shopping will ever take the place of brick and mortar for clothing, shoes, jewelry, even perfumes, makeup, furniture, decorative accessories as a picture is just not the same as trying something on, smelling it firsthand, and visually seeing certain products in person. But some toy advertised during Saturday morning cartoons a kid thinks he has to have, yeah online is great for that one.
 
vesper said:
Here in Central Ohio ToysRUs and BabiesRUS have been closing stores for years. We were down to two ToysRUs and two BabiesRUs . One on the Eastside of Columbus and the other was North at Polaris in Lewis Center. But both stores seem to do a good amount of business online.

I look at online shopping the replacement of the mail catalog. J.C. Penney, Sears, Montgomery Ward, .....when I was young, and even my kids looked through the catalogs and made their wish lists for Christmas. Now the grandkids check things out online. I don't think online shopping will ever take the place of brick and mortar for clothing, shoes, jewelry, even perfumes, makeup, furniture, decorative accessories as a picture is just not the same as trying something on, smelling it firsthand, and visually seeing certain products in person. But some toy advertised during Saturday morning cartoons a kid thinks he has to have, yeah online is great for that one.
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There is surely space for some sort of national year around toy store chain, and clearly they are helpful to the toy makers.....maybe someone will start a new company.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
There is surely space for some sort of national year around toy store chain, and clearly they are helpful to the toy makers.....maybe someone will start a new company.
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Maybe but I have to tell you I can't remember the last time I was in a ToysRUs store. We have other toy stores. And then there are specialty items stores that are based around children.
We have Disney stores. We have hobby stores. We have specialty sports stores focused on children. But you know who carries all the toys advertised on Saturday morning cartoons? Target, Meijers and Walmart.
 
I'm going to miss this meme:

19b5f9282bf7951075ecf84895716e91f88999e2202f87ef80d6370d09f53cf7.jpg
 
Lutherf said:
On the flip side, I don't know how it is elsewhere but in Tucson we have a few really cool local toy stores that carry creative, quality stuff. I stopped going to KB years ago and never was much on Toys R Us. I absolutely love the little places we have here. They remind me of when I was a kid and the owners can actually give me great ideas for gifts.
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Greetings, Lutherf. :2wave:

We have a new addition to the family that just turned age one last month, and her mom has already hinted she will doubtless want a toy car to drive one day in a year or two, and that it really should be a Corvette! Uh huh, okay, that's cool, but Toys R Us has been the only toy store around here that ever offered them for sale, and they are the stores that are going to close! However the "mom" mentioned above remembered that she got one from Santa when she was a toddler, so she's going to do some checking. Now there have been jeeps and other battery-powered ride-ons for sale for years, but to my knowledge only T.R.U. ever offered a 'vette, even though they only go about two miles an hour or less - like everything else battery-powered for kids, but everyone loves those Corvettes! :mrgreen: The boy toddlers in Texas have ride-on jeeps.

Question: Do I buy it now, if they still carry them, since T.R.U sounds like it's closing all its stores in the US, and store it, or do I take a chance and wait to see if someone may sell them in the future? Decisions, decisions! :thumbdown:
 
polgara said:
Greetings, Lutherf. :2wave:

We have a new addition to the family that just turned age one last month, and her mom has already hinted she will doubtless want a toy car to drive one day in a year or two, and that it really should be a Corvette! Uh huh, okay, that's cool, but Toys R Us has been the only toy store around here that ever offered them for sale, and they are the stores that are going to close! However the "mom" mentioned above remembered that she got one from Santa when she was a toddler, so she's going to do some checking. Now there have been jeeps and other battery-powered ride-ons for sale for years, but to my knowledge only T.R.U. ever offered a 'vette, even though they only go about two miles an hour or less - like everything else battery-powered for kids, but everyone loves those Corvettes! :mrgreen: The boy toddlers in Texas have ride-on jeeps.

Question: Do I buy it now, if they still carry them, since T.R.U sounds like it's closing all its stores in the US, and store it, or do I take a chance and wait to see if someone may sell them in the future? Decisions, decisions! :thumbdown:
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Who are you buying the toy for the kid or the mother? I am sure when the child is actually old enough to operate one it won't matter what make it is.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
There is surely space for some sort of national year around toy store chain, and clearly they are helpful to the toy makers.....maybe someone will start a new company.
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Or maybe Target and Walmart will simply swallow that share.
 
I wonder if any of y'all have been shopping at Toys R Us lately. I mean...I hear you say you used to love going in there...and thats cool. But the 2 Toys R Us stores out in our neck of the woods have been damn near abandoned except during Christmas and even then, the parking lots have never been even halfway full.
 
VanceMack said:
I wonder if any of y'all have been shopping at Toys R Us lately. I mean...I hear you say you used to love going in there...and thats cool. But the 2 Toys R Us stores out in our neck of the woods have been damn near abandoned except during Christmas and even then, the parking lots have never been even halfway full.
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My youngest is 24, and we have zero grandkids, we are waiting.......so no.

Also we have almost no family, and several of what we do have technically have long been disowned for cause, we have no nieces or nephews to buy for either.
 
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