British Columbia's last Toys 'R' Us has closed and here's why
The toy story is over as the last Toys ‘R’ Us in B.C. has officially closed, after it was reported that its location in the Willowbrook Shopping Centre in Langley Township suddenly shuttered on Jan. 13.
According to reporting from Surrey Now-Leader, a notice was posted on Toys ‘R’ Us’ door that stated that it owed its landlord over $98,000 in rent, fees, and interest.
Daily Hive Urbanized reached out to QuadReal Property Group, the company that manages the retail spaces, which confirmed that Toys ‘R’ Us had closed but didn’t provide further details. We also reached out to Toys ‘R’ Us, which didn’t respond before publication.
This follows the closure of three other locations across Metro Vancouver in the past year — Metrotown, Landsdowne Centre, and West Broadway — and numerous locations across the country.
David Ian Gray, a retail consultant and a business instructor at Capilano University, attributes this to kids pivoting their play to online games, brands selling direct to consumers, less consumer spending, and even people buying toys second-hand.
He said another primary reason is that the company didn’t pivot to modern retail trends, similarly to other legacy stores like Hudson Bay.
“The modern retail world is like this very increasingly sophisticated blend of physical stores to serve part of the shopper set of needs, but also social media and also a really good web platform — with all of it interconnected,” Gray explained.
The rise of stores like Toys ‘R’ Us started in the 1990s, when a trend of retail called “category killers” started that competed with department stores, he said.
“They were picking one department from the department stores and then just becoming the everything store for it.”
For example, Best Buy took on electronics, Home Depot offered hardware, and “Toys ‘R’ Us did toys.”
“It was highly successful, because at the department store, you have sort of a smattering of things you can get, but here you get everything. And it was new — consumers weren’t used to that.”
Because they were selling at scale, they could also offer better prices than department stores. Those same department stores, meanwhile, “didn’t really see that coming or change their model, and so they lost a lot of that business that they otherwise had.”
Toys ‘R’ Us locations started popping up in malls and in new retail developments.
But what the toy retailer didn’t anticipate was the rise of online shopping. While they did start e-commerce in the early 2000s, they didn’t want to deal with the “headache” of fulfilling direct orders.
Toys ‘R’ Us outsourced this work to Amazon, which would go on to use this data and become a toy competitor in their own right.
And while the traditional department stores became a thing of the past, new stores like Walmart Canada started growing their toy business and competing with the mass market toys they sold.
“Toys ‘R’ Us didn’t really find a way to reinvent itself,” said Gray.
The U.S. parent company filed for bankruptcy in 2017 and started shutting down its stores.
In Canada, however, since stores weren’t doing as poorly as their American counterparts, executives found private equity to keep them open.
But Gray said they didn’t do anything to address the problems.
“They basically just opened the stores up again. And so all it did was move the problem down the line. It didn’t really solve anything.”