Hey meh you buying Toys R Us left over inventory since they close for good on Friday?
12I do hope your buyers are scavenging deals from Toys R Us as Friday is the last day the chain is open. Pretty please???
Love to have transformers appropriate for 4 and 5 year olds. I bought 2 when I passed one in TX and should have bought more to give at Christmas as it turns out the boys love them. Also something for a child who will be 2.5 at Christmas who is in love with all her brother’s toys. And her 4 year old brother is getting more enjoyment out of the dollhouse meant for 2-4 year olds (gave to her earlier this month on her second birthday) than she is although I am sure that will change when she decides that if he is playing with it then it must be cool. Right now she is fixated on the talking fridge, talking stove, talking toilet and that you can launch the people out of the bunk beds when you push down on the alarm clock.
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The talking toilet sounds right up Meh’s alley.
@sligett TRU had a little toilet you could use to slingshot fake poop. I almost bought one.
I bought one of those Anki Overdrive kits for $75. My kids have had some fun with it.
/image anki overdrive
@shawn That does look cool.
@shawn Should’ve bought more than one and built a complex track with wooden fixtures around the room.
Told my kid they were closing Friday. She says, “Where are you going to buy toys for Christmas?!”
@medz
@medz You’re lucky your kids still like toys. Most of them just want video games. Stupid kids.
@medz too bad that my kid will never know Toys R Us since he’s only 1 month old this week.
@medz I was born into this world without TRU; I shall die without TRU.
@therealjrn
Were you born this coming up Saturday?
@medz Man, that sucks, I’m 32 and still like toys.
@medz @seraphimcaduto Congratulations on your new baby. (Well, by now he’s a slightly used baby, I guess.)
@PlacidPenguin Toys R Us didn’t exist before 1957, and it didn’t expand into a national chain until the late Seventies and Eighties.
As hard as it is to believe, there are many people still alive who were born before 1980. Crazy, huh?
@medz @therealjrn I wonder where my parents toy shopped. Montgomery Ward? Sears? I’ll have to ask.
@sammydog01 JCPenny catalog?
@craigthom
Well aware
.
(And not just because of this thread.)
@medz @sammydog01 Woolworth’s and Ben Franklin? I distinctly remember shopping with Mom at the ‘big Ace’ hardware store in Barrington, IL in the 70s (there was a smaller hdw store closer to home) for things like Hot Wheels, model airplanes/cars/paint/supplies, balsa gliders, etc. Maybe they had the ‘hobby shop’ niche back then?
/image army men
@compunaut Ben Franklin was the small town go-to place for toys.
Sears put out a special “Wish Book” toy catalog before Christmas. Definitely a highlight of the season.
http://www.wishbookweb.com/FB/1964_Sears_Christmas_Book/
@compunaut I bought a hamster at Woolworth’s.
@medz @sammydog01 Along with Sears, my mom & dad went to OTASCO, Oertlies (local dept store) and TG&Y.
@sammydog01 You’re right. I have made other arrangements with the kids about gifts - no toys - they agree they never play with them for very long, if at all.
@craigthom OMG, I use to scour that Sears book for months circling everything that I wanted. That book was huge - the predecessor to Amazon in it’s day.
@mfladd @sammydog01
What about giving them mops and such?
@PlacidPenguin @sammydog01 They have chores already. I supply such items to them at no cost
@mfladd @sammydog01
What are those?
@compunaut @medz We had a Rexall for little toys and candy close enough for me to ride a bike to.
For larger gifts there was Woolworths or Monkey Wards (Montgomery Wards). Woolworths also had a soda fountain bar with sandwiches.
The Shell station by us had the coldest Coke in town, in a horizontal water bath machine.
Money for little toys & candy was from searching roads for soda bottles, the reason I had a basket on my bike.
@daveinwarsh Gee, we’re old. My girl’s bike had two baskets in back.
Meet Princess Sparklebritches, my last ever TRU purchase. I’ll always remember you Geoffry.
@sammydog01 your picture isn’t working.
@RiotDemon I forgot to take out that stupid s.
@sammydog01 what the… I kinda want one.
@RiotDemon Check it out- she’s a cousin of monkeybot. Only at Toys-R-Us.
@sammydog01 aww, it’s cute.
@RiotDemon @sammydog01 Making monkeybot jealous with those gorgeous locks and not horrific eyes.
@RiotDemon @ThomasF She has a magic wand too!
@RiotDemon @sammydog01 What! I got ripped off. Teaches me to shop simians at Dirt Cheap.
Somewhere in a box somewhere I still have a “High Hopping Hoomdorm” from TRU.
Meh already bought all of TRU’s Fidget Spinners.
@cinoclav Geoffrey finally gets a vacation. Retirement.
@RiotDemon Makes me awfully sad. The big box stores can’t compete with the selection and buying online doesn’t give you the same pleasure as perusing the shelves and discovering some awesome new toy. I remember when Kiddie City closed and I felt that little piece of my childhood die off.
@cinoclav I work retail. Every time a customer says, “I’ll just order it from Amazon”, I die a little inside. Eventually the stores won’t be there for all the other items you are purchasing.
@RiotDemon I used to do retail mgmt but that was before the internet ruled. Before I went back to school I worked in e-commerce. That was incredibly frustrating because we ran the websites for established b&m’s (like Sports Authority and Dick’s) but we had our own inventory. Customers would call all day long looking for items they saw in the store that we didn’t have online. I’d had enough of the retail world. Now I get to have people throw up in front of me!
@cinoclav oh that really makes me sad
@cinoclav Okay that made me sad :C
@cinoclav @RiotDemon “Can you price match this online price?” “Sorry, we don’t price match.” “I can get this online for $6 plus shipping, your price is $14. That’s too high.” “Sorry, we don’t price match. That’s a really quick way to go out of business.” “Why is it so much cheaper online?” “I don’t know. Online businesses have different expenses and different profit expectations.” [Unspoken part: “Don’t you want my business?” “Not if we lose money on you.”]
@cinoclav @PooltoyWolf What’s even sadder is that giraffe will be on the streets turning tricks in 6 months - mark my words!
@cinoclav @mfladd @PooltoyWolf @RiotDemon They don’t send old giraffes to the glue factory, do they?!
@cinoclav @mehcuda67 @mfladd @PooltoyWolf @RiotDemon We have an exhibit at our science museum called Animals inside Out. This is a photo of one of the giraffes:
The other giraffe is worse. Run, Geoffry!
@sammydog01
Your museum sounds fun.
@cinoclav @mfladd @PooltoyWolf or will he be the “John” paying for his “tricks” with Toys-R-Us deadstock?
@sammydog01 your picture is broken again.
@RiotDemon Shit. They work for me so I don’t notice.
They take dead animals and pump them full of silicone basically.
@sammydog01 ah, it’s like the human Bodies exhibit. Still want to see that.
@sammydog01
Well, that’s a deal breaker for me.
@PlacidPenguin @sammydog01 yeah, me too
@RiotDemon We have one dead guy too. They also freeze the bodies, take a thin cross-section, and pour plastic around it. We have a giraffe made up of cross sections about a foot apart and placed where they were originally. Creepy.
@llangley @PlacidPenguin It’s recommended for ages 13 and above but people bring in little kids. They sometimes freak out when they see the baby reindeer. Poor Dasher never had a chance.
@sammydog01 I wonder if they were inspired by the movie Cell, or the other way around.
Family members brought home from their sale weird toys that I don’t remember seeing on the shelves. Like they were already selling somebody else’s remnant inventory. Or maybe clearing out their warehouse. Some of the stuff felt like prototypes or maybe samples. Kind of cool in a way.
@walarney Examples?
@walarney They totally are. I’ll try to dig up pictures, but ours had endcap after endcap of “The Wave Game” which weren’t there when the clearance started. Seems there were a few other items like that too.
Definitely bringing in pallets of clearance goods to sell as long as the stores were open.
@sammydog01
I shopped TRU the day before my location closed. Trust me, you don’t want to buy the leftovers.
@MrMark bad prices? bad selection? bad quality?
@MrMark I found some very NICE things June 6th in a TRU when I was in Houston for my cancer check up. Sure there were lots empty shelves, damaged items… but my mom paid the $99 it cost for an outdoor plastic playhouse for the kids that was 60% off. At that same % off I bought the 2 year old birthday presents from mom and me, and the 4 and 5 year old their “consolation prize that this was not their birthday” present. ALL of this stuff was nice. If I had had more money I would have bought more things and set them aside for christmas. Sure that was a couple of weeks ago and it is likely even more picked over now but likely not everything not yet sold is junk. It may be that they just had too much of it and/or people felt it was overpriced at full retail.
I’ve visited my local store several times over the past few weeks to peruse the final sales, most recently yesterday. Today is my store’s final opening day. I managed to score a Nintendo display rack, complete with advertisement inserts for the Switch and New 3DS systems and 3 current games, for $10. Also got the canvas ‘Drone Zone’ banner for my younger brother for like $7. The store was very depressing, all the shelves were empty and most of the store was cordoned off. However, what stuck out most to me was that all the staff were still cheery and helpful, despite the fact they’d all be out of work in a day. We spoke with a couple of ladies in particular who were extremely helpful and polite, and I was glad to have met them. There was a dad outside trying to explain to his 5 or 6 year old son that it would be their last visit, and you could tell the boy was visibly upset. I’m gonna miss this place. I got my very first Nintendo Game Boy (transparent Game Boy Pocket) and a copy of Metroid II: Return of Samus, as well as my Atomic Purple GB Color with Kirby Tilt n’ Tumble, at this store. My brother used to participate in the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game tournaments held there, and both of us went for many of the Pokémon giveaway events, as well.
I’ll miss you, Toys r Us!
@PooltoyWolf We bought Commodore C64 stuff for our family that had those back in the day. I used to love the place too.
While I don’t know for a fact, it is common for large stores that are closing to bring in a different crew for the final sales. Its possible the staff there were not the people working the store before.
@duodec @PooltoyWolf in this case most, if not all, of them were original employees. I worked with someone that was there for the end.
@duodec @RiotDemon Yeah, everyone at our store had been working there for a long time. All awesome people. We closed our store forever today, with the last official sale on their registers.
Nearest TRU to me, where I currently live, is about 130 miles. Tomorrow I will be at the doctor about 20 miles from them so I plan to mosey on over and see what, if anything, is left 6 hours or so before they’d be closing…
Too late for an edit. The store closed yesterday!!! I just called to see if they were going to open until what time on Friday. WAAAAHHHHHHHH!!! I blame @unclevinny that they closed before Friday night.
The really sad part is I didn’t even check that store once during this whole closing process. I just didn’t care enough.
Well, local news failed me. Closing Friday means already closed by Thursday afternoon. Kid was sad. Went to the dollar store instead. Going to real toy store tomorrow.
@medz mine was closed this evening too. It has a piece of paper taped to the door that just said “Closed :(”
I’d been meaning to stop by all week but kept having other things to do.
@djslack our piece of paper read:
Sorry
Store Close
@medz Yeah my news was a fail too. Yesterday they said it was still open. They even edited it yesterday. I called the same day and it was not.
No kids here. But I did buy a couple of life size German Shepherd plush animals once upon a time (for the kid in me).
As Jimmy Buffet says, " I’m growing older but not up. "
From Not All News is Bad!
Maybe this is why some stores were closed early
Person buys $1M worth of remaining toys at Toys ‘R’ Us store to donate to kids
https://www.wfla.com/national/mystery-person-buys-1m-worth-of-remaining-toys-at-toys-r-us-store-to-donate-to-kids/1273637851
Wow…
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/business/toys-r-us-closing.html