Mar 27, 2018 3 min read

Millions nationwide will soon be saying goodbye to a cherished friend. It is a retail chain, not a living person, but one whose stores, merchandise and atmosphere made many of us feel very alive from the moment we stepped inside until hours after we departed.

Toys R Us Inc. announced March 15 it will sell or close all 735 stores in the United States and Puerto Rico, and began liquidation sales Friday at all Toys R Us and Babies R Us outlets. This came down two months after the company said it would be shuttering about 180 U.S. stores in the spring, including the Washington Mall location in South Strabane Township and three other Southwestern Pennsylvania sites: Beaver Valley, Monroeville and Ross Park malls.

Once the king of the national toy market, the New Jersey-based firm is now billions of dollars in debt. It filed for bankruptcy protection in September. The rising popularity of e-commerce competitors like Amazon, discount chains like Walmart and the preponderance of mobile games have been blamed for Toys R Us’ predicament.

Then if things weren’t bad enough in its corporate world, the company announced last week Charles Lazarus, who founded the company in 1948, had died.

For four generations, parents and guardians have devoted a lot of time, dollars and emotion to this chain, to the joy of their children as well as the children still inside themselves. Toys R Us has been a shopping destination, especially around the holidays, since the Truman administration.

It didn’t matter that on the night before Christmas, when all through the house, you would be assembling a dollhouse or tricycle – always more of a task than the directions indicated. The smiles the Barbies, bikes and other toys engendered from the kids warmed your hearts and created lasting memories.

And for the young ‘uns, of course, the inside of a Toys R Us was Kid Heaven. Greeted at the entrance by the affable cardboard corporate mascot, Geoffrey the Giraffe, they would bolt for racks and rows and stacks of glistening-new play things. For each child, it was like being a kid in an eye candy store.

Toys R Us was a trendsetter in its industry, a byproduct of Lazarus’ shrewd business acumen. He learned from his father, a bicycle shop owner, and went on to open a baby furniture store in Washington, D.C. Heeding requests from customers to sell toys, Lazarus decided to do so and, starting in 1957, dropped furniture to sell only toys.

That plan worked astonishingly well for more than six decades. But times change, and consumer demands change, especially in the digital age. Geoffrey and the marketing model couldn’t cut it anymore. Toys R Us is shutting down.

An email from the corporate office did not establish a time frame, so it is not known – locally -when Toys R Us will close at Washington Mall or at Village Square Mall in Bethel Park. A Babies R Us also will be shuttering in Bethel.

We don’t know how long our cherished friend has, but it isn’t much.