OT: Toys R Us Dead
Our favorite CEO has finished the job. Toys R Us won't emerge from bankruptcy. RIP Geoffrey the Giraffe
To be fair, it may have been an impossible job.
...a good girl!
We all joked and stuff when he took over that it'd fail but wow.
Everything that man touches turns to shit!
The business was already failing, and would have failed with or without DB. He had a near impossible job there, nobody was bringing them back.
I mean, fuck him and all, sure. But be honest about the situation.
Uhhhh didn't the courts just allow the executives to pay themselves outrageous bonuses? WTF
Question one, how do you know he did nothing?
Question two, what makes you think his job was anything but bringing the demise of TRU to a soft landing?
who accelerated the demise were the vampire equity investment firms KKR, Bain, and Vargo who's leveraged buyout for $7.5 billion saddled the company with debt ToysRUs couldn't afford. The interest on the debt payments could have been put into technology or store improvements that could have kept the company going. As crappy of an executive as David Brandon is, he took the helm of the Titanic in this case.
...captained a few previous Titanics, you can't argue with his credentials.
Bain Capital, KKR and the other private equity firms killed Toys R Us. It had no chance after being saddled with so much debt. Jim Hackett probably couldn't have revived the chain.
He should be in line to take over Amazon at this pace.
What innovative things did Dave Brandon try to do to save Toys R Us? Did he do experimental tweaks at different stores to gauge results?
if I were CEO I would have picked a number of markets to try some different things to drive excitement and sales...what worked I would have rolled out at more stores to beta test yet again. Retailers are dying everywhere due to the acceptance, and convenience, of online purchasing. But damn I don't think this guy tried really friggin hard.
Wow...what a plan. Same store sales down in the USA? Spend millions to expand in a foreign market while you bleed money in your home market.
You have to go where the money is. Businesses evolve or they die. U.S. Woolworth went from one of the biggest discount retailer to Footlocker. Tandy started out making leather goods and moved to computers after they bought Radioshack. Demographically, Japan doesn't seem like it would be especially profitable. If that was their strategy, I am sure it was analyzed and scrutinized.
More than Amazon or Wal-Mart killing toy stores, I think youtube did. Many kids love watching unboxings of toys more than actually playing with them. That combined with screens dominating their attention in general and its hard to compete with plastic stuff. Babies R Us seems like it should have been a goldmine and there was a lot of untapped potential.
Like I said, demographically it doesn't make sense. I have no idea if that is what they actually did or not.
But never had very many stores (maybe 150 or so). They seemed to do okay when I was living there a few decades ago but I'm not sure how they're doing now. The birth rate is super low there so I'm thinking not great.
You are a business that has been targeted by Amazon on the Internet side, and Walmart on the brick and mortar side.
You are doomed. Death by the convenience of buying online, or death by the largest retailer the world has ever seen.
Combine that with the fact that kids are playing less and less with toys and more and more with electronics/video games/software...
This wasn't Brandon's fault.
Maybe it was doomed...but the point I was trying to make is that the_dunce didn't do SHIT to really save it did he? I mean, if you're put in charge of a national retailer you try some different things at the stores to drive traffic...each experimental store a hotbox of ideas to test.
Walmart is fighting back against Amazon and other retailers as well like Best Buy. I don't think Dave Brandon ever had an original thought in his head.
...what doomed it was the enormous amount of debt that Bain Capital had the company assume for no reason except profit taking when they should have been investing to stay competitive. Oops.
The only upside of this is that Dave Brandon can now take his proven and innovative marketing genius to some other struggling company or athletic department.
TRU was owned by an alliance between Bain Capital and KKR who did a LBO on it a few years ago. At the time of the purchase they probably knew it was toast and figured they could liquidate it and come out ahead. They hired Brandon to lead that effort and no doubt Brandon knew exactly what he was getting into and charged with doing.
People saying TRU going bankrupt was DB's fault do not know what they're talking about. I'm sure DB is, as Brian put it, a "piece of shit human being". But that doesn't mean he's an incompetent CEO.
personally, i’m waiting for him to take over a publicly traded company. i’m going to short the ever-loving shit out of that company and then retire early
So there was zero chance they "knew it was toast" -- unless their plan was to wait 13 years for it to come to fruition.
No, instead these private equity folks saw (what they thought) was a relatively stable company with enough cash flow that they could load up with debt, pay themselves a nice fee, and then re-structure the company to make it competitive while paying off the debt.
Instead, they got hit with a double-whammy: 1) the Great Recession came, which hurt non-essential retail in particularl, making it an awful time to have to make a ton of debt payments and 2) competition got much more fierce, making it an awful time to have needed capital going to debt instead of needing store renovations and technology.
Brandon was put in a hard spot -- he neither wrecked this company, but nor did he save it. He was paid a lot of money, though, and accomplished little.
"The downfall of Toys “R” Us can be traced back to a $7.5 billion leveraged buyout in 2005, when Bain Capital, KKR & Co. and Vornado Realty Trust loaded the company with debt. For years, the retailer was able to refinance its debt and delay a reckoning."
Perhaps they'll take a look at the New Jersey site; that would be ironic.
Niedermayer dead!
we can get OSU to fire Gene Smith and hire Brandon?????
my grand daughter works there.
Sears was the first thought that came to my mind.
Both Sears and JCP moved out of downtowns to the malls 40 years ago. Now those malls are under seige by Amazon. And people are heading back to downtown to drink craft beer.
The local one has (had?) Sears, Macys, JCPenny, and Toys R Us. I think they are all gone or going and BonTon has filed for protection. I don't go there but I drive by it at least 2x a day.
I think many of malls will soon be car dealerships and medical facilities.
I've been arguing with the wife to finally use it and now I found something to light a fire under her.
Do that outdoors, the burning gift cards produce fumes which you'll want to avoid breathing. /s
It may very well have been "too little, too late" for Toys R Us anyway - actually, it probably was for them a while ago. It's the same old story with so many products, it seems: "Why do I go to the store and pay a premium when I can just get it on Amazon?"
The only service we've really liked where you actually pay a bit more than the store is Shipt, but you're paying people to shop for you basically, so I get that, and it is convenient. There's zilch that is convenient about going to a toy store to pay more for something.
My experience (shopping for toys for two little boys) has been that you had better prepare to get severely gouged on price when shopping for popular toys (e.g. Star Wars, Transformers, Marvel/DC, etc.) on Amazon, compared to the brick-and-mortar stores. You are just as likely to find someone reselling the toys on Amazon with a gigantic markup that they bought elsewhere as you are to find a good deal. I would say that you are actually paying a premium to use Amazon, in those cases. Your mileage may vary...
It does happen that you can pay more on Amazon than elsewhere. However, the category managers are always benchmarking pricing on competitive sites and stores. Generally, the more offers for a particular item through Amazon itself and third-party sellers, the lower the prices will be.
You are correct about being careful to watch for items that are "exclusive" to competitors such as Walmart or Target, but that are somehow available through third-party sellers on Amazon.com. That's almost ALWAYS a case of the 3P seller simply buying an item through the competitor and reselling it on Amazon at a huge markup. Shop elsewhere when you see that the offer (as shown on the product detail page) is not "Sold by and ships from Amazon.com."
