Or B. Dalton instead of Waldenbooks. Oh, and don’t forget that many malls had some kind of video arcade too.
Now that the bookstores are gone, there’s Gamestop and that’s about it. Malls are for females for the most part. Even the clothing stores for men are there for wives and girlfriends to shop for their guys. There really isn’t much else for us guys besides food places.
No, there’s just not much for us old dudes. There’s plenty there for my 15-year-old brand-savvy sneakerhead son, between Zumiez, other “cool clothes” stores, and the shoe places. Young guys are way more style conscious than our generation.
Ok, I love this song, but there’s a better video of it. This is so charming. It’s a high-school project from way back in the '70’s and I’ll be damned if it isn’t a fantastic capture of this song, considering it was done with whatever they filmed with back then and high-school kids created it.
I guess so. I came of age in a bluejeans and non-descript shirt age. I don’t think we ever really shopped for style, us guys back then.
It still seems like the overwhelming majority of stores in malls are aimed at females.
Womens’ sections of shoe stores (at least DSW) also tend to be 3x bigger.
Is it just me or is there a layer of innuendo in that video? Something along the lines of how the female is the gatekeeper and the male is the keymaster?
There’s a hot topic spinoff (boxlunch) that basically sells all the non-game type stuff that GameStop sells, but moreso, and so seems primarily targeted at guys.
And the axe falls tomorrow. If you have any rewards s at TRU, use them today.
33,000 jobs kaput.
Selfishly, I’m glad I track /r/ActionFigures closely enough to have ordered a TRU exclusive Marvel Legends set within hours of it being available Monday, and I worry about other already announced TRU exclusives due later this year.
“You can find more zest for life in a Walgreens.”
That last line is such a savage burn. Brutal.
Bad news for traditional videogames & console makers. The Toys R Us holiday bump was significant. I am not sure its going to be picked up by online only. Hmm.
How much of that was specific to Toys R Us, and how much of that will just be absorbed into the remaining retail? There aren’t going to be fewer kids this Christmas, won’t that just mean more shoppers at Target or Walmart or Best Buy or whatever?
The only question I wonder about is who gets their exclusives. That seemed to be their only plan.
My experiences with Toys R us were not good over the last years. The employees were rude. Their Price Match policies were pretty scummy, they never seemed to carry the good board games, and their online store was awful… maybe just not as awful as Sears.
Could be. I hope so. My fear, with some data, is that Toys r Us accounted for a good size chunk of the “what do we get the grandkids this year?” demographic who dutifully trotted out to the toy store to buy stuff each Christmas.
But if I am scared by this I imagine toy manufacturers are terrified. Even of Target/Walmart pick up the slack, the shelf space will always be smaller then a dedicated store. How you launch a new IP toy without Toys r Us there is also something of an open question.
The kids watch other kids open toys. It’s a huge market, millions of followers. So to get the kids to ask for your toy, you get a kid with a camera to open it online… boom, marketing. Then you get the kids to tell the grandparents what they want and the parents tell them where to get it. I’d tell them Amazon or the dozens of other places they can get it.
The store browsing part is, well I don’t do that much so I guess that might be lost.
Megan McArdle quoted a toy company exec (Mattel, maybe?) saying that with Toys R Us gone, it’s very possible that 10-15% of (Mattel, maybe)'s sales just wouldn’t happen. Toys R Us accounted for 2-3% of toy sales in a market that’s only been growing by about 1% annually.
I loved looking for stuff for my nieces and nephews at Toys R Us. There is no way to properly figure out if a doll is gonna work looking at it on Amazon. Or if it’s a nice action figure vs. something cheap and terrible.
Trump needs to implement some kind of tariff.