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.
Brick & mortar shopping will continue losing ground and this will only be one domino amongst many when all is said and done
My take is that these things go in cycles...if you look at the early 1900s Sears (and some others) upended retailers with their catalog sales. It really was revoluntionary but retailers came back.
As a thought exercise we can imagine the consumer world with a bulk majority of sales being online. At some ponit, a generation may arise that will have nostalgia for the days of walking in to a retailer and seeing stuff...the whole shopping experience maybe.
We are living in heady times where technology is accelerating faster than our ability to process how it impacts our culture. Drone deliveries of online purchased goods, 3d printing of replacement parts and space based internet delivery. What a time to be alive!
I'm just sorry I won't be around to see mankind's expansion to the stars and tourist visits to other planets!
and more about how hedge funds and private equity work. When they buy companies, they make those companies assume the debt (or most of it) that arises from the purchase. In other words, if I swoop in to buy your company for $1 million, I might cobble together $100k from my investors and just put the other 900k on the company's books.
Now much or even all the cash the company might have ends up being used to service the debt instead of being invested into improving the stores. The grave has already been dug.
I haven't read the entire thread, but allow me to do a pre-emptive FU to anyone gloating about this because they don't like DB. This is about thousands and thousands of people for whom even losing one paycheck means not being able to pay the rent or mortgage.
Not capitalism, economic evolution. Even the most ardent advocate of the worker's paradise would allow that evolution of technology and the economy means that some industries will contract as others expand. And yes, there will be layoffs, but there will also be opportunity.
That a Coca Cola bottle top promotion will pull Toys R Us away from the abyss?
Dunno that anyone could have saved the company. But if it was going to happen, they needed someone who was a visionary.
I think any of us could have told them that wasn't Dave Brandon.
and my SHOP, BABA, and BZUN stocks are going through the roof.
There will only be a handful of big box stores left in a decade. The new model will be for brik-n-mortar to be used for showrooming only with same day deliveries by autonomous vehicles.
The automotive OEM's will be largely dead twenty years from now, too.
This wasn't Brandon's fault. That company had so much debt piled on in the leveraged buyout that it had to basically continue to make money as though Amazon didn't exist. I'm not saying that he did a great job... but it was probably an impossible one.
The real bad guys here are the group lead by Bain. Most of the pre recession leveraged buyouts are all facing the same issues. Lots of job losses in many sectors because of it.
didn't destroy Toys R'Us. Many factors including Wal-Mart who went after them with predatory pricing, later Amazon who could provide the same selection at a lower cost. And finally Wall Street who loaded the company up with debt it could never pay back as its revenue streams shrunk. And finally management (prior to Brandon) who failed to see the value that online sales could bring to the company and never managed to put a functioning website for sales into practice.
Dave was simply there to burry the coffin, and collect a small fee. (relatively small)
Brick an mortar collapse. Already dozens of malls across the country are closing. Soon we will just be left with online shopping, grocery stores and Walmart.
I hate Wal-Mart.
Just saying.
Was hollowed out and destroyed by Bain Capital, KKR & Co. and Vornado Realty Trust, leaving it with mountains of debt that it never got out from under. Thousands of people out of a job, and somehow nothing's been done to end this vampirism.
Guess I'll have to keep getting all my kids' toys from grandma for free. Damn.
More games, more toys, oh boy! I wanna be a Toys-R-Us kid!
This is sad
October 3rd, 2018 at 5:33 PM ^
https://kotaku.com/toysrus-files-for-chapter-11-bankruptcy-but-its-not-…
Not dead yet.
If all goes well, Toys’R’Us could emerge from Chapter 11 protection in much better shape to take on competing retailers online and offline. There’s still a chance it could all go south, but the company remains hopeful it will all work out. CEO Dave Brandon certainly seems optimistic in the official announcement, saying, “Today marks the dawn of a new era at Toys’R’Us where we expect that the financial constraints that have held us back will be addressed in a lasting and effective way.”