ToysRUs Plans Deeper Stock of Toys in Stores

If you’re a child of the seventies and eighties you probably remember the toy shelves as far larger and better-stocked back then than they are today. Photos at Kenner Collector show us Star Wars toy displays from the seventies and eighties that support our memories: Stores did carry more toys when we were kids.

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Well, it seems that ToysRUs plans to try to return to the days of fully-stocked and operational stores. A new WSJ article posted yesterday, Struggling Toys ‘R’ Us Tries Fuller Stores, shares with us news that ToysRUs is stepping away from “just in time” practices and experimenting with deep stock in stores.

Before Mr. Brandon arrived, stores were considered to be in stock if they had three of a particular item. “If someone came in and bought those three items, we’d be out of stock, which meant we were out of stock a lot,” Mr. Brandon said. Fuller shelves are more appealing to shoppers than half empty racks that look picked over, he said.

This is great news for manufacturers and toy fans, but I worry that today’s discount-hungry crowd may not be capable of supporting deeper supplies in stores. Part of the sale of action figures to collectors, for example, is dependent on the scarcity of items; witness the rush to find Captain Phasma action figures when the toy was tough to locate at retail. Would demand have been as high if collectors walked into ToysRUs and saw seventies-like supply levels of the various Star Wars action figures.

I’ll definitely have to visit a few different TRU locations after Christmas and see if the store does heavy markdowns on over-stocked toys.

6 thoughts on “ToysRUs Plans Deeper Stock of Toys in Stores

  1. This is interesting as I’m guessing that heavily marked down stock is what helped Toys R’ Us get into bankruptcy trouble to begin with. Maybe just plan on stocking more than 3 at a time?

  2. If they doubled their stock numbers on Star Wars, Transformers, TMNT, WWE and the like they would be way better off. It seems like they constantly end up with shelves of the remainders because of their poor policies. (So many Greedos!)

  3. One of the biggest issues w/TRU I consistently saw on the East Coast was this. There’d be no stock… For months! Or worse, there’d be 50+ of one character in a wave, a sure sign a reseller is abusing the store’s return policy.

    Hopefully the increase in stock will result in a little more competitive pricing, another issue they’ve had, but on the ground, the main issue I see throughout the U.S. in TRU stores is Amazon & eBay resellers dumping their unpopular stock back into TRU. If they just made each figure a different SKU in their system it would prevent this type of rampant scam

  4. I’ve actually wondered for a LONG time if some of the issues we’ve seen at retail are legitimately “boys don’t play with action action figures” or if it was something retailers kept telling themselves until it just became an “accepted truth” like “boys don’t want female action figures”. When I worked at Walmart, I saw first hand how an action figure would sit, untouched, until the peg was restocked (often with more of the same) only to see sales noticeably increase.
    There seems to be an ingrained “resistance” to the last one of something, a perception that because it is the only one, there MUST be something wrong with it (a big reason the US sees so much waste food production), even though it more often does not.

    But I’m not sure collectors should be a factor here (or at all). If Phasma were readily available as we saw with dozens of figures during Episode 3, the most likely scenario would be that we wouldn’t be seeing the after market mark up, but a LOT more consumers (especially kids and parents, the ones actually driving this market) would actually be able to BUY the figure, which is what the stores and Hasbro really want.

    “Scarcity” might be an issue for collectors, but I’m of the opinion that mentality and the stores that have adopted it, have done wonders to kill the action figure sections in many retail stores.

    If demand warranted a 70s/80s levels of supply for current Star Wars product, Hasbro and retailers would be FAR happier than if Joe Collector is going out to stores a cleaning out 2-3 of a couple different characters.

  5. I would love to see this rolled out. It’s the same in Australia (well, at my TRU anyway). They just don’t seem to get enough stock, or they overstock on crap that no-one seems to want (Transformers 4 being a notable recent example). Then they’ll suddenly get in one case of say, Combiner Wars, which vanishes in a flash. Though I understand there are larger economics at play here, it ultimately makes for a depressing shopping experience which becomes self reinforcing. It’s not just limited to TRU either; Store X doesn’t sell many toys because they never have any stock…because they never have any toys…and so on and so forth.

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