Courtesy of Pam Martens
After seven decades, Toys ‘R’ Us may have run out of options and be forced to liquidate all of its U.S. stores according to media reports. (The company called the reports “speculation.”) Toys ‘R’ Us had filed for bankruptcy protection on September 19 of last year, listing assets of $6.57 billion and debts amounting to an astounding $7.89 billion.
If the news reports are accurate, more than 36,000 U.S. jobs could be at stake. According to the company’s 10K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 12, 2017, as of the beginning of last year, the company employed “64,000 full-time and part-time individuals worldwide, with 36,000 domestically and 28,000 internationally.” Those figures, the filing said, do not include the tens of thousands of part-time employees the company hires for the holiday season.
The liquidation would also put a vast quantity of empty commercial buildings on the market. According to the company’s website, it has 564 Toys ‘R’ Us store locations in the United States plus another 230 Babies ‘R’ Us stores.
Its international footprint is also sprawling. The Toys ‘R’ Us website reports that its has “765 international stores and more than 245 licensed stores in 37 countries and jurisdictions.” It is not known what the company plans to do with the bulk of those operations. In addition to troubles in the U.S., in an SEC filing on February 23 of this year, the company wrote that it would be shuttering operations in the U.K. The filing said:
“On February 27, 2018, as part of the overall restructuring plan of the Company, Toys ‘R’ Us Limited and certain of its U.K. affiliates constituting the U.K. business (the ‘U.K. Subsidiaries’), commenced an administration under the U.K. Insolvency Act 1986 (the ‘Administration’). Pursuant to the Administration, the U.K. Subsidiaries will begin winding down business operations in the United Kingdom.”
The problems besetting Toys ‘R’ Us are a combination of its private equity/leveraged buyout in 2005 and the fact that big box retailers like Walmart and Target are able to undercut its pricing in its most important holiday selling season, where it achieves approximately 40 percent of its total annual sales.
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