Now let's check out the most recent Toys R Us store reboot. We visited this store in March 2025. The store opened on November 2, 2024, and is listed at about 8,000 square feet of retail space.
The store is located at a prime spot at the Northeast corner of the Tanger Outlets facing the main road and the Premium Outlets just across the road.
The front of the store has a lot of decorations to draw attention to the store.
A cool storyboard showing a brief history of Geoffrey and the history of Toys R Us.
Now for the store. Just to be clear, there was a decent amount of customer activity within the store, but I used AI to edit out any people that were in my photos.
Photo OP!
An even better photo OP!
Checkout line entrance.
The dinosaur in the top left-hand corner moves and opens its mouth.
The selection of toys is a lot better than you will find at the Macy's Toys R Us locations.
There is a massive board and card game selection.
I haven't played a board game or card game in years, but I was tempted to purchase one here.
Preschool and infant toys.
Sports and outdoor toys.
Girl's toys and books.
Collectible action figures. Some of these were popular when I was a kid back in the 80's.
Some of the larger toys that the smaller Macy's locations don't have are here.
Lots of Legos here too. More than I have pictured.
One last look at the front of the store.
Here are my thoughts about the store. They have a really good mix of products for the store size. Just about every well-known brand of toys is covered. The store is well-stocked and clean. There is a much better variety of products than the first reboot of the stores we saw in 2019. There is a minimal number of electronic toys which is a good thing to see in 2025 and more of a return to what made Toys R Us a great place for kids. While the 2019 reboot had some good ideas (linked here), the product selection was not anywhere close to what is available here. I hope we see more of these stores in the future. This store reminds me a lot of the Toys R Us express stores, but with a much cleaner store than we were used to.
This TRU looks pretty good! I am somewhat surprised about that given some of the recent attempts at TRU reboots. Some might complain that this store isn't as big as the original TRUs, but it reminds me of the old mall toy stores that were the norm when we were kids. In reality, this is even bigger than those Playhouse Toys, Circus Worlds, and even the Kay-Bee Toys that came later. The selection is a little better than what the mall toy stores had and certainly the store has more room to move around in which is good when there are potentially a lot of rambunctious kids running around.
ReplyDeleteIt is kind of funny to see such a nice looking floor at a store like this given how basic the flooring is in many retailers these days and also the basic warehouse look of original TRU stores. I suppose TRU knows that they fill a higher-end of the market these days since parents can buy toys from places like Walmart and Target so they know they need to present things in a better way to earn business. We'll see if it works, but at least visually, this store looks like a worthy competitor.
It is neat how the AI feature can take the people out of the photos. I know you always try to take images without people in them so this should make things a lot easier for you.
This version of Toys R Us definitely has a lot more stock than what we saw in the first reboot attempt. There is a much better selection available here than in the Macy's stores I have been to. I also think that this is a perfect location to draw customers in. The outlet malls here are very popular and draw in people from all over central Texas.
DeleteI am not sure if this concept would work in just any regular existing big box shopping center or mall. I don't think people really go toy shopping these days since the old Toys R Us stores disappeared. Impulse buys are what they seem to target with Macy's stores and these carefully selected stores.
I didn't realize they opened a standalone store recently. In this day and age, it's unlikely that the big box Toy R Us will come back, but this is still a very nice format and it's good to see they are still trying to make a comeback. I was a little concerned about how empty this store looked, until I read the part people were edited out with AI, so it's good to hear that people are still shopping at Toys R Us.
ReplyDeleteThe new Toys R Us will never have a massive following like the old stores did. I think the company disappearing for as long as it did, hurt the chances of a large revival. Thanks for the comment!
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