It's interesting, there's a Toys R Us cobranded as a Babies R Us near our house (I could walk there if I had any reason to go to a toy store) that has no indication of closing and isn't on the store closure list, but the property where it's located has a sign up about space for lease. The other store there is a La-Z-Boy that isn't expected to close any time soon. I wonder whether the landlord knows something that hasn't been publicized yet.
Last time I was in a Toys R Us was last month in Fort Myers looking for Christmas presents for our nephews and niece. Store was mobbed, but I guess that's to be expected in the days before Christmas. I noted both how cheaply made the toys seemed to be and how almost everything seemed to have some sort of movie or TV show tie-in. That is, obviously as a kid I had Star Wars toys, but we had a lot of things that were not related to movies or TV, especially stuff like Tonka trucks, and Lego wasn't all related to movies back then. Other than Nerf guns and such, there didn't seem to be a lot of non-movie stuff now. (We didn't find anything for our niece at Toys R Us, so later that day we stopped at an independent toy store in the area. Much nicer—higher-quality stuff, Brio trains, no movie tie-ins, no violent Halo-type video games—more like the kind of independent toy store my parents took me to when I was a kid, although we went to Toys R Us too for Intellivision cartridges.) It reminds me of how one of my teachers when I was a kid disapproved of movie-related toys because she felt they impaired your imagination by "letting someone else do your imagining for you." She would HATE today's versions of Lego.
