What Happened to All the Toy Stores?

Merry Christmas!!

This may be the first year in a long time I have not bought - researched, selected, sought out - Christmas gifts for young children. In recent years, it has been a challenge to find toys that are both fun and educational. My mother used to admonish me when she looked at the stuff I got for my own kids: “Toys don’t have to be educational!” Yes they do.

Actually, almost any toy is educational in nature because children naturally learn all the time. They learn at school but also on walks to school. They learn from movies and television (sorry, but they do). They learn while playing with toy trucks and Barbies and dinosaurs and plush, red Elmos.

Obviously, some toys are better than others. Legos are probably always a better bet than a singing Mickey Mouse, but even Mickey will teach kids something. Still, if you are on a budget, as I always was, you probably look for toys that are both fun and educational (sorry, Mom).

This was a much easier proposition in the 1980s and 1990s. As my kids grew older, and toys got more expensive (gaming systems and the games required to make them work but also computers and phones), I started to notice that toy stores were slowly, inexplicably disappearing from the suburban landscape.

I discovered the delights of a colorful, engaging toy store when my daughter was a toddler. On rainy or cold days, we would traipse to the mall where mom could get coffee, and Sara, frequently along with her playgroup friends, could explore at least four toy stores: FAO Schwartz (and its marvelous all-Barbie auxiliary shop where everything was pink or gold); K-B Toys, where the same Barbies could often be found for half the price and the store was literally only three aisles wide and about a tenth the size of FAO; a short-lived store whose name I cannot bring forward that sold the best, most unique toys and supported PBS stations; and a small gift shop owned and operated by the folks who founded the Library Ltd. bookstore chain that had a great children’s section.

There were other stores that came and went, such as the Disney Store, which mostly had clothing and stuffed animals, but we could spend hours in the FAO store, where they graciously provided a Brio train set-up with a toddler-sized table where kids could play even if you didn’t buy anything. We discovered these stores during Sara’s toddler years but continued to visit and play (and sometimes buy) into Simon’s toddler years. In between stores, the kids could run up and down the mall (driving actual shoppers crazy, I'm sure), or throw pennies into the fountain, which always ensured good naps for everyone. Honestly, these are some of my favorite memories from those years.

At some point, probably as they started preschool and then school, and I went back to work, we stopped going to the mall regularly, but by then we had found other toy stores that carried the kinds of things I wanted for them (Legos, challenging puzzles, arts and crafts), such as Zany Brainy and, if all else failed, Toys ‘R Us. Then one day, maybe 15 years ago, I was in the mall looking for a gift and realized I hadn’t seen a single toy store. Not one. I walked the mall a second time to see if I had just missed them. The only stores I found that catered to kids were Build-a-Bear and Gap Kids.

K-B (aka KayBee) Toys was founded in 1922 and had 1324 stores in 1991, but was in bankruptcy court by 2009. Its remaining 461 stores were acquired by Toys ‘R Us. The K-B trademark was obtained by Strategic Marks, a company that buys and tries to revive defunct brands. It has so far been unsuccessful with K-B and has abandoned the trademark.

FAO Schwarz was founded in 1862 in Baltimore before moving to New York City and was known for high-end toys, such as life-sized stuffed animals, Brio, and Barbie collectibles. They filed for bankruptcy twice, first in 2003, permanently closing their famous Fifth Avenue location in 2015. They have since reopened at 30 Rockefeller Plaza and have established new locations around the world. The brand name and trademarks are still owned by the family’s foundation and are licensed to the ThreeSixty Group, which owns and operates all the retail locations. I don’t know when the location here (at the Galleria) closed.

I have no idea what happened to the PBS store, which was by far my favorite of the lot. The Disney stores in St. Louis were mostly gone by 2000 (currently some have moved into Target stores). There was also a Warner Bros. Studio Store for a while, but those were all closed in 2000.

Zany Brainy, an FAO Schwarz company that focused on educational toys and multi-media products for kids 4-13, such as games, puzzles, infant development, books, building toys, and arts & crafts, operated from 1991 to 2003, when it went into bankruptcy.

The first Toys ‘R Us store opened in 1948. By 1957 it had become a sort of big-box retailer, putting smaller toy stores out of business, but by 2017, it had unmanageable debt and filed its first bankruptcy. Apparently there are about 400 “store-within-a-store” sites planned for Macy’s stores. I don’t know if any have opened in St. Louis.

I don’t remember any real toy stores from my own childhood. Maybe they existed, but if they did, my mother did not take us. I honestly don’t know where she bought our toys. I never thought to ask. It has always felt to me like the proliferation of these specialty stores, especially the ones focused on educational products, with colorful displays of toys and gadgets and puzzles that intrigued my kids and me (and that stayed with us for years - in fact, there may be a few still in storage downstairs), existed inside a kind of short-lived toy store renaissance, from basically the 1980s to the early 2000s, when they all mostly disappeared.

I guess their disappearance roughly corresponds with the beginning of the internet era in retail (and the beginning of the demise of malls overall), and I’ll bet there are books out there on the subject. Their years of popularity also align with the millennial generation, who are mostly the children of baby boomers. (Yep. There’s a whole book just waiting to be written on this topic.)

I can’t help but lament the loss of these magical places. Malls today seem more geared toward sporting goods, women’s clothing, food courts, and aromatics - stuff for adults, in other words. The good news is small toy stores still exist, although you have to seek them out. St. Louis Magazine published an article last month on “7 Must-Shop Toy Stores in St. Louis” (link below), and one of the most successful and long-lasting locally, Imagination Toys in Ladue, makes the list (although, being in Ladue, it’s always been a little too pricey for my pocketbook). Pro-Tip: You can search on Amazon for toys by age (and gender if you must).

So that’s my Christmas post for this week. I got to spend about four days with my favorite daughter this past week and then drove her to Memphis to pick up her husband at the airport and spend a week with his extended family (and I only cried for about 5 minutes after dropping her off, picking up a Starbucks latte, and beginning my five-hour drive home).

Merry, merry Christmas to all who celebrate it.

Beth

St. Louis Magazine List: https://www.stlmag.com/family/best-toy-stores-in-st-louis/?fbclid=IwAR17oWe-EGd-2gqtANfyF8Ag7WFjXj4FRgn6WIE9NZOdgt37rtlxhdgIopg