Had a chance to visit the brand new, Toys R Us at the Garden State Plaza on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the first of their new physical stores.
Not surprisingly, the first thing you can notice is how small the store is compared to their previous stores. They are currently opening up two locations, the one we have here in NJ and a second one in Houston. While a traditional store from the first version would've been around 40,000 sf, the store I visited was about 6,500 sf according to reports I've read. Also understand that future stores will be about 10,000 sf, still much smaller than their older stores.
The other thing that you see right away is that it is much more experiential than the previous version of the stores. Although they had a few flagship stores (like the one in Times Square), most of their stores were really just large warehouse buildings with a lot of merchandise in them. They were pretty unfun places for a company dedicated to sell toys to children. Now, each area of the store is designed to let people actually play. My favorite was the Nerf shooting range, which I thought was pretty cool.
In order to keep the the number of SKU's down in the physical store, they've partnered with Target to deliver additional products through digital screens placed throughout the store. These screens are located throughout the store and allow you to find a broader range of toys than they can stock in the stores. Not sure how partnering with Target will help them build their own brand identity, so it will be interesting to see how this works out for them.
The good news is that the store was pretty crowded (I deliberately took pictures without people as much as possible) and kids certainly seemed to be having a good time. The store had a great deal of staff working the day we visited, so it will also be interesting to see if that continues after the holiday season.
I'll do some additional visits throughout the holiday season and see how it continues and will report back here when I do. For me, creating smaller stores, designed to let children actually play, is what they should've done years ago.