Since its reorganization three years earlier, sales had more than doubled to nearly $750 million in fiscal 1981, a year in which many toy sellers suffered, especially during the holiday season. By 1980 Toys "R" Us had earned a solid reputation as a retailer of great efficiency, with 101 stores around the country. Customers then automatically assumed most of the store's items were equally well-priced and did the rest of their shopping there. Lazarus's approach to pricing was vastly different from that of his competitors: he sold the items shoppers wanted most at little or no profit. To reflect its principal business, the company had changed its name to Toys "R" Us, Inc., with Lazarus serving as its president and CEO. It had closed or sold all of its discount store operations only the 63-store toy chain and ten traditional department stores remained.
In 1978 Interstate emerged from its reorganization a vastly different company.
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In years to come the company would upgrade its computer system many times to keep pace with its ever-growing sales volume and inventory level. Before 1974 Toys "R" Us was still ordering and counting stock manually, but that year the company streamlined its ordering and inventory system by installing its first computer mainframe.
By that year Interstate had 51 Toys "R" Us stores, and it continued to open new ones during its court-ordered reorganization. In 1974 Interstate declared bankruptcy, its debt at the time the largest accumulation of liabilities in retail history. Interstate undertook an aggressive but ill-fated expansion, overextending itself, and the 1973-74 recession aggravated its problems. By 1960 it had acquired two discount chains: the White Front Stores in southern California and the Topps chain, located mainly in New England. The company sought relief for its financial woes in the burgeoning discount store arena by experimenting with a discount store in Allentown, Pennsylvania. With 46 small department stores in its fold by 1957, sales growth had dwindled to almost nothing, and profit margins were shrinking. for $7.5 million but continued to run the toy business that he had created.įounded in 1916, Interstate became publicly owned in 1927. By 1965 Lazarus operated four such outlets in the Washington, D.C., area, and the next year, when revenues had increased to $12 million, he sold the profitable toy supermarkets to Interstate Stores Inc. five years later he opened a discount toy supermarket in Rockville, Maryland, the first to bear the abbreviated Toys "R" Us name (the store's original name would not fit on its sign). In 1952 he opened the Baby Furniture and Toy Supermarket in Washington, D.C. The bike shop was eventually renamed Children's Supermart. Noting that customers often asked if he sold toys, Lazarus began adding rattles and stuffed animals to his stock within a year. This was just two years after the beginning of the baby boom, and Lazarus aimed to attract as customers the families of GIs coming home from World War II. In 1948, after a stint in the Army, Lazarus began selling baby furniture in his father's shop, using as seed capital $5,000 from a combination of savings and a bank loan. Toys "R" Us founder Charles Lazarus was born above a Washington, D.C., shop where his father repaired and sold used bicycles. also sold its products online through and other web sites, with this online retailing conducted via an alliance with, Inc. The company operated, licensed, or franchised an additional 544 toy stores in 29 foreign countries, headed by Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, Spain, and Australia. There were also four Geoffrey stores featuring products from all three of the "R" Us formats. locations, 681 were general toy stores under the flagship Toys "R" Us name, 183 specialized in infant and toddler products under the Babies "R" Us banner, 146 were children's clothing outlets under the Kids "R" Us brand, and 37 operated as educational specialty stores under the Imaginarium moniker. Although Toys "R" Us stood as the only nationwide toy store chain in the United States in the early 2000s, it was no longer the nation's leading seller of toys, having lost that position to retailing behemoth Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is one of the world's leading retailers of toys, children's clothing, and baby products.
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