We visited a Toys R Us store that's about to shut down - and it was a grim glimpse of the future

Jessica Tyler,Jessica Tyler

Mar 21, 2018, 21:38 IST

We visited a Toys R Us store that's about to shut down - and it was a grim glimpse of the future

Business Insider/Jessica Tyler
I visited a Toys R Us store in Yonkers, New York.

Toys R Us will be closing or selling all 735 of its US stores after filing to liquidate last week.
Back in late January, the company announced plans to close just 170 Toys R Us and Babies R Us stores.
We went to a Toys R Us store in Yonkers, New York, that was part of the initial round of store closings. Overall, the store was a sad vision of what's to come as Toys R Us closes locations.

Toys R Us will be closing or selling all of its US stores after filing a motion to liquidate its US business on March 15. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September.

In January, the company announced plans to close just 170 Toys R Us and Babies R Us stores, many of which have already started going-out-of-business clearance sales.

Toys R Us' liquidation includes a plan to close or sell all 735 of its remaining stores, but sales at these additional stores aren't set to begin until Thursday in at least some locations.

To see what a Toys R Us store looks like in the midst of the company's demise, we visited a Yonkers, New York location that was part of the initial round of Toys R Us closures. This is what we found:

The Toys R Us I went to in Yonkers, New York, was on the list of store closures that were announced in January. It will close imminently.

When I first walked in, there were no obvious signs that it would be closing soon. Everything looked well-stocked, and we didn't see any clearance tags at first.

As I continued walking through the store, I realized how wrong my first impression was. The shelves only looked stocked because everything was spread out and pushed to the front. There were small sale signs next to nearly every item.

It seemed as if the empty shelves were strategically hidden behind the larger displays up front.

Nearly everything was marked as sale or clearance, and half the shelves were empty.

Many aisles of the store looked like this.

The further back in the store I went, the more depressing it looked.

However, there were quite a few aisles that were fully stocked. Many were full of sale and clearance tags, but some weren't.

Like in the front of the store, many shelves that looked well-stocked at first actually just had one product pushed to the front so that it looked like there were more.

There were a lot of torn boxes that seemed to be randomly left around the store ...

... and some displays were falling apart.

A lot of the merchandise wasn't in great condition. This Minnie Mouse toy looked like it had been stepped on and then put back on the shelf. Other toys were falling out of boxes, and a lot of the stuffed animals were collecting dust.

The Lego display in the center of the store looked sad ...

... and the electronics didn't look much better. The store still had a large selection of video games, none of which were on sale, but most of the accessories and other electronics were out of stock.

The pattern of empty shelves and clearance sales continued as I walked back toward the front of the store.

The displays by the register were in bad shape ...

... and some were completely empty.

This table was past the registers, right before the exit. It had some random marked-down merchandise on it, but there was no label and no one around to ask what it was. The store, overall, was sad, and it was representative of what the future of Toys R Us holds as its stores prepare to close.

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