Goodbye, Geoffrey: Toys R Us is closing its last stores
Toys R Us is closing its last U.S. stores by Friday, the end of a chain known to generations of children and parents for its sprawling stores, brightly colored logo and Geoffrey the giraffe mascot.
But many of the children who happily sang the “I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Toys R Us kid” jingle grew into busy parents who found shopping online more convenient. The company, which also owned the Babies R Us chain, was hobbled by $5 billion in debt after a leveraged buyout that left it unable to invest and keep up.
As the last of the U.S. stores close, more than 30,000 workers will be looking for work. Toys R Us’ troubles have also shaken some big toy makers like Mattel and Hasbro.
Customers who were still devoted will be looking elsewhere to shop. Retailers like Walmart and Target are expanding their toy aisles to fill the hole, while Party City is opening 50 pop-up toy shops this fall.
Toys R Us filed for Chapter 11 reorganization last fall and pledged to stay open, but had poor sales during the critical holiday season as customers and vendors shied away. In January, it announced plans to close about 180 stores, but then in March it said it would liquidate the rest of the 700plus stores.
Will the Toys R Us name and mascot disappear forever? An auction for the company’s name, baby shower registry and various trademarks is set for late July. The 16-foot tall statue of Geoffrey the Giraffe that greeted visitors at Toys R Us headquarters in Wayne, N.J., will be moved to a children’s hospital in the state.
Many long-time employees were hoping to retire at a place they called home.
“I’m never going to have a job like Toys R Us,” said long-time employee Patty Van Fossan, 54, from Boardroom, Ohio, who was among a group of workers at protests in New York, fighting for severance that they believe they are owed. “It was the best job I had. I was surrounded by children.” cessors plow it into cheese, butter and milk powder.
“I anticipate that we’ll continue to set these records,” said John Newton, director of market intelligence at the American Farm Bureau Federation. “We’re producing more milk. It’s inevitable. That milk needs to get turned into something storable.”
But the sheer amount of cheese in storage may be causing problems. Cheese prices have fallen in recent weeks, Fuess said, a response both to the surplus and to growing trade concerns.
That fall is problematic, said Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis cultural commodity traders. “The discounted price of U.S. beans compared to Brazilian origin will cause that to happen.”
Trade tensions have intensified in recent weeks, with China vowing to retaliate against President Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs on another $200 billion of Chinese imports.
China is the world’s largest importer of soybeans, partly used to make animal feed, and prospects of fewer shipments from the U.S. have boosted premiums for the oilseed in the Brazilian market.
As of Wednesday, soybeans at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, because the price of cheese is a major factor in the equation that USDA uses to set the price that dairy farmers receive for their milk. The current price — $15.36 per 100 pounds — is about a dollar below the average for 2017 and well below the price that many farmers say they need to break even.
“When inventories get too large, that pushes the prices down,” he said. “And yes, that trickles down to dairy farmers.”
Dairy groups aren’t yet asking USDA to buy the surplus, however — a common practice that Newton calls “quantitative cheesing.” In 2016, dairy farmers requested that the agency buy more than for loading at the Brazilian port of Paranagua in September were at a premium of $1.95 a bushel to futures on the Chicago Board of Trade, according to São Paulo-based broker Ary Oleofar.
That’s double a month earlier. Chicago futures slumped 15 percent in the same period.
The EU is the second-largest destination of Brazilian soybeans, and the South American nation was the main seller to the bloc for at least six seasons, according to data from the Brazilian government and the European Commission.
That could soon change as the potential trade war is set to boost China’s share of South American soybean 90 million pounds of cheese to cut the country’s “mountain” of excess dairy.
Michael Dykes, president of the International Dairy Foods Association, said that although stocks are sky-high, he is confident Americans will eat through them.
That’s because stock-touse ratios, a measure of the amount of cheese taken out of storage, have remained constant even at these higher levels.
On top of that, cheesy foods remain a hallmark of the U.S. diet. This current record was driven by a buildup of non-American, non-Swiss cheeses — largely mozzarella, experts suspect — that could get drawn down by strong summer pizza sales. imports to 90 percent from June to December, according to estimates from Hamburg-based researcher Oil World.
China could replace around 4 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans with Brazilian supplies in the fourth quarter if tariffs are implemented, according to Rabobank. Those losses would be partially offset by 2 million tons of non-China demand moving from Brazil to the U.S., driven largely by the EU, the bank said.
“It’s already happening,” said Pedro Dejneka, partner at Chicago-based MD Commodities. “While China concentrates its purchases on Brazil, the rest of the world turns to the U.S.”