My group chat went nostalgic Thursday night. Somebody posted the giraffe. Somebody else posted a photo of the bike aisle. Within an hour four grown adults were trying to describe the exact sound the doors made in 1994, and one of us typed out the jingle from memory, all of it, correctly.
Not one of us had set foot in a Toys R Us since college.
That is the entire story.
The company said this week it will close or sell every one of its US stores, and the internet produced the largest wave of affection I have seen for a retailer in years. Genuine affection. People wrote paragraphs. People got legitimately sad. And none of it was worth a dollar.
Affection is not preference, and a brand that has banked enormous amounts of the first while earning none of the second is in more danger than a brand nobody feels anything about at all.
The debt gets blamed, and the debt is real. Five billion dollars of it since the buyout. But debt is what made the decline fast. It is not what made the decline happen.
What made it happen is that at some point the answer to why here stopped existing. Amazon ships the same Nerf gun in two days. Target has it cheaper and you were already in the building for paper towels. Meanwhile the store itself got worse every year: fluorescent, understaffed, product locked behind plexiglass, an aisle of empty pegs where the thing your kid wanted used to be. The nostalgia online this week is for the 1994 store. Nobody is grieving the 2017 one, because nobody was in it.
Lego had the same problem and answered it. Not with lower prices, which it could never win, but with a reason to be in the room: the sets, the films, the stores where a kid can build something at a table. Affection converted into a trip. That is the conversion Toys R Us never made, and it had more affection to work with than almost anyone.
Here is the uncomfortable part for anyone reading this with a beloved brand. Love is a lagging indicator. It tells you what you were worth to somebody ten years ago. It tells you nothing about whether they will choose you on a Tuesday against a competitor who is faster and four dollars cheaper. The warmest brand equity in your category will not survive a missing reason to show up.
Nobody is grieving the 2017 one, because nobody was in it.
I went to Powell's Sunday and stood there a while, watching people actually buy things in a physical store in 2018, and thought about how much work that takes. Then I came home and Barnaby had gotten into a paper bag, which was free, and had his full attention, and required no strategy at all.