Toys R Us -- ruining a company is very lucrative

Sears, the Original Everything Store, Files for Bankruptcy

Same basic story -- hedge fund buys company and intentionally runs it into the ground gaining profit the whole way down. At what point do we re-examine the nature of corporate 'personhood' in light of the conflict of interest of those who are making the decisions for it?

If you had power of attorney over your elderly relative and used that legal authority to deny them medical care while also taking out home equity loans in their name and selling their house etc. you would be locked up. Instead we have these doofuses that can ruin the lives of 10s of thousands of employees while taking home massive profit. Seems just so fundamentally wrong.

Even today, over two decades past its prime, Sears has some 68,000 employees. That's more than the sum total of every American coal miner. Where's Mr. MAGA?

I know the world is full of coulda-woulda-shoulda, but Sears actually had a relatively sophisticated inventory system in the late 70s that tied their in-store stock to the catalog and vice versa. Imagine a world where this was continually updated and brought screaming into the dawning of ecommerce. They could have easily had 'Prime Now' 10 years ago.

So the first of the NEW ToysRUs stores is now open in NJ and it is interesting to read all the comment pieces about it.

Some people are flabbergasted that it is now more akin to a WeWork setup where toy companies pay to have different micro-shops set up within a larger space. This is silly because that sort of shelf-space allocation is already done in every corporate retail outlet imagineable. It was certainly the case in the old ToysRUs where they auctioned off sections of the store and endcaps etc to the highest bidder, this is just taking that concept to the next level.

Others are aghast that the new store has cameras and sensors to track shopper movement and gauge overall interest by demographic. (what toys do boys 6-12 linger at...where do all the asian kids congregate?). Again this is not new. Tracking shoppers is very much a thing these days and even built into many of those nifty 'coupon apps' that people download. This is just being a bit more obvious about it and offering that data up for sale rather than using it solely internally.

Still others wonder why it is that all the kiosks inside the store send shoppers looking for an item that isn't for sale on site to a Target.com based web portal. Large physical retail is functionally just a showroom at this point anyway. How many of you pop open Amazon.com on your phone while at a store and check to see what the price is or what other options are available? I know I do it constantly and even will go so far as to try an item at the store and then buy it from Amazon so that it just gets automagically delivered versus me lugging it home in an Uber.

To me it sounds like the new store is actively trying to function in a current retail sales model where the physical store serves a function that is closely tied to the physical presence and work to those strengths rather than tilt at windmills.

The other comments I'm seeing are those who are trying to retrocon the story of the original ToysRUs's failure and canonize the original investors for having helped poor Geoffrey last as long as he did. Yeah they kept the poor chap on life support, but only because they had leeches attached to his jugular draining him dry.