News, Views Etc . . . Passing through . . . gone!

Timpo
Barney has an update, lots of ACW and Wild West from Timpo just come-in....

Herald Toys & Models

"This week we have for sale a collection of early plastic (solid and swoppet-type) Timpo American Civil War and Wild West figures, including some mounted Civil War officers and a Wild West bank robber."

The Toysaurus Lives! Maybe!
They probably got some DNA out of amber? Will Jeff Goldblum play your dad? "Err . . . miss . . . please . . .  scuse-me, err . . how much are . . . humm . . . these toy soldiers please, err, I can't err, seem to find  . . . hur-hum. . . . the label?"



Thought for the day . . .

Maybe - Maybe Not
Ms May asked Parliament for some time yesterday, may I suggest; eight-years, no parole? Six weeks 'till we become Portugal-minus-minus! Minus the sun, minus the smiles! Even Luxembourg will be able to laugh at us . . .and they're just a  truck-stop on the way to somewhere else!

New, Views Etc . . . Toys Я Going...Going...Still Going!

Kerching!

Despite the end coming some time ago, news stories continue to surface about TRU, not lest the recent spate of articles - in the major press - on the sale of six former Toy 'R' Us sites for £30.5m squids, one of the purchasers being Cardiff City Council? Plymouth Council has bought another (and funnily enough Plymouth is one I've been to!), I guess they are looking at conversion to sports facilities or maybe those multi-store craft/antiques markets?

Three have gone to an unnamed retail chain, so will remain shops of some type while the sixth is to be converted into housing it seems?

Gone Under - Down Under

Back in June it was announced that the 44 Australian stores were all to close through July, the whole group including the US parentage is going to be wound-up in the fullness of time, with a few US stores continuing as clearance depots.

As I've said before, not something I'll actually morn, they created the industry-model which destroyed them.

Still Trading!

However there was a good news story (for those who persistently and without reason, cling to a vague 'faith in humanity'); in Cheltenham one autistic lad was so bereft at the closure of his local store, and unable to fully comprehend it (it was his favorite store from infanthood) having fixed-it in his mind, as a constant in his life (as autistic's can), that his mother wrote to TRU explaining the worrying predicament.

Gloucester store invited him down, showed him the 'dead' Toysaurus, gave him a tour so he could finalise its demise - mentally - and presented him with logo boards (including Lego!), point-of sale display boards, an opening-times entrance sign, a large Geoffrey Giraffe and etcetera; allowing him to re-create a permanent TRU in his bedroom - which he has now done!

D is for Death . . . of a Toysaurus.

Or - The bigger they come - the harder they fall.

Not really news; it's been all over the media but I was visiting Woking the other day and popped into the Toysaurus for what will be the last time, and it was a sorry site, I can't imagine they had actually sold everything on the miles of empty shelves, so I guess a lot had been sent back under sale-or-return deals and other stock had probably been shifted in bulk clearance deals to wholesalers,  sold-on to bigger evilBay outfits, or sent to those parts of the TRU-empire still trading; if there are any - Australia, HK, some US stores I think?

Following previous posts and 'News, Views . . . ' on the subject here, and the constant talking-up of their future viability by both the UK and US management, the end unfolded with the same rapidity as the sudden autumn collapse.

Miles of empty shelving.

The 1st of February saw the US parent announce it was looking for a buyer for the UK arm, which pretty-much sealed their fate, and could be seen as an act of cowardice on the part of the US had-office, but it was - I'm sure - also designed to protect a core hub of the US stores.

The trouble with Thatcherite-Regonomics is that it is driven by long-knives and short-termism! The beauty of the Victorian 'family firm' model (even when the firm got to be as big as Cadbury - for instance) was that it featured no knives and long-term vision.

No matter, I have little sympathy for the Toysaurus, as I think you know, and for a month there was little more in the media. However, you could see at Christmas, the writing was on the wall, people are simple creatures with a herd instinct, and the autumn headlines, far from driving people into the stores to look for bargains, frightened them away - I went to the same Woking store in Christmas week and it was dead; an early evening a few days before the 25th it should have been heaving!

Beware - loud [yet vacuous] music!

On the last day of February both Toys 'Я' Us and Maplin (a UK out-of-town/mall-based electronics retailer) announced the plug was being pulled, the administrator's spokesman - Simon Thomas - announcing "All stores remain open until further notice . . . " he also encouraged customers to redeem any vouchers and gift cards outstanding (see below) and added that the search for a buyer went on.

Having watched Price Waterhouse Cooper's (PWC) wind-up a business I was involved with, I know that these 'receivers' and administrators just talk bollocks until they've changed all the locks and padlocked everything they can't sell; closing down forums, denying rumours and threatening disgruntled staff or customers with legal action!

With no stock you can leave the stock-room door open!

On the 9th March came news from Moorfields Advisory (the administrators) that stores not included in the Autumn tranche would begin closing the following week and that an 'orderly wind-down' of the company was underway.

Five days later it was announced that the end had come, the company or the UK arm was bust and the remaining 100 stores would start closing - the same day. The whole process to be completed in six-weeks - which is this Wednesday, but I believe they either closed the final stores Friday just gone, or will close them this coming Friday?

Everything was for sale

If I'd had £40 on me I would have had a ladder, they're £100's new!

Of course the broadcast and print media have been blathering on about the death of another high street staple and it took a Michael Cooper to remind the 'i' (Letters - 16th March) that the Toysaurus is not a 'High Street' store! Which is the point I've made in the past, Toys 'Я' Us are among those corporate 'free market' fans who helped damage the high street in the first place.

Furthermore, in the case of the Toysaurus, they helped destroy the world of the 'Toy Men' and create a global behemoth of a few giants, sourcing licensed TV & movie-character driven polymer tat from China, containerised round the world in huge, polluting, vessels while all the little domestic firms went to the wall . . . well; eat your medicine Toysuarus, you've fed it to everyone else.

No you 'ain't!

At the risk of repeating myself, of the big five; Hasbro and Mattel (1 & 2) are in merger talks, Lego (4) and Hornby Hobbies (5 - Corgi, Scalextric and Airfix) are in trouble and Tomy-Takara (3) are increasingly branding Tomy only (to improve their visible footprint/customer recognition), all five (who between them hold several hundred defunct 'household name' brands) hung on to the coattails of the TRU-model (because they had to) and have suffered as a result.

And there's a wider problem, as well as Maplin, we have B&Q looking ill, Homebase on the way out (both DIY giants), Carpet-Right struggling, Restaurant chains Prezzo and Byron, House of Frazer (department stores), New Look (Fashion) and Jamie Oliver's mini-empire are all in trouble.

The problems are many and varied - B'wreaksit hasn't helped with a falling pound fueling inflation leading to lower consumer spending, which was already down following a global crash, ten-year austerity and negative wage-growth which had nothing to do with Labour and everything to do with global corporate greed and lack of regulation!

To which you can add higher ground-rents and business-rates (greed - bad), competition from Amazon, feeBay and Alibaba et al (all fair under capitalism!), and - recently - the creeping up of union wage demands and minimum-wage requirements (reward - good) have created a minestrone of problems for senior managers.

And it's funny [ironic] that it's now hitting the big malls and out-of-town complexes, as the high street's been under attack for years - from them, and while for a while the 'empty teeth' in the high street were filled quickly with discounters, pop-up's, Chinese-run nail bars, hair dressers and Turkish or Kurdish barbers, the empty units are beginning to stay empty now, even in affluent, middle-class, dormitory-towns like Fleet or large malls like Basingrad's!

Have I said how luscious this figure is?

I bought this morning's posted-figure as a goodbye, for the hell of it, and when I took my 75p 'bargain' to the till it first racked-up as 76p (a trades description (consumer credit) violation!), then got reduced to 61p with an applied  'voucher' I never saw or handled! Chaotic!

Win a hundred-quid and collect it . . . never!

And despite the fact that the store had either four days or 7 to go, and was/will be one of the last to go (being also one of the first to open in the UK), it's still offering all the club-cards, gift-cards, offers and prize-draws, oxymoronic when you consider that six weeks ago the administrator was urging people to use-up such things. I mean - I'm sure nothing would happen if you followed any of this up, but why is it still there at all?

It was amusing, there was very little still in-store, a single large bay (where the bikes used to be) piled-up with mostly Disney-licensed, pinky-purple stuff and last year's movie-related bits, while blokes in their work clothes (on lunch) wandered round talking to their wives on their mobile 'phone; "I don't know, shall I get one?" one chap was saying, and I thought - if you've got a kid, get everything you can carry, there's the next three Christmases and Birthdays here for less than one at normal prices!

See'ya Geoffrey; wouldn't wan'na be'ya!

Stop Press - the last press release stated that all remaining stores will cease trading on Tuesday 24th April - That's All Tomorrow Folks!

Sad - but I ain't crying.

News, Views Etc . . . Toys Я'n't Us!

So; everything dies! It's a fact we struggle to remember and keep having to re-learn, whole galaxies crash-into into each other in a primordial slow-motion, yet whilst also travelling millions of miles an hour, spawning new star systems like caterpillars soup themselves into butterflies.

Continents come and go, volcanoes once a mile high are worn flat to the landscape by wind and rain, and indeed, given the examples above; the bigger things are, the more overdue death is, and spectacular the end might be! The Toysaurus has got very big, and death seems inevitable.

But what was looking like it might be a spectacular collapse a few months ago, seems to be turning into the damp-squib of a long, slow, draw-out, death rattle.

This article deals with the UK situation and compares it to the US end, I believe there are - as yet - no problems announced in Australia, although they were running losses of Au$400m+ a few years ago, so probably looking unhealthy in the long-term, and I don't know and haven't looked up what's happening elsewhere (Europe-Asia), although if the US and UK ends fail completely, the others may find themselves the possessors of independent and no longer related Toys Я Us branding/store-chains?

I'm sure you've all followed the strands of this particular piece of News, Views...; it's been hard to avoid it, but I thought I'd bring all the threads together here, for those who haven't followed it closely, but who are more than vaguely interested!

Toys Я Us (or Toys "Я" Us as they were for the longest time) started life innocently enough as a store selling children's furniture; Children's Supermarket, founded by a Charles Lazarus but as is often the way (you often see it with stores that start by selling pram's and push-chairs), they took on toys as a side-line - because you had the parents and kids in one place - it would be daft not to exploit the situation. So-far-so-good!

However, as more and more space was given over to toys, and the sales of toys became more and more important, the Toys Я Us branding (hereafter; 'Toysaurus') was adopted (in 1957), and expansion was rapid, attracting the attention of a corporate giant; Interstate Department Stores, who were part of the move to large out-of-town retail spaces, alien to us Brits in the 1950's. They also owned White Front, Topps and Children's Bargain Town USA - which was rapidly integrated with the Toysaurus. The rest - as they say - is history!

They came to the UK in the mid-1980's - which is what I thought, when some people were reporting it to be later the other month, I remember the store in Woking was one of the first to open, and it was long before I left the Army! - opening five stores in 1985.

But the trouble was, a good idea - everything under one roof, infants, kids, teens, prams, bicycles, play equipment, pocket-money novelties - left no room for competition, there's a name for it; Category Killer, it's a vicious term for a vicious form of retail.

For instance - within ten years of the Woking branch opening all bar one or two (Games-bloody-Workshop) of all the toy, novelty, gift, modelling and model-railway shops in the ten, twenty, thirty . . . nearest towns and larger villages had shut! And that's not Google search results; I can name half of them! Tangly Model Workshop in nearby Guildford for instance, a fantastic store, long gone!

But, nemesis follows hubris like the plague, and in recent years, the Internet and Amazon on the one hand and (in the US) Target and Walmart on the other have eaten into the Toysaurus's top-line, bottom-line and fat-middle line, like cancers, eating it away, and it all came to a head, as far as media headlines go, back in the autumn, although we have covered some of the preliminary stuff here in the odd 'News, Views . . .' going further back.

Figures release in late December revealed the US Toysaurus lost $623m (£466.5m) in the quarter to the end of October, against losses of 'only' $156m for the same period last year! But they have been struggling for years (the Wikipedia page has the bulk of the USwoes) and lost 'first place toy seller' to Walmart in 1998! Annual profits have halved since 2009.

The first inkling of trouble was the US parent filing for 'Chapter 11' in September, which is a bit like when the 'administrators are appointed' here, except that with Chapter 11 the company keeps control of itself, and the creditors - instead of getting some money - have to form an orderly queue in the waiting room!

As reported here in the autumn, it was stated that the non-US stores wouldn't be affected . . . and so they immediately were, one) because elements in the supply-chain got cold feet, and two) because the pressures on the UK stores are exactly the same.

Steve Knights, managing director of the Toysaurus in the UK first saying back in September that it would be "Business as usual" with no job losses then announcing closures in December with; "All of our stores across the UK will remain open for business as normal until spring 2018. Customers can continue to shop online and there will be no changes to our returns policies or gift cards across this period." Well, I don't know when his spring starts, but stores are already closing!

No sooner had the supply chain be reassured than the pension's regulator began sniffing around; as with Carillion and now Crapita,(as Private Eye have been calling them for 30-odd years, no wool over their 'eye') these companies use the pensions pot (the workers own deferred earnings) as a private piggy-bank, which they are allowed to do by regulators set up by Thatcherite-Raganomic governments . . or governance!

If you're not Orwell, Kafka or a dozen others who tried to warn us - you can't make it up! And the Brwreaksit-friendly Trump & May Show is more of the same!

We now enter the realm of acronyms, a sure sign that the people who rule over us are up to no good!

The creditors [wanting their pound of dodgy flesh] got together with the company [who raided the pension] and the pension regulator [who'd sat and watched, doing nothing for years] to agree with the Pension Protection Fund (PPF) to 'find' (under an old mattress?) £9.8million squids, to shore-up the pension.

However, as part of that deal, 26 of the UK's 105 stores would have to close (approximately a 5th of the stores), which will cost around 800 jobs among a workforce of 3,200, approximately a 4th or a quarter of those employed by the Toysaurus!

The US end hasn't decided but will probably be losing at least a 6th, probably nearer a 5th of its stores, with similar job-losses; they won't be 'coming back to America' Mr. President? Closures have already begun, both in the US, and - despite no real sign of Spring - here.

This all adds-up - in the UK - to a Company Voluntary Agreement or CVA, even closer to the US's Chapter 11, but only requires the Toysaurus to find £3.9m this year, the other six-million coming in 2019-2020, assuming they are still around to honour such pledges!

But there's more, there's always fucking more with all these multi-millionaire, 3-yacht-owning, island-buying, helicopter-flying, semi-fascist, money-grubbing fuckers, while Interstate Department Stores are still technically at the helm, following the first 1999 panic, no; the second (2005 - not covered here), they took the company off the public-markets and it was privatised.

A 'leveraged' buyout (it even sounds evil) was arranged with three now 'owners'; Bain Capital, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, and Vornado Realty Trust (they all manage to sound evil too!), a deal 'smoothed' by Credit Suisse; much heard-of in the media since the 2007/8 global crash - not much of it good. The deal was that they (the three private-equity numpties) would shovel money into the Toysaurus ($6.4bn, most of it borrowed) until they could either float it on the markets again, or find another way out.

But the crash happened - as they do every few years (next one's overdue, and we haven't recovered from the last one), a planned floatation failed (in 2010) - and so they (the serial gamblers) were left this autumn with no more willing lenders, no pension pot and lots, and lots and LOTS of debt, on top of a business model which never envisioned the Internet; they had to find a billion (with a B) dollars by the Christmas just gone.

It's not rocket science! They've been spending $250m PER YEAR servicing debt, $5bn of it! While the taxpayer was bailing-out banks in Europe and the motor-trade in the US, and quantitative-easing was making rich-people even richer, the owners of the Toysaurus were robbing Peter Pension to pay Ivan Interest.

The provisional list of stores closing in the UK (the US arm is looking at 100-200 stores, with totals given so far; 150, 180?) was as follows:

• Aberdeen
• Basingstoke
• Belfast, Newtownabbey
• Birmingham, St Andrews
• Bolton
• Bradford
• Bristol, Brislington
• Cambridge
• Cardiff
• Derry City / Londonderry
• Doncaster
• East Kilbride
• Exeter
• Hayes
• Kirkcaldy
• Leicester
• Livingston
• Manchester, Central Retail Park
• Old Kent Road (London)
• Plymouth
• Scunthorpe
• Shrewsbury
• Tamworth
• Tunbridge Wells
• Watford
• York

In addition to stores earmarked, and stores currently running up to 30%-off everything closing-down sales (Brislington), a 'pop-up' store in Peterborough has already closed (another 15 jobs lost), which is more bad news, as it not only takes the amorphous list to 27, but part of their rescue plan involves small stores!

Which is the bit that would really piss me off; the irony that having destroyed the old system of toy sales, swallowed all the little guys and produced the 'big five' model (Hasbro, Mattel, Tomy-Takara, Lego and Hornby Hobbies, three of whom [underlined] are also having problems now) which gives us such a bland landscape of same-old-same-old licensed crap, are they now going to go head-to-head with the few, struggling, independent survivors and smaller high-street chains like The Entertainer?

But even that small-store plan (announced with all the other part-conflicting announcements back in the autumn) seems like pie-in the sky, as the US parent/s (?) having previously assured everyone the non US/Canada arms would be unaffected are now looking for a buyer for the - now obviously struggling - UK arm.

This news (1st February) has put all the stores back on a long list, made a mockery of the [provisional] short-list and worried the 2,400 staff who had stopped worrying! Poor sales over Christmas (I went to the Woking store about three days before Christmas and it was dead) meaning all 'plans' are now awry!

The Toysuarus is dying, we can all see it's dying, we just don't know when that last heartbeat will flutter, the last breath be heard.

Who's next?

B is for Bouncysaurus and Buffalo, or is it Bison

Nah! Yer wash yer'hands in a by'son! An oldie but goodie! And it could be a wisent!

These are funny little novelty items, I bought a fair few about 10-15 years ago, mostly from a party shop down near Eastbourne somewhere, but a few nearer home (somewhere in Aldershot - I think?), there are Soldiers, footballers and tiny little sky-divers around 1:300-compatible in formations, a nice set of Arctic/Antarctic mammals (Killer-whale, dolphins, seals, sea-lions, walruses &etc.), fish and something else I can't remember because they are all in storage! No matter we can look at them again one day, and in the meantime these were on Clearance at the Toysaurus for a quid the other day.

What looks like a Gaur (or poorly sculpted Wildebeest?), the Bison/Buffalo/Wisent type, and a crested dinosaur, now imported by AI&E of the Netherlands. The dino is in an all-clear, hard-silicon or Whan-o secret-formula type polymer, while the two ruminants get a background of coloured flecks which are magnified into a washed out swirly-greenery effect.

One of the lots I bought way-back was an end-of-line, so I talked the shop-assistant into letting me keep the tub, as a result most of them are kept in the tub, but I always cut a few free - as samples - for future posts like this one!

You can see how much the magnification-effect is, when you release one, they are actually very small, but equally at home with Airfix soldiers and their ilk; here shown with Atlantic buffalo. Atlantic did two sets of these, one set slightly smoother (illustrated) than the other, add the bouncy-ball one and a couple of Priser's and you've got a fine heard with few duplicates!

You can also see the layering involved in getting the various elements in place. The skydivers I mentioned above are palced in their pairs, or diamonds or circles around what would be the 'Tropic of Capricorn', while below them (at the 'Tropic of Cancer') is a small disc with an aerial photograph of a landscape 'far below'. Others have both a whole-coloured and clear halves. While the soldiers and footballers are a disappointment freed of the ball, as they have no base!

N is for New Arrivals Part II - Animals

Having had a dinosaur post a while ago, then another in Rack Toy Month, I can't believe we're having a third so soon, but that's how the stuff comes in!

Monochromatic erasers from WH Smith, 2-quid isn't going to break the bank and they are bigger than the Paperchase ones although the 'kerthunkersaurus' is a poor sculpt.

These are also Smith's, at 3 for 2 and seven or eight sculpts, I chose three contrasting ones including a much better kerthunkersaurus - I must get the proper name of the poor thing! Here credited to Keycraft, these have been in boxed-sets of several animals in The Works for a year or so now under HGL (Grossman)'s moniker I think? But in such presentation - well outside my budget.

[Note - loading this just know (last Wednesday morning) I'm also downloading Target set images from Brian Berke which look like they might contain the same sculpts, will check at home!]

The Toysuarus was offering these at 79p each, well it would have been rude not to, so I got one of each! The Beetles are the ones we've already seen in two packagings at the beginning of Rack Toy Month (or even a few days before?), the Dinosaurs are yet another set of smallies, and I'm going to get them all back-out and compare soon, just for the hell of it, so they stayed in the bag for now, which left the frogs.

I was going to Blog them with the MTC set the other day, but they are in fact different sculpts, being three poses in various colours while the MTC's are all the same [four-ridged back] design.

The reason I went to the Toysaurus was to get these (also 79p), as I'd said they were the ones above when we looked at them last time, but they weren't! A nice lesson in false memory - hours after the event, because I'd forgotten the other set and conflated the two when posting the others, and mentioning I'd seen them in glow-in-the-Dark plastic in Toys R Us!

In fact, the Toysaurus had the normal ones in the party bags, and these from Grossman are actually new sculpts. This is why one should try to use maybe, probably or possibly if the stuff isn't actually on the table in front of you...I think?!

The ladybird is very similar, and while I'm sure standard painted versions exist somewhere, the spots on this one are textured within the sculpt, rather than reliant on paint.

Look! Charity Shop! 50p! Invicta Plastics megasaurus for the British Museum. Herein lies a funny story, well; it might only be ironic?

When I was a small-scale only collector (and a limo-driver), I used to have early-morning runs out to Gatwick or Heathrow on a Sunday; exec's going off to the 'States or wherever for Monday meetings, and I would do the car Boot sales on the way back*, sometimes hitting them as the traders were setting-up - still had to pick up the crumbs left by earlier early-birds like Collectakit's Pat Lewarne though!

Anyway, if there was large-scale stuff, cheap enough, I'd drop it round a mates house and he was always giving me small-scale lots so fair was fair (and he's given me far more over the years - JB for those who know), one day I got the Invicta set in full, in a BM box (lovely set, lovely sculpts, lovely colours), about 15? Maybe 16 in the set, there might have been one missing, but I remember making it up from spares on JB's lawn in the sun.

Fast forward 20 years, finds I'm buying them one at a time...and I had the whole lot in my hands! Still; it's more fun this way and I have got a couple of the smaller ones already in storage!

*It was a Mercedes V-Class, not a stretch - try parking one of those at a car-boot sale! Although I did drive Stretched-limos for a while too, horrible things, horrible customers - except the couple on a Wedding Anniversary who got me stage-side at Robby Williams and gave me £20 for a fish-supper and coke!

These were also a charity shop buy, 50p the lot, they're very small and each has its name on the belly, a definite irony as there is a kerthunkersurus here, but I didn't take note of it and they're in the attic now . . . what am I like!

It was a toss-up between ' I - Figures' or 'II - Animals' for this one, but 'figures' already had 8 images so Peter goes here! Paul Lamond Games, Charity Shop, 99p and it's been a while since we had some paper/card flats on the Blog, I must remedy that properly - he says cryptically!

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Apropos the date: Don't forget its Sandown Park toy fair tomorrow - if you're at a loose-end? 400-odd tables of other people's old playthings . . . I'm on the lookout for a motor for an HO-gauge Tri-Ang LT tube train!