Toys R Us Made Eleven Billion a Year. Three Investors Killed It in One Meeting.

In nineteen forty-eight, a twenty-five year old World War Two veteran named Charles Lazarus opened a small baby furniture store in Washington D.C. with money from his savings and a bank loan. By nineteen ninety, that store had become over one thousand three hundred locations worldwide, eleven billion dollars in annual revenue, and the undisputed king of the global toy industry. For three generations of American children, Toys R Us was not just a store. It was the place where childhood happened. Every birthday. Every Christmas. Every wish list that mattered. Then in two thousand five, three investors who had never sold a single toy in their lives bought the company for six point six billion dollars — and loaded five point three billion of that debt directly onto Toys R Us itself. From that day forward, the company owed four hundred to five hundred million dollars every year just in interest payments. There was no money left to modernize. No money to compete online. No money to fight back. In September two thousand seventeen, Toys R Us filed for bankruptcy. In March two thousand eighteen, all seven hundred thirty-five United States stores closed permanently. Thirty-three thousand employees lost their jobs and received no severance. And exactly one week after the closure announcement, founder Charles Lazarus died at ninety-four years old in a Manhattan hospital. The investors collected four hundred sixty-four million dollars in fees before the company collapsed. The workers received nothing. This is the complete story of how the world’s greatest toy store was not beaten by a competitor — it was buried by the people who bought it. A full Fallen Giants USA video on Toys R Us — the founding, the rise to eleven billion dollars, the Amazon betrayal, the leveraged buyout that destroyed everything, and the thirty-three thousand people who paid the price.