If you grew up in the 80s or 90s, there’s a good chance you remember the magic of walking through the sliding doors of Toys R Us.
A place where shelves stretched to the ceiling and the latest games, consoles, and board games seemed to go on forever. But the question people often ask today is simple: how many Toys R Us stores are left in the world?
The answer is fewer than you might think. In the United States, only a handful of full-size Toys R Us stores remain. There’s the flagship at the American Dream mall in New Jersey, one inside the Mall of America in Minnesota, an airport outlet in Dallas, and another store at Harlem Irving Plaza in Illinois.
Alongside these, there are over 400 mini “Geoffrey’s Toy Box” shops inside Macy’s department stores, but the big standalone stores that once defined the chain are now rare.
Outside the U.S., the picture is mixed. Spain, for example, has kept the brand alive with around 30 stores, while elsewhere the name survives through licensing deals and small-scale outlets in airports, malls, and cruise ships. The global giant has shrunk into a patchwork of scattered survivors.
The Rise and Fall of a Toy Empire
Toys R Us started with big ambitions. The first store opened in 1948 in Washington, D.C., though it wasn’t until the 1950s that the business became the toy-only megastore we remember. For decades, the chain dominated toy retail. By the late 20th century, it had become the destination for birthday wish lists and Christmas shopping.
But success brought problems. By the early 2000s, the company was struggling under the weight of a leveraged buyout that loaded it with debt. At the same time, Amazon and Walmart were rapidly taking market share. Toys R Us was too slow to adapt to online shopping, and its famously huge stores began to look more like warehouses than wonderlands.
By 2017, the company filed for bankruptcy. A year later, almost every store in North America shut its doors. Parents who had once spent hours pushing trolleys down packed aisles now found themselves buying toys with a few clicks from their sofa.
Attempts at Revival
The Toys R Us name hasn’t disappeared completely. In 2019, a new owner tried opening two smaller concept stores in New Jersey and Texas. They were designed to be interactive, fun spaces rather than the endless aisles of old. Sadly, the experiment didn’t last. Both stores closed by early 2021, hit hard by the pandemic and low sales.
Then came another twist. In 2021, WHP Global took control of the brand and struck a deal with Macy’s. This partnership placed Toys R Us “shop-in-shops” inside hundreds of department stores across America. It wasn’t quite the same as visiting a giant toy palace, but it did mean the brand was back in front of millions of families.
New flagship locations also opened, including the eye-catching store at the American Dream mall in New Jersey, complete with a slide, café, and life-sized Geoffrey the Giraffe. Meanwhile, overseas, retailers in countries like Spain kept the name alive with their own networks of stores.
Why Did Toys R Us Really Struggle?
The downfall of Toys R Us is often explained as a simple story of e-commerce beating the high street. But it wasn’t just Amazon’s rise that hurt the chain.
The debt taken on in the early 2000s drained cash that could have gone into modernising stores or building a better online platform. Shoppers began to notice that Walmart and Target often had lower prices on the same toys. By the time Toys R Us tried to fight back, its rivals were already ahead.
There was also a cultural shift. Kids no longer needed to browse aisles to see the latest craze — YouTube and TikTok made sure they knew what was hot. Parents, too, changed their shopping habits. Online wish lists and free delivery became the norm.
What’s Left Today
So, how many Toys R Us stores are left in the world? The short answer: only a handful of large stores, mostly in the U.S., plus hundreds of smaller Macy’s locations and scattered shops abroad. In Spain, the brand still feels like a high street presence, but elsewhere it survives more as a nostalgic name than a true retail giant.
For older fans, it’s bittersweet. The company that once promised “I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys R Us kid” has itself struggled to grow into the digital era. But the fact that the brand hasn’t vanished completely shows there’s still affection for Geoffrey the Giraffe and what he represents.
Toys R Us may never return to the scale of its heyday, but in its smaller, reshaped form, it’s clinging to life. Whether it can thrive again depends on whether nostalgia alone can carry a toy store in a world where toys are bought online.
