Toys-R-Us 2010 Black Friday Plans

'Tis the season to be discounting!

All the Black Friday circular ads for the major retailers are leaking out onto shopper websites all over the 'net. TRU's BF ad leaked overnight and reveals a bold and aggressive new plan of attack for the last giant toy store in the world. In a first for just about any retailer, Toys-R-Us will open its doors to the masses on Thanksgiving night at 10pm.

While every year it seems more retailers are opening earlier the day after Thanksgiving than the year before, a few at midnight, several now at 3 and 4am this year, TRU breaks tradition and will be open for a limited time until 1am, then reopen at 5am Friday.

Not exactly a fun weekend of the year to be working inside any retailer. If you have ever seen firsthand how that Black Friday shopping crowd tears apart the aisles of any store, you then have to realize how long it would take to clean the place back up, re-stock and be ready to open fresh again in just a few hours. I doubt any of those TRU managers will even leave the stores between 1am and 5am.

The deals in TRU's Black Friday ad are very good this year. Check out the scans here!

While the majority of these deals are a draw for the average Holiday toy shopper, there are several great deals for the toy collector as well that include:
Transformers Voyager or Power Bots series $9.99. Reg is $24.99 at TRU
Transformer, Iron Man & GI Joe action figures half off reg retail.
Last year's GI Joe giant PITT vehicle will be only $49.99 or half off.

We've seen the Target BF ad and now TRU's. So far TRU has the best overall toy deals by a mile. Wal-Mart's ad will likely leak by next week and you can bet the team at Amazon.com is happily taking notes on all these ads and will be setting up their own deals to match much of the competition over the course of those few days.

Next to the post Holiday clearance, this is the best time of the year get out and spend money like you actually have it!

Best Toy Retailer of 2009 - TRU

Toys-R-Us has good reason to celebrate the 2009 Holiday shopping season. The company released their December 2009 financials today and despite difficult economic challenges in the marketplace, they had a very positive December.

WAYNE, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--January 07, 2010-- Today, Toys"R"Us, Inc., the world's leading dedicated toy and baby products retailer, announced its comparable store sales for the month of December and the 2009 holiday selling season.

For the month of December, the Toys"R"Us, Inc. Domestic division reported a comparable store sales increase of 4.6%, while the International division reported a comparable store sales increase of 1.1%.

"We are very pleased with our December results, which reflect the successful execution of our overall strategy for the holiday selling period," said Jerry Storch, Chairman and CEO, Toys"R"Us, Inc. "This strategy focused on our breadth of product assortment, including the hottest toys, a commitment to quality products, providing good value, and offering expert service. Our toy authority position was clear, as consumers turned to us in increasing numbers for their toy buying needs this holiday season."

We watched the marketing of the major retailers closely over the 2009 shopping season and could tell TRU had finally put a very solid game plan together to compete against the likes of Wal-Mart and Target. They had it all covered.

* Competitive pricing out of the gates starting in October linked with strong marketing that never let up with compelling circular and television ads.

* Strong inventory control, finally! This is where TRU had the most difficulty over its history and just had too much of everything. This year, they planned ahead by backing off on lines that are lower in demand while pumping up the sure fire brands such as Lego. TRU was the only major retailer left with decent Lego selection still on shelf late in December. Both Target and Wal-Mart were completely wiped out by then.

* Their buyers displayed insight early when they were the only major retailer that bought into the Zhu Zhu Pets toy line. They then artfully capitalized on it all season with free press as it turned into 2009's hottest toy of the Holiday season. All other retailers played "follow the leader" on this one.

* Video Games, Video Games, Video Games. This is the gift leader that puts traffic in your store in November and December and TRU had some of the best video game deals every single week of the season. Practically every kid out there has some sort of game console (or wants one) and develops a game or accessory want list for Christmas. This is one retailer that knows how to capitalize on this need.

* TRU took a risk and aggressively expanded by opening roughly 80 temporary pop-up holiday stores in shopping malls and about 260 temporary toy stores within Babies-R-Us locations nationwide.

As a hardcore toy guy, I'm very happy for TRU and extremely pleased to see they pulled it off. This is a retailer that has struggled from time to time over the years and made very bad decisions that nearly closed its doors at one point. They have made quite a strong comeback over the past two years. Thanks in part to the leadership of Jerry Storch (A former Target leader).

Of course they still have some work to do with managing their inventory and the buyers need to be better at recognizing when to bail out of poorly selling licenses (Star Trek and Hulk come to mind). But it's absolutely vital to the health and diversity of the toy industry that the world's largest toy retailer remain strong and can compete against the big two. You can imagine how bad it would be for an entire industry if it had to shrink down its offerings to fit into a handful of aisles at a Wal-Mart, Target or even a K-Mart.

We can imagine some serious celebrating going on in Wayne NJ this week. Much deserved.

The party is over for the rodents and the scalpers

By now everyone knows the runaway hot toy of Christmas 2010 has been the Zhu Zhu Pet Hamsters.

Every year the media, mass retailers and ebay scalpers need at least one in-demand toy to drive interest and profits. And every time one is crowed the season's hottest of hot toys, there is always an endless army of dumb parents and grandparents that are willing to pay way too much on the secondary market just to have both the item itself and a story to tell their friends and family about how difficult or expensive it was to land the prize. Or the toy is gifted with the misguided hopes that this grail will provide a life altering moment for a kid who will most likely play with the mass-produced hunk of plastic and faux fur for maybe an hour on Christmas day then disregard it for their Wii games and ipods.

In the meantime, the hot holiday toy is a profit center primarily for the professional toy scalper (yes, there are pro toy scalpers, thousands of them), or any informed shopper with an ebay account who gets lucky enough to come across the rare prize on a store peg hook. During the heart of the shopping season, a Zhu Zhu Pets hamster that costs an average of $10 apiece, easily netted a ebay sale price of $50 or more. Beyond the profitability, you could sell the item and be paid within minutes of listing it online. It's the greatest example of supply and demand in U.S. consumerism.

Here in the final week of shopping week prior to Christmas, everyone is learning the other side of the lessons of supply and demand as Wal-Mart, Toys-R-Us and even Target are finally flooding their stores with Zhu Zhu Pets inventory. A quick visit to my local Target this morning confirmed a large supply of hamster inventory on their shelves. And while the toy section was busy, no one was making any mad grab for the rodents. While standing there I did a quick check on ebay with my phone and confirmed secondary market prices have crashed back to earth. Completed auction searches confirmed the rodents were not even selling for a few dollars mark up over store prices. Now that they can found with little effort, few actually need them anymore. Another example of scalpers driving demand more than those who want to buy the toys as gifts.

So another Christmas toy fad abruptly and officially ends. Everyone will begin to find Zhu Zhu Pets and accessories all over the place and store inventory will begin to pile up as all the scalpers who stayed at the table and gambled too long now discover they cannot make a profit much less any investment back will return the toys in droves on Dec 26th when retailers return policies are more lax. Now the realization will be made, as it is every year, that the "hot toy" was not really in demand because it was something children actually wanted, it was a only easy money for ebay scalpers and driven by a lazy media who repeat the same ‘hardest to find’ toy story weekly all during the season.

Of course by next November this lesson is forgotten, the next hot toy is crowned and the dance begins all over again.