I'd argue that a toy store, more than any other kind of retailer, is insulated from that, because the store has an little advocate for spending ten dollars extra to buy the product right now with most shoppers. And going to the toy store itself is kind of an activity that I don't think you can replace with online shopping.

Anecdote time: I took my cousin (12) to a toy store once. First it was difficult to get him out of his iPad and get out of home. Second he was completely indifferent to anything in the store. We ended up buying some card games and credit for mobile games.

+ There aren't many kids anymore.

That's on the older end of the customer demographic, though. My kids (oldest is seven) would have a blast, and would definitely be begging to bring something home.

Maybe it's my inexperience with kids then. Perhaps I should have taken the boy to the local apple store?

Thanks~

I don't know why you're being down voted. For better or worse, this is common child behavior now.

I am curious: how to downvote in HN?

At some Karma threshold (might be 500?) you get a downvote button on comments.

I'm sure it's recently shifted from 400 because not that long ago I could downvote (not that I did) and now I can't. Although I may have imagined that but I'm pretty sure I could.

Kids. They don't make'm like they used to.

And they don't make them in the same quantities. I think what killed Toys R Us was demographics more than consumer trends.

Mine are growing up way too fast. My daughter, 12, lost interest in toys fairly early and was never into dolls or princesses at all. She did have a great Scooby Doo phase and we did buy the figures and toy Mystery Machine from Toys R Us and those toys went to hell and back. There were no monster characters to be had at the time, however, so our Scooby friends had little to do other than look at each other. We improvised.

My son, now 8, has been hot and cold with toys. I think he'd rather just run around with the neighborhood kids and engage in mock battles with makeshift swords and such. He liked my old Star Wars toys for awhile, and we even bought a few new ones to add to that stuff, but lately those things are sitting in a big bin in the basement. He was/is a Lego nut and has tons of Lego sets in his room and I am hoping he doesn't totally lose interest in building the sets and making up his own. If he loses interest I'll have about a zillion Lego sets to sell on CL.

It saddens me that kids aren't kids very long because I enjoy playing with him but my free time is so tight and I am often so harried that it is hard to just say "I'm going to dig through these bins and find parts so we can rebuild this set together." He'll be leaving for college one day and I'll have these huge regrets! My son's other big obsession is Nerf guns--those have been an enduring pastime for him, but one can only buy so many Nerf guns before saturation is reached as they are often huge and bulky items that don't store well. Still, much fun, especially in the dark winter months.

The only other toys that had any lasting impact for my kids were the expensive wooden Thomas trains when they were 3-4 years old. I guess my son liked Hot Wheels for awhile and we still have a large parking garage thing in our family room that probably is getting dusty right now. That thing comes out when the slightly younger neighbor kids come over.

I felt like last Christmas was really expensive and yet we didn't really buy them much of anything really good and I told my wife I'm not doing that again just to have the appearance of a lot of gifts. If they aren't going to play with stuff, they aren't getting it because our house is too full of unused junk as it is. I'd rather take a trip to Disney or maybe skiing.

There may be fewer children than at some point in the past but let's not get carried away

Anecdotally, I have been to many bookstores and board game shops that allow people to play or read for free on site and taking it home is what costs money. The way they manage to make it work is usually by having a cafe with food and refreshments onsite; it's like how movie theaters do not primarily make money on the tickets, but on the concessions. It's also why McDonalds' has their Playplaces.

The LEGO stores have this exact experience, and they seem to be doing well.

History of fun podcast has an good run down of how they innovated through history. Sadly they did not this time, and pumped and dumped a great iconic property.