![]() ![]() Other Jewish industry superstars include Isaac Heller, who converted military surplus into toys for boys in the 1950s, Elliot Handler, the founder of Mattel, and Milton Levine, creator of the wildly popular “Milton’s Ant Farm,” which was a hit with kids during the 1950s and 1960s.ġ970s Toys R Us ad, still associated with the Children’s Bargain Town name. “The modern American toy industry was really created by Jewish soldiers coming back from the war,” he says. Gottlieb sees Lazarus as part of a bigger wave of entrepreneurship that took hold in the post-war years. “What Lazarus really captured was this sense of American abundance after the war and after all those years of depression,” says Richard Gottlieb, founder of Global Toy Experts and an authority on the toy business. Lazarus’ stores, on the other hand, were orders of magnitude larger than their competitors, and presented a smorgasbord of thousands of different toys.īig-box stores like Toys ‘R’ Us astonished the era’s consumers, who had simply never seen stores that big and crammed with merchandise. Most toy stores were small and family-run, and only carried a limited line of products. The new megastore took a supermarket-style approach to toy selling, which distinguished it from every other toy store in existence. In 1957, he got out of the baby furniture business, renamed his company Toys ‘R’ Us and created the first ever big-box toy store. He had an idea that was bigger than Children’s Bargain Town or any kids’ store he had ever seen-a massive store filled with every toy in existence. He started selling a few inexpensive toys, then added to his inventory as they proved popular.īut Lazarus wasn’t content to stop with a single store. Specializing in baby goods, it only began selling toys once Lazarus realized customers didn’t come back for more strollers, high chairs and other baby goods with their second child. Lazarus opened his first store, Children’s Bargain Town, in Washington, D.C. It was the end of an era for the store that once held a lock on the entire toy industry and made toy shopping-once a seasonal treat-into a regular family outing. In March 2017, the 70-year-old business announced that it would call it quits. Now, the retail giant has been forced into bankruptcy, the victim of a retail model it helped pioneer. Once a retail juggernaut, the store dominated the entire toy industry-and children’s imaginations-by driving its competitors out of existence. Those instincts didn’t just help Lazarus capitalize on the baby boom: They helped originate Toys ‘R’ Us.
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