>>11141168A new retailer requires a shit ton of capital to start up and to pop up suddenly as a no-name chain store, it would likely take a decade for it to turn a profit.
If a company took over TRU, along with some of its assets (such as locations), it would have an INSTANT consumer base. So they'd take a loss for a couple of years, setting up buyers, supply chain, etc, but having those day 0 customers means they'd have way more revenue at the start and could possibly start expanding their business in 5 years.
Is there even an example of a chain store that started off as a chain store? Is it even possible? Most businesses come from a single store or two in a single city at first, and start building from there over decades.
All those companies who wanted to buy TRU, like every other smart company who would like to enter a market, would need to buy a pre-existing chain in order for it to make any business sense. There are no toy stores in the US like that anymore. All other chain stores were either bought out or closed down during the last financial crisis in 2008.
There's plenty of indie toy stores, but none of them have the capital to expand to being multi-state chain stores, and they don't even have the capacity to even compete against Walmarts and Amazon like TRU did. Most of them can't even price their Marvel Legends at MSRP, hence dealing mainly with collector toys where the MSRP is heavily padded.
