It might, but probably only once. This venture will fail. I don’t say that lightly, and it’s worth examining why: the lesson applies to far more brands than one toy shop. We’ve already seen this happen in Australia. Toys R Us arrived here in 1993. By 2018, it had 44 stores and around 700 employees. Administrators couldn’t find a buyer, and the lights went off. A year later, the brand returned online, promising smaller experience centres where kids could see and touch products. Those centres never opened. Last June, it went into administration again. The business now sits with a Melbourne distributor. There’s no Toys R Us store in Australia today, and there may never be one again. Yet anyone who grew up here could draw the giraffe from memory. The logo survived every one of those chapters. The reason to visit didn’t. The memory belongs to the customer. It was never the brand’s to sell Nostalgia is a feeling about yourself. The place is just where you left it. Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, professors of social and personality psychology, have spent 20 years studying this. Their work keeps finding that you’re the main character in a nostalgic memory, surrounded by people you loved. The setting is scenery. On top of that, the brain lets the bad bits fade faster than the good ones. Nobody remembers 40 minutes circling the car park in December or the kid in the next trolley losing it under the fluorescent lights. They remember being eight and being told yes: birthday money burning a hole in their pocket, the catalogue arriving at home, circling everything they wanted next, and walking back to the car holding a new box with both arms. That was the product. Toys R Us is marketing to the parent’s memory and expecting it to create the child’s moment. But they’re two different people standing in the same aisle. Today’s eight-year-old has no memory of the giraffe. Their wants are shaped by YouTube, Roblox and the playground. The Nerf blaster they’ve asked for by name is also available at Kmart, Big W and Target, or on Amazon by tomorrow. Circana reports that US toy sales rose 17 per cent in the first half of this year, with teens and adults driving nearly 60 per cent of the extra dollars. The nostalgia is real, and people are spending on it. But they’re buying the object, often for themselves. Nobody needs to go back to the old address to do that. A smaller warehouse is still a warehouse Toys R Us was always a big box of toys, and the internet does that much better now. The new Creator Studios, where influencers and toy brands host launches, don’t solve the problem. They may make it worse: an influencer performing play for an audience is close to the opposite of a kid actually playing. Kids can tell the difference. The joy is in hands-on play, both physical and emotional. That’s the one thing a screen can’t sell. Joann Peck and Suzanne Shu, marketing academics who study consumer behaviour, showed in 2009 that simply touching a product increases the feeling that it’s already yours. Picture a child making noise with a toy while another kid beside them does the same. That’s about as strong a version of the effect as retail gets. It’s the whole argument for a brand having a store, and it’s exactly what the 2019 relaunch here promised but never built. I’ve said for years that physical retail is the fastest route to trust, and I still believe that. But I’d add a condition now. A store on a 12-month lease is asking for trust on a timeline the customer can see. Will people invest in something that has already told them it’s leaving? The first numbers will look fantastic. Foot traffic, social activity and opening-week sales will all draw attention. Go! Retail is already saying the results are great. But opening-week numbers measure the memory; week eight measures the moment. Your data reports both in the same column. If you run a brand that people remember fondly, and plenty of Australian retailers do, try a few things next week. Walk into your store as someone with no memory of the brand and ask what would make them want to come back. If the honest answer is the brand name, you’re borrowing goodwill. Track second visits, not just first visits. If you can’t track them, that’s a finding in itself. Also watch what a customer does with their hands in the first 90 seconds. If all they do is pick up a box and read the back, you’re a website with a rent bill. Whether it comes back here is the wrong question to start with If those 120 stores have a good Christmas, someone will ask whether Toys R Us should come back to Australia. Recognition alone could make it an easy yes. But I’d want an answer to the question the 2019 relaunch raised and never quite delivered on: what does a kid actually get to do with their hands when they walk in? Answer that, and you’ve got a really good reason to exist. Skip it, and you’ve got a well-known logo on a 12-month lease. Australia has already let this brand go twice. The most telling examples came from two small independent toy shops in and around Boston. They know they can’t beat Target and Amazon on price, so they’ve stopped trying. One is building a year-round play space with classes, birthday parties and nights for adults. The other has a mirror maze for kids to run through and staff trained in how play supports a child’s development. They’re giving kids something to do with their hands when they walk in. Toys R Us is hoping memory will fill that gap. Let’s see. People will give you one visit for who you used to be. Maybe even two. After that, you’re just another shop – and there’s a Kmart down the road. Further reading: Toys R Us collapses again, goes into administration