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Action Figure News and Toy Review (Feb 1997)

I’ve been thinking a lot about KBToys, since word came in that they were liquidating and closing their doors for good. But working on the calendar really brought things to the surface.

The reaction in the Transformers community seemed to be a sense of smug satisfaction, that the chain’s prices were too high and they brought this upon themselves.

I know little of KBToys’ day-to-day operations (since the chain does not exist in Canada), so I cannot speculate about specific business practices. But I do know a bit about toy pricing.

It’s really hard for a specialty store to compete with the generalist, particularly one as big as Wally-Mart, under normal conditions. When your bread and butter are toys and games, it becomes even more difficult because the big box stores use your main product as a loss leader, selling at a loss to bring in customers to buy their clothes and groceries and other merchandise through which they can profit.

So while it might ultimately be the store’s fault, I would not jump to that conclusion off the bat. And I wouldn’t be smug about it either. In the end, when a specialty toy chain like KBToys falls, we are all the losers because there is less choice and opportunity in the marketplace. And that’s seldom a good thing.