Toys ‘R’ Us has taken over the FAO Schwarz line of boutique toy stores for an undisclosed amount. It’s a move that many are calling a Good Thing, given the embattled history of the FAO Schwarz brand. Toys ‘R’ Us plans to keep the stores as they are, instead of converting them to Toys ‘R’ Us shops. This will help keep the historical nature of the name alive, which many customers have fond memories of, and also help diversify T.R.U’s holdings.
However, this news annoys me on a personal level. I’m not a fan of chain stores of any stripe, and a firm believer in supporting the local mom-and-pop shops. I think that there are a lot of smaller, homegrown toy designers who would rather not put their wares in the gigantic chains for fear of being swallowed up by the kind of in-your-face advertising that the larger toy companies can afford.
There is a charm and nearly indefinable quality to home-made toys that can’t be replicated by a large team of marketers. We buy our son a number of great, smaller-shelf toys from creators like Melissa & Doug, who value inherent education and trend away from all-plastic body toys in favor of wooden craftsmanship and more gentle ideology.
The biggest problem with chain stores is that their very nature creates the demand for cookie-cutter, assembly line thinking, which in turn leads to cheap labor in third-world countries. For me, it’s a simple choice between exploitation or consideration, and that’s an easy choice to make.
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