WHAT HAPPENS TO TOY MAKERS?
Toy companies will lose a place to test new toys. "Toys R Us was known as an incubator," said Jim Silver, editor-in-chief of toy review site TTPM.com.
Toy makers will also have to find new places to sell their goods. The bigger toy makers, Hasbro and Mattel, will likely hurt at first but then find their footing at Walmart, Target and Amazon, says Richard Gottlieb, a consultant at Global Toy Experts.
Toys R Us accounts for about 11 per cent of Mattel's annual sales and about nine per cent of Hasbro's annual volume, analysts estimate.
But smaller toy companies will have a harder time. Silver believes they will be hurt more than Mattel and Hasbro since Toys R Us could account for up to 40 per cent of their overall business. And big stores, such as Walmart and Target, are less likely to sell smaller brands because they have less space to sell toys.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THE REAL ESTATE?
Given the chain's issues, the closures will not be a shock to shopping centre landlords, and they have already been trying to line up possible tenants to replace Toys R Us in the past few months, says Katy Welsh of the commercial real estate brokerage firm Colliers International.
But Suzanne Mulvee of real estate research firm CoStar says 51 per cent of Toys R Us's stores are in shopping centres considered low quality. So landlords could struggle to replace them with tenants at similar rates - or worse, the spaces could remain vacant.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THE BRAND?
Toys R Us, as a well-known and long-lasting brand, might yet have a future - the company even quoted its classic jingle in its bankruptcy filings. And other seemingly dead retailers have a way of coming back to life.
American Apparel, which closed its stores last year after filing for bankruptcy, was revived by another company as an online-only clothing store. FAO Schwarz, which Toys R Us once owned, is opening shops in US and Chinese department stores. And Sharper Image, which also shut its stores, now sells gadgets online and opened a New York pop-up shop during the Christmas holidays last year.
