This Twitter thread full of pictures of the interior of a Toys 'R Us in the late 90's/early 00's is oof, hitting me right in the nostalgia

It's all from the video game aisles but still, it's a nice trip down memory lane and makes me sad/angry all over again how badly TRU got fucked over

(Amazon was not at fault, as is popularly believed; my understanding is TRU was still profitable on paper and was responsible for something like 20% of toy sales in the U.S., but they were bought out by a company that had massive debts and so all their profits went straight into that til they went bankrupt)

basically, yeah. they were screwed over by a buy out.

TRU is doing fine in Canada to my knowledge. we still have ours.

Sega Genesis Aisle at Toys R Us 1990

I still remember getting tickets, paying, and going to the cage at the front of the store to have an employee get your game for you

me toooo

I remember gunning for the nerf and super soakers or checking out what cool jurassic park shit they had

between my friend growing up and I, we had a nearly full collection of JP paraphernalia

and we lived in the woods, so we didn't have back yards. His was Isla Sorna while I had Isla Nublar, baby

I remember going up and down the video game aisles being told to pick something out for my SNES or Genesis

i remember when tru sold huge packs of comic books for real cheap, and in hindsight it makes a lot of sense, given how the early 90s speculative market led to a lot of overprinting, but i sure bought the shit out of those

also, action figures

I bought my oot link action figure at toys r us back in like 2001 when those were impossible to find and i will always have a fondness for them because of rhat

sailor moon dolls...