They Killed Toys "R" Us On Purpose (It Wasn't Amazon)

Everyone says Amazon killed Toys "R" Us. The year before it collapsed, the company was operationally profitable and sold one out of every five toys in America. Companies with 20% market share don't die of a website. In this file, we follow the paper trail back to 2005, when KKR, Bain Capital, and Vornado bought Toys "R" Us for $6.6 billion — using $5.3 billion of borrowed money that got loaded onto the company itself. From that day on, Toys "R" Us paid roughly $400 million a year just to service the debt from its own acquisition, while its owners collected $183 million in advisory fees. When it liquidated in 2018, 800 stores closed and 33,000 workers were initially told there'd be no severance. Founder Charles Lazarus died the same month his company did. Amazon was the current. The debt was the anchor. Welcome to The Liquidation Files. New file every week. Instagram: instagram.com/theliquidationfiles Contact: [email protected] Sources: Forbes — The Big Investment Firms That Lost $1.3 Billion In The Toys R Us Bankruptcy: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanva... SEC — Toys R Us 2005 acquisition announcement: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da... Private Equity Stakeholder Project — KKR, Bain Capital, Vornado repeatedly rewarded themselves: https://pestakeholder.org/news/kkr-ba... The American Prospect — Private Equity: Looting R Us: https://prospect.org/2018/03/20/priva... In These Times — How Private Equity Killed Toys R Us: https://inthesetimes.com/article/how-... #TheLiquidationFiles #ToysRUs #PrivateEquity