The 'Official' Toys 'R' Us History is Wrong

Toy industry truth bomb: Charles Lazarus did not start his company as Children's Bargain Town U.S.A. in 1948.

Thanks to decades of erroneous reporting and revisionist history, most of the world believes that he did — and a big part of that is because the old Toys "R" Us corporate website (archived) said that he did. But the "official" corporate history and timeline were wrong.

Because the company timeline was put out into the world as fact, pretty much every mainstream media outlet in the U.S. reported an inaccurate "origin story" (and I probably did too) when the original 70-year lineage of Lazarus' company came to an end during the epic bankruptcy and liquidation that played out between 2017-18.

In reality, there is a Chicago connection that gets wiped from the slate in most tellings of the Toys "R" Us story, and much of what transpired to create what became known as Toys "R" Us gets glossed over or condensed in the period spanning the late 1950s through the mid-1970s.

The Truth:

Lazarus started Children’s Supermart by dealing cribs, changing tables, and other baby furniture out of his dad’s bicycle shop in Washington, D.C.?

“Everybody I met in the service said they were gonna go home and get married and have children,” Lazarus told Mark Aaron in a biographical interview in 2016, parts of which were later released on YouTube. “I did anticipate that there might be a baby boom, but I had no idea where it would go or what the size of the toy business could be.”

Within a few years, he noticed parents hunting for toys as their kids got older. In 1957, the business evolved into Toys “R” Us with the opening of a new store in Maryland, but babies remained key to the store’s success. During the same year, Chicago entrepreneur Larry Hochberg opened a similar store with a similar concept, mission, and name: Children’s Bargain Town U.S.A.

Borrowing tricks from the grocery trade, Lazarus and Hochberg fashioned their stores in a “supermarket” style. By the late 1960s, both Children’s Supermart Inc. (doing business as Toys “R” Us) and Children’s Bargain Town U.S.A. were sold to Interstate Department Stores (in 1967 and 1969, respectively) and eventually rebranded as Toys “R” Us across the country.?

Anyone who's followed me here on LinkedIn for more than a few years knows that I've written a lot about Toys "R" Us, for better or for worse. I love the toy industry. I love retail. I love business. And I love history.

In the latest issue of The Pop Insider, I was handed the keys to The Rewind column for a little two-page overview of Toys "R" Us since the brand is in the midst of a rebirth in the U.S. and beyond. You can read it on pages 70-71. More to come in an upcoming Backstory column in a future issue of The Toy Book.

Growing up in the Chicagoland area, it was the norm to see combined signage that would have the Toys "R" Us name with the old Children's Bargain Town U.S.A. branding below it. Back then, I didn't know why, and over the years it seems that most of the world that would've known simply forgot as a crucial piece of history has been largely erased.

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