Friday, January 26, 2018

What Toys R Us Needs



18 years of my life I dedicated to Toys R Us. I had the Cinderella story, which began as a 16-yr-old kid making $5.25 an hour during the fast-paced Christmas season. My career quickly progressed upwards, and I worked in 6 different states during my tenure finally parting ways much further up the ladder's rung into corporate. You have to have blood type: T (for toys) to survive in this dysfunctional, often times manic environment, and I had it. All my lifelong Toys R Us friends, most with similar stories like mine, have T blood too. 3 years later, it just doesn't go away.

It's painful to watch a company that I love so much slowly sink.

So here's my humble, "non-politically correct" opinion of what Toys R Us needs:

In the history of Toys R Us, a company whose #1 customer by an unbelievable margin is MOM, a woman has never been at the helm. One or two women have sat at the "table" the last few years, but none have called the shots. It doesn't take a fancy MBA or a case study to recognize the irony of this.

What Toys R Us needs to turn the boat around is a "She-ro."

Yes. I said it. Toys R Us needs a strong woman leader, with a pack of strong men & women leaders behind her, to lead this company out of this mess. Sorry fellas. A company with over 90% of their paying customers being women SHOULD BE LED by fellow women.

 (Side note: Before you judge or eye roll, please note that I am a woman who spent over 1/2 my life dedicated to this company, and I never once felt "unequal" to men or "inferior." When I entered into HR and had privilege to real salary information, I discovered women were paid the same, and in some cases better, than men at the same level. So, if you think I am going down the path of constructing a women's march or putting on my pink beanie, you are poorly mistaken; however, I did have the experience of sitting around with 11 other men discussing sales strategies. I would be lieing if I didn't say that I felt for a moment self-conscious about my purse taking up too much space at the table, but never once did I think that it was a "man's" fault. Any woman who was willing to pull the long hours and grow her leadership skills could have been at that table with me. But I digress.)

Gone are the days when moms are going to trek across town, fighting traffic, to haul their kiddos into a store filled with germs and uninspired teenagers to be badgered at the checkout line about warranties and opening up additional credit lines. Give me a break.

 A She-ro understands.

Somehow, someway, what should be a very simple business model of selling toys and baby products has become grossly over-complicated. Toys R Us lost it's purpose, which should always be having mom's best interest in mind.

Toys R Us needs a "She-ro" who can win the support of Moms again: Not credit companies, not vendor support, not real estate companies, but Moms.

Wouldn't it be amazing to see a She-ro get out from behind what appears as a closed door to the public and win the hearts of Moms again?!

 Perhaps it would go something like this....

I am so sorry that Toys R Us forgot who made us successful to begin with, and that's you, all the mom's out there. I am sorry we tried to trick some of you into shopping with us by offering you attractive coupons with small print full of ridiculous exclusions, such as essentials like diapers and formula. I am sorry for the times when you had come into our stores and our team members were so stressed getting freight out from the back or meeting their credit card sales quota that they didn't notice your cute little baby bundled up for their first ever public outing.

We want to do better and be better.

We know you probably spent hours researching the best toys to help your little baby. I am sorry that you have to take the time to go to amazon to read product reviews about things because you can't trust that our employees will know their product well enough.

We should be the master of our industry but you are getting better service through your computer screen than inside our stores. How embarrassing!!

Although we live in your community, we know we are terrible community leaders. I mean, we  should have been there bringing joy to your kids faces during their school's fundraiser when you asked.  Legal said no, so managers said no, so you quit asking!  We dropped the ball.

For you moms who worked for us during Christmas, I am so sorry that we didn't value your product knowledge and reward you for helping out other moms pick out special products for their children.  That's probably what you thought you were going to get to do, huh? Instead, you were only acknowledged positively by your manager when you pushed a credit card on that young mom. That must have been shocking! We know you would have much rather had your manager notice you for teaching that expecting mom all the ins and outs on different car seat models. She was so lucky to have gotten help from you! We failed you and we need passionate people like you back working in our stores.  We will make it right.

Going forward, we know we must do better. We are going to stop wasting our customers time with manipulative advertising and instead partner with a group of amazing moms and dads, who you can trust and who can keep you informed on the latest information on products that you can easily access from home. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to quickly ask a question on a toy and get a quick response vs having to call a 1800 number?!

 Anyways, we've got some work to do. Lots of unwinding a ball of yarn where things just got way too complicated. Bear with us. And please forgive us for losing sight on you as our customer. Somehow, we got distracted. We hope you accept this apology from the bottom of our hearts.

 Signed, Your She-ro.

No comments:

Post a Comment