When Interstate fell into trouble in the mid-1970s, Lazarus was able to take control, reorganise the group under the Toys’R’Us brand, and float it on the stock market. Branches were added, and in 1966 he sold the fast-expanding business to a chain called Interstate Stores. Originally called Children’s Supermart, his first store in the Maryland suburbs of Washington became Toys’R’Us in 1957. When young Charles asked why they didn’t sell new bikes, the answer, which he never forgot, was that they could not compete with chain stores that sold at much lower prices.Īfter war service as a cryptographer, Charles went into business for himself in 1948, at first selling baby furniture – cribs, pushchairs and high chairs – from his father’s shop to cash in on the postwar baby boom, and then toys for the same infants.Īccording to company legend, it was when a mother returned to replace a doll her baby had broken that Lazarus realised toys offered the prospect of multiple repeat sales, whereas most items of furniture are only ever bought once. His father Frank ran a workshop repairing and selling used bicycles from the family home. Lazarus’s technique, based on highly centralised financial controls, was to price the hottest items at the thinnest margins, or no profit at all, to convince shoppers that everything else in the store was a comparable bargain.Ĭharles Philip Lazarus was born in Washington on October 4 1923. “I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys’R’Us kid”, was a jingle that helped cash registers to sing.
CHARLES LAZARUS OBITUARY PATCH
He did so by creating a global chain of identical “big box” stores stacked from floor to ceiling with a range of as many as 18,000 different toys at discount prices.Īnd while traditional US department stores made 70 per cent of their annual toy sales in the pre-Christmas season, Toys’R’Us became a year-round success story, boosted by television advertising that made children clamour for whatever was the must-have of the moment, from Barbie and Cabbage Patch Kids to the Nintendo Gameboy. Lazarus was once described as “the person most responsible for loosening Santa’s grip on the toy business”. But the chain fell into bankruptcy last year, and the announcement of his death coincided with news of the closure of its remaining stores. Charles Lazarus, who has died aged 94, was the American founder of Toys’R’Us, which grew in its heyday to be the world’s largest toy retailer.
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