![]() ![]() ![]() The company traces its roots back to the early 1930s, to the Wichita, Kansas-based electric fan manufacturer O.A. It is worth taking a closer look at Vornado’s corporate history, with all its surprising twists and turns, because of what it can teach us about the broader story of the American economy over the last century. has found the sweet spot in the horseshoe- between QAnon-ers waiting… So why Toys ‘R’ Us? Forbes contributor Brad Thomas suggests Vornado was simply getting out of its lane in the pre-Recession years, when the three-way Toys ‘R’ Us acquisition took place. (Photo by Daniel Schwen )Vornado’s website links to a 400-page interactive flipbook of its Manhattan property portfolio, and states that it “owns and operates nearly 20 million square feet of prime office properties.” It also holds select prestigious properties in other cities, such as Chicago’s huge Merchandise Mart, which their website describes as the “largest privately held commercial building in the United States” and “one of the world’s leading commercial buildings.” (Vornado’s 2020 revenue came in at $1.5 billion for comparison, WeWork, with a much larger, global footprint, and which I wrote about here recently, had only $3 billion in revenue.) In 2015, just three years before Toys ‘R’ Us went belly-up, Vornado spun off its Urban Edge Properties division, consisting of suburban strip-retail holdings from its earlier days, concentrated in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Vornado owns the gigantic Merchandise Mart in downtown Chicago. Ironically, Vornado didn’t end up faring too well as a Toys ‘R’ Us owner, and the company now focuses almost entirely on high-end commercial real estate in New York City. While some commentary picked up on the obvious connection between a real-estate firm and a large, ailing brick-and-mortar company, much of the press coverage mentioned Vornado only in passing, if at all. There were also some weak attempts to fashion a natalist or anti-feminist argument out of the toy retailer’s demise, to the effect that Toys ‘R’ Us might have survived if people were having more kids.Ī more subtle, but very real, element of the Toys ‘R’ Us story involved the real-estate firm Vornado Realty, a third major stakeholder of Toys ‘R’ Us after Bain and a second private equity firm, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. This places it in the same shoes as Sears, Payless, and other stodgy retailers whose slow but perhaps manageable declines were accelerated by “vulture capitalists.” Of course, competition from Internet retailers, especially Amazon, was a major factor. The common characterization of the toy giant’s death was that private equity firms killed it, with plentiful reference to the involvement of Bain Capital. The actual toy retailer, which began in what’s now a bar in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., is as dead as a busted wind-up motor. If the company lives on in any way, it is almost certain to be only as a trademark, much as Radio Shack and Montgomery Ward still exist as brand names associated with unrelated e-commerce operations. Several lifetimes ago-March 2018, to be precise-Toys ‘R’ Us began to liquidate its stores after a final bout with bankruptcy. ![]()
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