OPINION: When toys were us, a farewell to Geoffrey the giraffe
As with many national tragedies (like the death of Courage, the first Thanksgiving turkey pardoned by President Barack Obama, and the discontinuation of Crystal Pepsi), we all remember where we were when we heard the recent devastating news that Toys “R” Us was closing all of its U.S. stores.
I was in the car with my children when the radio announcer tearfully (no, really!) reported that all of the Toys “R” Us kids out there would now be forced to grow up and enter puberty, whether they wanted to or not. Although my three adolescent daughters have pretty much moved on to retail establishments requiring more extensive lines of credit, they reacted with a collective wail — as if Christmas, Easter, and all other holidays co-opted by the toy industry would now be strictly religious observances. And I have to admit that I, too, felt a twinge of bittersweet wistfulness in the wallet area upon hearing about the shuttering of a business that has provided my family with so many yard sale items over the years.
Other than filling my home with mountains of plastic happiness for the past decade, “The House that Geoffrey Built” has also given my children hours of comparatively low-cost entertainment within the store itself. When my daughters were younger, a visit to Toys “R” Us was every bit as exciting to them as a vacation to one of the parent-torturing amusement parks throughout this great land of ours. In fact, anytime someone mentioned the “D” word, all I had to do was suggest that we run by Toys “R” Us to see what new trinkets the Mattel Corporation was pumping out, and it was as if Mickey Mouse was, once again, just an ordinary glove-wearing rodent with a creepy voice.