Issue is, a company does that and then parents still search and buy the toy for cheaper on Amazon from their phone.
I have family members who run a small retail store with excellent inventory and service, and they barely scrape by due to people show rooming. They are not in toys, but they simply cannot compete on price, as Amazon, etc sells it cheaper than they can buy from the suppliers.
People will generally pay a premium for better service, but in the case of retail, it's usually hard to beat the service of "instant purchase with free two day delivery to my doorstep". I for one, very rarely buy something w/o checking if it's cheaper on Amazon (or some other online retailer) first. It's gotta be a tough market that's for sure.
it's been a couple of years since I went into a toys r us, but the reason why I stopped going wasn't the very messy store, nor the lack of inventory, but the prices being about 20% above MSRP, especially when I can go to a specialty store a couple of blocks away and pay MSRP for a lot more inventory.
I think that the idea of a "destination store" has been dying a slow death, and making them a lot more unattractive is accelerating this.
as for toys, I found myself paying a little over MSRP (not 20%) at my local walking-distance boutique store, but mostly because it was in my neighborhood.
Probably amazon buys it from the same supplier, but they can sell it for less margin, because they don't have the overhead of running a store, and they have the scale of being amazon.
> sells it cheaper than they can buy from the suppliers
Perhaps they miswrote, but the comment says that Amazon is cheaper than the supplier.
It's somewhat common for a large manufacturer to accidentally undercut themselves. For example, one branch selling to Walmart and another selling direct to restaurants. Sometimes the price at Walmart, even after Walmart's margin, is cheaper than the direct price. The restaurant-sales group is horrified as they lose customers to Walmart and goes running down the hall to tell the bigbox-sales group to raise prices.
I have family members who run a small retail store with excellent inventory and service, and they barely scrape by due to people show rooming. They are not in toys, but they simply cannot compete on price, as Amazon, etc sells it cheaper than they can buy from the suppliers.