The Death of the Brick & Mortar Toy Store

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why more and more local stores are going defunct. A short trip downtown makes the destructive nature of Amazon et al. apparent: the city centre is littered with for-sale or for-rent signs, stuck on dirty windows of almost every third building. In 2024, I already wrote about the challenges of buying games locally, but now that we have two kids, I think about this more often. Yes, it’s annoying for myself, but no, it’s not a big deal: physical editions of rarer Nintendo Switch games or retro video games aren’t available locally anyway. But what about buying the kids a simple box of LEGO? Even that’s not possible anymore. And to me, that’s very sad. When my wife was little, her parents would take her out to the centre on Christmas eve where she could choose a little present for herself. None of the toy shops she used to frequent with her folks back in the day are still in business. None of them. So we can’t offer the same thing to our kids: we’d…