Charles Lazarus: Toys R Us founder whose warehouse-sized outlets revolutionised retail

The ascent of his retail empire worked in tandem with the rise of television and the advertising of ‘must-haves’ aimed at children

‘Toys are a great kind of thing to sell because they don’t last long,’ Lazarus said (Getty)

“If you’re going to be a success in life, you have to want it,” Toys R Us founder Charles Lazarus once said. “I wanted it. I was poor. I wanted to be rich.”

Lazarus, who has died aged 94, was born in Washington to Frank and Fannie Lazarus. From an early age, he helped his father refurbish second-hand bicycles for resale. Asking his father why they didn’t sell new bicycles instead, Lazarus learned an early lesson in retail economics: “My father said it was because the big chain stores could sell them so much cheaper than we could.”

Upon returning from military service following the Second World War, Lazarus took over his father’s bicycle shop and in 1948, to cash in on the post-war baby boom, he opened Children’s Bargain Town, selling children’s furniture. Not long after that, he started to sell toys too, recognising that the fickleness of children’s affection for their playthings would bring them and their parents back to his store again and again.

The first official Toys R Us store opened in the suburbs of Maryland in 1957. Lazarus designed the store’s logo himself, with its famous reversed letter R. The store’s mascot was a stuffed giraffe named Geoffrey.

Lazarus meets US President George HW Bush in 1992 (AP)

Its ascent worked in tandem with the rise of television and the advertising of “hot toys” – must-haves impressed on young minds who in turn placed pressure on their parents to buy.

In 1966 Lazarus had four stores, which sold around millions of dollars worth of toys a year.

In order to grow the business, he sold the whole operation to a company called Interstate Sales for $7.5m. Interstate, however, was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1974. Lazarus persuaded the bankruptcy court to let him manage the liquidation, with a four-year campaign of restructuring from which a strengthened Toys R Us emerged.

Toys R Us operated on a “big box” model. Its cavernous stores carried a huge inventory sold at high discount. Prior to Toys R Us, toy retailing was strongly tied to the seasonal market but Lazarus broke that connection, making it a year-round concern, prompting Atlantic Monthly magazine to describe him as “the person most responsible for loosening Santa’s grip on the toy business”.

Speaking in a documentary in 2016, Lazarus explained the secret of his success. “When you look at what the creativity of the toy market is, you have to have imagination, you have to think like a child,” he said.

By 2017, the Toys R Us chain comprised 1,758 stores worldwide, employing almost 65,000 people.

Lazarus married three times. His first marriage, to Udyss, ended in 1979. They had two daughters, Ruth and Diane. His second marriage hit the headlines when his wife Helen Singer Kaplan, who was dying of cancer, wrote Lazarus a letter exercising a provision in their prenuptial agreement entitling her to $20m upon declaration of her intent to divorce. Her rationale was that the letter would ring-fence that amount for her three children from her first marriage.

Kaplan died the day after writing the letter in August 1995. Lazarus spent the next half-decade battling Kaplan’s children in court to keep the $20m out of their hands, claiming that Kaplan would not really have divorced him had she lived – this despite the fact that Lazarus married Joan Regenbogen, an interior designer just four months after Kaplan’s death.

Lazarus once said: “Toys are a great kind of thing to sell because they don’t last long.”

Toys R Us filed for bankruptcy in September last year and is in the process of winding down its remaining stores. Lazarus outlasted his own greatest success by just a week.

He is survived by his wife Joan and two daughters.

Charles Phillip Lazarus, American entrepreneur, born 4 October 1923, died 22 March 2018