The Death of the Brick and Mortar Toy Store

Summary

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 have to drive further—to a bigger supermarket with a toy region, or to a chain store. And to me, that’s very sad. The evolution of types of stores in our local city centre from small, independent, and varied to big names and nothing but shoes, boutique clothing, or €10 counterfeit made-in-China watches is a curious phenomena. That got me thinking: In which stores was I a (regular) customer, what kind of toy did I buy there, and which of these businesses are still selling stuff today? Christiaensen: a Belgian toy store chain from the seventies and eighties that got bought out by the Dutch Blokker: see the Jeugdsentiment nostalgia: Christiaensen post. I bought Stratego Legends there when I was 16. The only photo I could find of a Christiaensen store (in Brussels) by Jeugdsentiment. Bart Smit: a Dutch toy store chain that got bankrupt and bought by Intertoys/Maxitoys. The Christiaensen store got converted into a Bart Smit that now is yet another empty building. I bought too many Nintendo GB(A...