If you grew up around here, the history needs no explaining. There was a store your parents took you to before Christmas that was not really a store — it was the whole season under one roof, aisles tall enough to make a kid feel small. That store went away in 2018, and most of us assumed the name went with it.
This month, the name is going up over a door at South Hill Mall.
Toys “R” Us is opening at South Hill as part of a holiday expansion — 120 new standalone stores the brand and its operator, Go! Retail Group, announced in September. A second Washington store is planned in Auburn. The South Hill store is expected to open in October and run through the holiday season.
But read the lease before the headline, because the lease is the real story: at least one year, with an option to stay longer. That is not a comeback parade. That is a test — a famous name renting a room in Puyallup to find out whether the room still makes the business.
How a dead chain learned to travel light
The short version of the fall: Toys “R” Us filed for Chapter 11 in September 2017 carrying roughly $5 billion in debt, and closed its remaining U.S. stores in 2018.
What happened next is the part worth understanding. The stores died; the name didn’t. Brand management firm WHP Global took a controlling stake in 2021 and stopped trying to rebuild the old chain. Instead it licensed the name into other people’s rooms: shops inside more than 400 Macy’s stores in 2022, airport locations, Navy Exchange stores (one sits at Bangor, for military families), and standalone stores run with Go! Retail Group starting in 2023.
Go! is the operator behind this expansion, and the choice tells you the strategy. The Austin-based, family-owned company has run seasonal retail since 1993 — calendars, toy stores, pop-ups across six countries. Seasonal retail is a discipline: sign short, stock for the peak, open fast, know what the room has to earn. That playbook is now pointed at the most famous name in toys.
Why a toy store is a different bet in 2026
Why open a physical toy store in the age of next-day delivery? Because toys are one of the few categories where the trip itself is part of the product. Nobody’s childhood memory is of a package arriving. Kids don’t browse an algorithm well — they browse a room. A toy store sells discovery: the thing a kid didn’t know existed until it was at eye level, the thing a grandparent can’t choose off a search results page.
It doesn’t beat Amazon at Amazon’s game, and it isn’t trying to. The bet is that there’s a second game: the Saturday trip, the birthday-party errand, the December walk-through. The old chain lost the first game carrying too much debt and too much real estate. This version only plays the second one.
What South Hill gets out of the test
For the mall, the timing is the value. The holiday quarter is when a shopping center either gives people a reason to make the drive or loses them to their phones, and a toy store is one of the strongest seasonal reasons there is. Every family that comes to South Hill for Toys “R” Us walks past every other store in the building in the weeks those stores live on.
And the one-year term cuts both ways: the mall isn’t betting the building on this, and neither is the brand. Both sides signed a deal that lets everyone learn something cheaply — South Hill learns whether a nostalgia anchor still pulls traffic; the brand learns whether Puyallup families keep coming in February.
The only question that matters now
December will take care of itself — toy stores in December are like fireworks stands in July; the season does most of the work. The option on that lease gets exercised, or it doesn’t, based on months nobody writes press releases about.
Watch February. Watch whether the store becomes a habit — the birthday gift bought on the way to the party, the ordinary Saturday with the grandkids. A store that only works when the whole country is buying toys is a pop-up with better signage. A store that works in March is a business.
The name already proved it can survive bankruptcy, liquidation, and eight years of being a memory. What it’s testing at South Hill is smaller and harder: whether a famous name and a physical room, in a town that remembers both, still add up to a store people use.
We’ll know in a year. That’s what the lease says — and for once, the lease and the truth are the same document.
Sources: What Now Seattle; Toys “R” Us expansion announcement (PR Newswire); People; Retail TouchPoints.
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