Category: Field Notes

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.

When we wrote about what a million fair visitors leave behind, the claim underneath the piece was that the fair lives on phone screens as much as on the fairgrounds. Claims like that deserve receipts. So we pulled the receipts: Google Trends, day by day, for the whole run of the 2026 Washington State Fair — what Washington searched, and when.

This is the first installment of The Fair, in Search: a case study in four parts, built entirely from the search record. And the record’s first surprise is the shape itself.

How to read the numbers: Google Trends reports a relative index, not raw counts. 100 is the single biggest day in the window; every other day is scored against it. These figures are Washington State searches for the exact term “Puyallup Fair,” pulled for August 24 – October 12, 2026. Comparisons inside this one pull are apples-to-apples. (Methods and limits at the end — they matter.)

It is not a spike. It is a mesa.

Everyone pictures event attention as a spike: a surge at opening, a long decay. The fair’s search curve does something else. Weekly average interest during the run barely moves — 59.4 in week one, 55.3 in week two, 56.3 in week three, and 60.7 across the closing stretch. For twenty-four days, the fair is simply on: a plateau of attention at roughly triple the pre-fair baseline (the late-August average was 20.9), with the lowest single day of the entire run — a rainy-season Wednesday, September 9, at 29 — still sitting above that baseline.

A plateau changes the planning math. A spike rewards whoever shouts loudest on day one. A mesa rewards whoever is still findable, still accurate, still interesting on day seventeen.

The teeth: Saturdays, ascending

Riding on the plateau is a weekly rhythm with a clear beat. Across the fair’s run, weekend days averaged 79.5; weekdays averaged 46.4. The five biggest search days of the fair were all Saturdays and Sundays.

And the Saturdays climb. First Saturday, September 5: 78. Second, September 12: 87. Third, September 19: 100 — the single biggest search day of the entire fair. The closing Saturday, September 26, comes back to 76. The crest of the fair is not its opening. It is the third weekend — after two weeks of photos, scones, concert clips, and coworkers saying you have to go. Search interest in the fair is built by the fair: word of mouth, made visible.

Last year rhymes. In 2025’s search record, the peak day for “Puyallup Fair” was also a Saturday in the middle of the run — September 13 — not opening day. (Year-to-year levels can’t be compared directly; each pull is scaled to its own peak. But the shape repeating is the finding.) One year is an anecdote. Two is the start of a pattern worth planning around.

Two names, two curves

The fair has two names, and they behave differently. “Washington State Fair” — the official name — peaked early, at 79 on Sunday, September 6, opening weekend, and averaged 44.3 across the run. “Puyallup Fair” — the name people here actually use — averaged 57.5 and owned the crest. The formal name is how the fair is announced; the hometown name is how it is searched for once people are deciding to go. That split deserves its own installment, and it will get one.

The cliff

Then the fair ends, and the curve does the most honest thing in this whole dataset. Closing day, Sunday, September 27: 62 — still strong. Monday, September 28: 19. Tuesday: 5. By October 2: 0. The two weeks after closing average 3.0. There is no long tail, no nostalgic afterglow in search. The audience does not drift away from the fair; it is gone, the morning after, almost to zero.

That cliff is the most useful number in this series for a local business. It means the conversion window is the run itself — the reviews, the signups, the second invitation have to be captured while the mesa holds, because the day after closing there is no residual attention to harvest. October’s work, which the afterglow piece described, starts from an audience you kept, not one you can still reach.

What the shape tells a Puyallup business

• Plan for the third Saturday, not just opening day. The biggest search day of the fair is mid-run. Staffing, inventory, hours, and your best offer should peak when the curve does — September 19, not September 4.
• Weekends are the teeth. Search runs about 70% hotter on fair weekends than fair weekdays. If your public information is wrong anywhere, it is wrongest in effect on a Saturday.
• The mesa forgives a slow start. Interest holds level for three-plus weeks. A business that fixes its profile, photos, or hours in week two still catches most of the run. A spike would punish that; a mesa doesn’t.
• Capture during, because after is zero. The cliff is total. Whatever the fair is going to give you — reviews, names, regulars — it gives during the twenty-four days, or not at all.

Next in this series: the intent map — what those million visitors actually searched for, week by week, from parking to scones. The mesa is the shape. What flows across it is the story.

Methods: Google Trends daily data, geo = Washington State, pulled October 23, 2026 for the window August 24 – October 12, 2026; terms are exact search terms “Puyallup Fair” and “Washington State Fair.” Trends values are a relative index (peak = 100), not search counts. Separate pulls rescale to their own peaks, so the 2025 comparison is shape-only, and a separate June 2026 pull we ran was discarded for exactly that reason — levels from different pulls cannot be compared. Fair dates: September 4–27, 2026 (thefair.com). This is part one of “The Fair, in Search,” a Tygart Media case study; the companion piece is “The Fair Is Over. What Does a Million Visitors Leave Behind?”

Artificial intelligence feels weightless when you use it. It answers from nowhere, instantly, in a calm voice. But every answer is computed somewhere — in a building full of servers that draws serious power, drinks serious water, and has to sit on actual land inside somebody’s city limits.

This summer, that somewhere came up for a vote-shaped discussion in Puyallup.

The June 30 meeting

At its June 30, 2026 study session, the Puyallup City Council took up Phase 2 of the city’s zoning map and code amendments — Package Six of the Development and Permitting Services work plan, presented by Senior Planner Kendall Wals. Most of the package was alignment work: making the zoning map match the adopted future land use map, updating mixed-use zones, weighing consolidation of the single-family RS zones, refreshing the manufacturing zones, and revising the Fair Park overlay.

The council endorsed most of it and sent it forward to the Planning Commission. But on two items it deliberately slowed down: the single-family consolidation, and the proposed data center allowances — the question of where, and under what conditions, data centers should be permitted in Puyallup’s manufacturing and business park zones. On those, the council urged more public outreach and more analysis before anything moves.

Residents at the session made the concerns concrete: traffic, infrastructure strain, and protections for the neighbors of facilities that run loud, bright, and around the clock. Those are not abstractions in a city where industrial land and neighborhoods have been growing toward each other for thirty years.

The part nobody in the room could call hypothetical

Puyallup is not deciding whether to admit its first data center. It already has one.

Washington’s legislative auditor (JLARC), in its 2026 review of the state’s data center tax preference, lists exactly three owners who claimed the urban-county exemption — in Tukwila, in Kent, and Benaroya Capital, in Puyallup, whose facility opened in 2011 in a business park zoned for manufacturing and industrial activity. JLARC’s dry conclusion is also worth hearing in full: the tax preference “has had no influence” on where any of the three located. They all came before it existed, for their own reasons — power, land, fiber, and position in the corridor.

So the Phase 2 question is not whether data centers belong in Puyallup. It is whether the next ones arrive under rules the city chose on purpose — with conditions on noise, power, water, and siting written in advance — or under whatever the current code happens to allow by default.

The honest ledger both sides are arguing from

What a data center brings: a very large construction project; a serious new property-tax and utility customer; a small number of permanent, well-paid technical jobs — few jobs per acre is the industry’s known arithmetic, and pretending otherwise insults everyone’s intelligence; and a tenant that does not leave when retail cycles turn.

What it asks: power, at a scale that makes utilities plan around a single customer; water, in most designs, for cooling; land in the same industrial zones the city’s warehouse and manufacturing economy is competing for — the same corridor economy that is Puyallup’s growth story right now; and neighbors’ tolerance for generator testing, HVAC hum, and a building that produces almost no daily street life.

Neither column is a caricature. The council’s June move — forward with the package, slower on this — reads like a body that can see both columns and declined to pretend the math was finished.

What happens next, and what to watch

The Phase 2 package is working through the Planning Commission phase, with the data center allowances carrying the council’s instruction for more outreach and analysis attached. That means hearings, a staff analysis worth reading when it lands, and eventually a council decision that will be one of the more consequential land-use calls of Puyallup’s decade — because it writes the rules before the applications arrive, not after.

For local businesses, there is a quieter stake in this than the headlines suggest. Data centers are the physical plant of the AI services every small business in town is rapidly adopting. Whether that plant sits in our industrial zones — paying into our tax base, drawing on our power planning, answering to our code — or one freeway exit away in somebody else’s is a live local choice, being made this year, in meetings almost nobody attends.

The AI era will be built out of zoning decisions like this one, in towns like this one. June 30 was Puyallup’s turn to start deciding. The record so far says the city chose to look harder before it chose — and that the rest of the decision is still in front of all of us.

Update — October 23, 2026: the decision window is open

Two weeks after the June 30 session, residents were back at the microphone. The July 14, 2026 council minutes record public commenters advocating a moratorium on zoning changes related to higher-tier data centers, raising the impacts of large facilities on nearby residents, and pressing the council on its process — the June caution, organized.

And the calendar has caught up with the story. The city’s own published timeline for the Phase 2 amendments puts the Planning Commission public hearing in fall 2026, followed by council review and action, with council consideration of the package slated for October 2026. In other words: the decision this piece said was “still in front of all of us” is being made in the current window. When the hearing date posts and the staff analysis lands, this desk will cover both — the analysis the council asked for in June is the document that will tell us what “choosing on purpose” actually costs and pays.

Sources: City of Puyallup City Council study session minutes, June 30, 2026 (Phase 2 zoning map and code amendments, Package Six; data center allowances among items flagged for more outreach and analysis); Citizen Portal meeting record, June 30, 2026; JLARC, “2026 Tax Preference Review: Data Centers in Urban Counties” (Benaroya Capital facility in Puyallup, opened 2011; tax preference found to have had no influence on siting); City of Puyallup 2026 DPS Work Plan overview; City Council minutes, July 14, 2026 (public comment on data centers); City of Puyallup zoning map & code updates project timeline (Phase 2: Planning Commission public hearing fall 2026, council review and action to follow). Part of Tygart Media’s Puyallup coverage.

For twenty days in September, Puyallup — a city of roughly 44,000 people — hosted on the order of a million visitors at the Washington State Fair. The fair ran September 4–27 on the 160-acre fairgrounds, and then, as it does every year, it packed up and left.

Here is the question October asks every business in this town: what did the million leave behind?

Not the obvious things — not the revenue spike, welcome as it was, and not the traffic, unmissed as it is. The durable residue. Because a million visitors is the largest audience any Puyallup business will ever be handed, and almost all of that audience interacted with this town through a phone screen before, during, or after they walked through a gate. What they left behind lives on those screens — and most of it expires if nobody tends it.

What a million visitors actually deposits

• Searches. For twenty days, people standing in Puyallup searched like locals: coffee near me, breakfast, parking, burgers, things to do after the fair. Those searches taught the platforms which Puyallup businesses answer local intent — and the businesses that showed up, with current hours and real photos, banked visibility that doesn’t vanish when the Ferris wheel comes down.
• Reviews. Fair season is review season. Visitors review the restaurant that saved their rainy Saturday and the shop that treated their kids well — and those reviews are read for the next eleven months by the audience that matters more: the 44,000 of us who live here and the steady stream of people deciding whether Puyallup is worth a Saturday.
• Photos and tags. A million people photographing their day puts this town’s storefronts, signs, and plates into more feeds in three weeks than a year of ordinary marketing. That imagery is findable, and it compounds.
• Names and numbers. Every business that ran a fair-season list signup, a text club, a receipt offer, or a Spring Fair reminder hold now owns a small asset: permission to talk to people who already came once.

The October work: converting a crowd into a clientele

The fair’s economics tempt a business to treat September as weather — wonderful, uncontrollable, gone. The operators who win the fair treat it as the top of a funnel that runs all year. The conversion work is October work, and it is unglamorous:

• Answer the reviews. All of them, especially the fair-season ones, while the visit is still warm in the reviewer’s mind. A thoughtful reply in October is read by everyone shopping you in December.
• Fix what the crowd exposed. Fair traffic is a stress test: the hours that were wrong on your profile, the menu photo from 2023, the parking question answered nowhere. A million visitors just audited your public information for free. October is when you correct the findings.
• Send the second invitation. The list you built gets its first real message now — not a coupon blast, an invitation: the fall menu, the local night, the thing residents get that fair crowds don’t. The fair proved people will come to Puyallup. Give them a reason that isn’t a Ferris wheel.
• Speak to the 44,000. Residents watched the fair happen to their town for twenty days. The businesses that acknowledge locals in October — we saved you a seat now that the crowds are gone — earn the loyalty that carries the other eleven months.

The date that makes this a strategy instead of a sentiment

The fair has already posted its return: the Spring Fair runs April 9–11 and 16–18, 2027 — two weekends, a smaller and more local crowd, and the first big test of every October intention. Businesses that did the conversion work get to watch April behave differently: repeat faces, a warmer list, reviews that mention coming back.

And the wheel keeps turning. September 2027’s million will arrive on schedule. The only question the fair ever really asks a Puyallup business is whether it treats the crowd as weather or as an audience it intends to keep.

A million people came to our town this fall. What they left behind is sitting in your reviews, your search profile, and your signup list right now — quietly expiring or quietly compounding, depending on what October looks like.

The Washington State Fair ran September 4–27, 2026 at the Washington State Fair Events Center in Puyallup; the fair draws on the order of a million visitors across its run. The Spring Fair is scheduled April 9–11 and 16–18, 2027 (thefair.com). This piece is part of Tygart Media’s Puyallup coverage, alongside the Opportunity Zone series and the new farmers market story.