In March, 2018 Toys “R” Us announced a complete liquidation of their stores. This move came only six months after the chain filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection.

This news was sad for many, including myself, who had grown up during a time when the Toys “R” Us brand meant excitement and whimsy.

With the closings imminent, I wanted to catalog the store locations before that data became lost to time. In early April, I wrote a Python script to step through the store locator on the toysrus.com website.

I have curated this dataset and made it available on Github. The data is a point-in-time snapshot of where Toys “R” Us stores existed on April 2, 2018.

As a data scientist at heart, I also tossed together some high level descriptive analytics about this dataset.

In April, 2018 there were 881 stores, 227 of these were Babies “R” Us locations and the rest (654) were under the Toys “R” Us banner.

(image caption: Toys "R" Us locations noted with red markers and Babies "R" Us locations noted with purple markers)

Here are the five states with the most Toys "R" Us stores:

Here are a few observations from the data:

Wyoming was the only U.S. state without a Toys “R” Us store.

store. There were three Toys "R" Us stores in Puerto Rico.

stores in Puerto Rico. There were four Toys "R" Us stores in Hawaii, three on the island of Oahu and one on the island of Maui.

stores in Hawaii, three on the island of Oahu and one on the island of Maui. Five states only had a single Toys “R” Us store (South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Vermont, and Alaska).

I also did some spatial querying, and found that on average, each Toys “R” Us store was 1.3 miles from a U.S. interstate highway (stores in Hawaii and Puerto Rico were withheld from this calculation because... islands).

(image caption: the stores in Laredo, Texas, noted here with red markers, were representative of the close proximity Toys "R" Us locations maintained to U.S. interstate highways)