Toy Stores

If you have read The Muse's blog in the last couple of months, then you know that we -- after an election on the issue -- are getting a Target here in Carmel-by-the-Causeway. (Apparently, our town was the first town in the country to require a public vote to approve a Target. There is a first time for all things, apparently.) This pleases me. I like Target. I like the concept of being able to shop for socks, among other things, in town. Yeah to reducing our town's daily hemorrage of sales tax money to other local communities. One thing about the Target concerns me, however. That is I am pretty concerned about what it will do to our local toy store.

We have a pretty good toy store downtown. It's not the greatest toy store ever, but you can easily spend enjoyable 30-45 minutes in there while your kid shops for a birthday party (which is usually in about an hour, but that's a different issue). It is unfotunately one of a dying breed.

I'm old enough to have very fond memories of local toy stores. The next town over from where I grew up had a toy store to which my mom took my sister and I many times. My mom, my Grandma and my aunt used to go have lunch every Saturday -- usually at a very dark Mexican restaurant where I usually had a hamburger, which is one of the many things about which I now kick myself -- and then go shopping. One of the few appeals of participating in this to me -- shoe and garden-plant shopping often was involved -- was that, if we were good, we got to go to the toy store and spend $1. Even more importantly, after Star Wars came out, we could go and put an action figure on layaway for when I was able to come up with $3 to actually buy it. Ooh, that was awesome.

A local toy store was something of a metaphor for your community. In my hometown, a woman opened a toy store on the main drag (right near the B of A, as I recall) and gave it a go. I was about eight or nine and that was great. A toy store in our town!!! The store closed within a year or two, though, and what I remember people saying is that "I guess town just isn't big enough for a toy store yet." We apparently lived in a small town, although it get a stoplight right around the time that the toy store closed.

The bigger the town, the better the toy store. Our local big city -- known for many things, including being Kevin Federline's hometown -- had a huge, spectacular toy store. We went there about once or twice a year. It had whole separate departments of toys. You could spend days there as a kid.

Toy stores like these, however, are an endangered species. Target and Wal-Mart and probably Costco can buy toys in much larger quantities and therefore probably get much better prices. I recognize that this is the situation with small stores that sell many things that these big stores sell. In relation to toy stores, however, this situation seems particularly troubling. Toys are for fun. (If you leave them in the box so they are pristine, so you can sell them on EBay a la the 40-year-old virgin, I fear for you.) Our kids probably are not going to know how fun it is to go to a really good toy store. "Toy aisle" isn't the same as "toy store."

So, while I am quite glad that Target is coming to town, I think that our kids will keep going to the local toy store for birthday presents. Given our kids' ages, that should for another year or so.