How Toys R Us went on the offensive — and you can too!

Posted by: Joel Capperella

I came across an article last week about a new strategy that Toys R Us is employing for the upcoming holiday season. The leading kids toy store is launching 600 temporary Toy R Us stores in recession-induced mall and strip mall vacancies.

While the idea is not new (Hickory Farms and Halloween Adventure have been utilizing temporary retail space for years), its application by Toys R Us seems to be in the interest of long-term, consistent, and cost-effective growth.

By evaluating the success and strength of the temporary stores in various markets, the company will be able to make more educated decisions on whether or not they should flip that temporary retail space into a longer-term presence.

It really is a good read, and I’d encourage you to check it out. What struck me the most was that the operations necessary to support the strategy are in somewhat new or underdeveloped territories. For instance, each of the 600 leases had to be negotiated separately; the rapid hiring and deployment of 10,000 temporary employees to man the stores; inventory and floor space planning to make available and display the right merchandise in 4,000 square feet or less. No doubt the experiment will (and probably already has) encountered challenges.

The tie-in, in my opinion, is obvious. Here you have a major retailer embarking on a new strategic holiday sales plan that has many moving parts, some of which do not have the benefit of operational history — a direct reaction to the aftermath of the Great Recession. It’s a good analogy to the transformative maturation of the workforce itself. But instead of regurgitating that meme, consider the experimental approach to workforce planning.

For many firms, the reality of the post-recession workforce is, as we’ve written many times before, that it is doing much, much more with much, much less. Implicitly, those who have projects in need of completion are forced to evaluate the likelihood of success against who is on staff to help execute.

I can speak from experience here that ultimately it becomes a game of prioritization. With adding full-time heads completely off the table, the evaluation of new projects becomes very defensive rather than offensive.

But what if we took a new tact in order to develop a new offensive game plan? Isn’t this what Toys R Us is doing? Taking a familiar process, the utilization of temporary retail space, and leveraging it to capitalize on a clear opportunity — the holiday season.

Therefore, couldn’t we, as business leaders with budget and the discretion to spend that budget, decide to push ahead on some of our more offensively-oriented strategic projects and leverage temporary project teams and staff to help deliver them? After all, the risk (other than the investment in the immediately-needed temporary resources) is negligible and the rewards potentially significant.