Many fine men and women worked for Toys R Us and it is truly unfortunate that they will have to lose their jobs as a result of the famed toy chain closing up shop.
Thank you for helping to make our childhoods bright and may God bless you in your effort to seek new employment.
That being said, Toys R Us deserves this humiliating end, which began when they filed for bankruptcy last fall just so they could borrow money to buy toys to sell for Christmas. I shed not one tear for them, and neither should you: For the past decade, the organization has joined the ranks alongside Target, Starbucks, and every megastore chain in the conquest of progressive social engineering.
You may recall that as the “gender fluidity” debate entered the national conversation back in 2015, Toys R Us announced that it would no longer be categorizing their U.K. online stores according to “boys” and “girls” toys. They also began implementing the same policies in several U.K. retail stores as well as one of their superstores in Stockholm, Sweden. Though the chain did not implement the policy nationwide in the U.S., pressure from groups like “Let Toys Be Toys” coupled with the ongoing trend of degendering everything would have surely overtaken the store in less than a decade.
But that’s not the worst of the toy chain’s hypocrisy. In fact, Toys R Us has contributed to its own demise by funding the very organization designed to eliminate their future customers: abortion conglomerate Planned Parenthood.
According to LifeSiteNews, the mega toy chain was just one of many corporations that donated to Planned Parenthood, which performs an average of 324,000 abortions per year. LifeSite detailed the company’s relationship with PP going all the way back to 2010:
In August 2010, Life Decisions International (LDI) identified Toys R Us as a boycott target for its contributions to the abortion giant. In December of that year, LDI removed Toys R Us and several other companies from the list, a development it credited to pro-life activists who pressured the companies to reverse course.
According to LDI, a company can get itself removed from the list by either ceasing Planned Parenthood donations for at least five years, or pledging to disqualify the abortion giant from future contributions.
The toy company’s direct support for Planned Parenthood ended, but its indirect support continued.
2ndVote, an organization that monitors corporate giving from a conservative perspective, reports that as of February 2017, the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s Greater New York City and Minnesota affiliates listed Toys R Us as among the companies that match employee contributions.
As LifeSiteNews has previously covered, the Komen breast cancer charity was the subject of a 2012 controversy in which it attempted to cut ties with Planned Parenthood, but then backed down in the face of pressure from the abortion giant.
In 2016, Komen gave Planned Parenthood $363,290, ostensibly for breast cancer treatment. However, Planned Parenthood performs no on-site mammograms, and its cancer screenings dropped 68 percent from 2004 to 2014.
That the company donated to PP while pushing family-friendly labels like Babies R Us makes their actions all the more egregious and all the more deserving of failure. While that may come across as harsh hyperbole, the numbers actually prove otherwise. Business Insider notes that Toys R Us began to see a decline in sales in the 1990s as the birthrate in Western countries began to decline. In fact, the company essentially admitted the declining birthrate as the reason for the loss of profits in their annual 2017 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
“Most of our end-customers are newborns and children and, as a result, our revenues are dependent on the birth rates in countries where we operate,” the document explains. “A continued and significant decline in the number of newborns and children in these countries could have a material adverse effect on our operating results.”
Business Insider’s Leanna Garfield concurred that declining birthrates contributed to downward sales.