Toys R Us is adding 120 stores it will not run itself

Toys R Us announced 120 new U.S. stores for the holidays on Sept. 17, but the brand's owner is a brand management firm, not a store operator; the Toys R Us store jobs are posted by retail partner Go! Retail Group, which says 600 of the roughly 800 locations it runs are seasonal.

Key points

• The company's own release, dated Sept. 17, says 120 new standalone stores will open this holiday season on top of about 40 already open, for 160 total. It names no site for any of the 120 — no cities, no opening dates, no store sizes, no lease terms and no number of jobs. The only locations it dates are a separate project: airport shop-in-shops at Orlando International Airport run with WHSmith North America, the first opened in August and a second set for summer 2027.
• Two separate companies are involved. WHP Global owns the Toys R Us brand and describes itself in the release's own boilerplate as a brand management firm; Go! Retail Group, a family-owned company based in Austin, Texas, is the retail partner, and that same boilerplate lists Toys R Us and Babies R Us inside Go! Retail's portfolio of brands. The release quotes an executive from each: Jamie Uitdenhowen, EVP of Toys R Us at WHP Global, and Gideon Schlessinger, CEO of Go! Retail Group. Neither the release nor Fox Business actually says Go! Retail will operate the stores; both describe only a partnership. The hiring is what settles it — the Toys R Us store jobs below are posted by Go! Retail Group as the employer.
• Go! Retail's business is mostly temporary mall space. Its own boilerplate, printed on its live job postings, says it opened its first stores in 1993 and operates "200 year-round stores and 600 seasonal stores" in malls, outlets and shopping centers. That is roughly three seasonal locations for every one that runs year-round.
• The postings for these stores state the terms. A part-time Toys R Us sales associate job in Cerritos, California advertises $17.00 an hour and up to 20 hours a week; a seasonal store manager job at East Towne Mall in Madison, Wisconsin advertises $16.00 an hour and is classified full-time, temporary. Neither posting gives a season end date, and both are single high-cost markets rather than a national rate.
• The central question is unanswered. Fox Business reports that the announcement did not specify whether all 120 stores stay open after the holiday season, and the release itself contains no lease-duration language. One detail cuts the other way: the release says select locations will get Creator Studios and select stores cafés and candy shops, which is more fit-out than a pop-up usually gets — but it applies that only to some of the 120, and neither company has published a permanent-versus-seasonal split.
• The last relaunch did not hold. Tru Kids Brands opened two experiential stores around the 2019 holidays, at Westfield Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey and the Galleria in Houston. The Toy Book reported both closed in January 2021, the Houston store after about 13 months. WHP Global bought a controlling stake in the brand later in 2021 and, per Retail Dive, announced more than 400 shop-in-shops inside Macy's rolling out in 2022 — that figure is a 2021 plan, not a current count.
• The WHP Global and Go! Retail partnership dates to September 2023, when the two announced up to 24 U.S. flagship stores beginning in 2024. Three years on the standalone base is about 40, though the 2023 plan counted flagships and the 2026 release counts standalone stores, so the two numbers are not strictly like-for-like.
• Toy demand is genuinely up, and adults are the reason. Circana reported on Aug. 12 that U.S. toy dollar sales rose 17% in the first half of 2026, the strongest first half in six years, with units up 12% and average selling price up 4%. Sales to buyers 18 and over rose 25%, the largest single contributor to the industry's growth, and adult-only households accounted for 55% of toy sales while growing 16% through June.
• The holiday job market these stores enter has been shrinking. Challenger, Gray & Christmas projected on Sept. 25, 2025 that retailers would add fewer than 500,000 seasonal workers in the fourth quarter, against 543,100 added in the fourth quarter of 2024 — the lowest since 2009, which Retail Dive puts at 495,800. Those are last season's figures; no 2026 equivalent had been published as of this writing.

For a student reading this as a job posting rather than a nostalgia story, the useful detail is whose name is on the paycheck. The employer is Go! Retail Group, not Toys R Us, and the postings say what the press release does not: hourly rate, a 20-hour weekly cap on the part-time role, and the word temporary on the manager role. Go! Retail also recruits what it calls Operators, who open their own Go! Toys and Games, Go! Calendar or Attic Salt store with company support, an arrangement its careers page describes without publishing fees, investment requirements or income figures. A retail expansion announcement answers how many storefronts; the listing answers how many hours, at what rate, and for how long — and on the last of those three, neither the announcement nor the listings currently say.

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