A Toy Store’s Longest Day: Christmas Shopping Season Returns

It’s just before noon in a cavernous Valley toy store, where hundreds of people have squeezed inside. There’s shopping-cart gridlock in Aisle 2, and someone has knocked over a shelf of Tonka toys in Aisle 4, causing an 11-car pileup. A voice on the intercom demands that parents stop their children from test-riding bicycles in the store.

Christmas shopping has returned. At the Toys R Us in Van Nuys, it has returned with a vengeance.

“It gets so packed in here that people are bumping into each other. People are running their carts into little kids,” says Maria Arichea, one of the store’s four managers. “If there’s a hot item and we’re running out of them, I’ve seen people try to take the toys from each other. They get crazy.”

With just 25 shopping days until Christmas, the toy industry is in the midst of what experts predict will be a $7-billion holiday season. Toys R Us expects its 404 stores across the country to account for $2 billion of those sales.

That’s the cost of ten 747 jumbo jets. That’s the gross national product of Jamaica.

“That’s a lot of toys,” says Angela Bourdon, a Toys R Us spokeswoman.

And it takes a lot of people to buy them. They aren’t the genteel clientele of Bullocks Wilshire or Abercrombie & Fitch. They are children tearing packages and flinging boxes. They are adults jostling to get at the “Altered Beast” video game or, perhaps, a “Cherry Merry Muffin” banana-scented doll.

“You try to figure out who these people are, where they come from,” says Ed Brunisholz, another store manager. “That’s the fun of working here. Well, fun is one word for it.”

Each year, holiday shopping officially begins on the day after Thanksgiving, a day that Toys R Us officials call “Black Friday.” The shopping crowds grow larger and larger, they say, right up to Christmas Day.

“It keeps getting busier,” says Tom Matousek, director of the Toys R Us in Van Nuys. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

On “Black Friday” in Matousek’s store, shelves are well-stocked in advance. The staff, expanded from 80 to 200 people and hurriedly trained to handle the masses, stand ready for a marathon, 16-hour shopping day.

Ten minutes before the opening, a dozen customers are lined up outside. Matousek rushes through last-minute preparations, checking with a uniformed security guard who will be in the parking lot and a plainclothes guard who will be watching the registers and the single exit door.

“The first big day,” Matousek says, “you always worry.”

When the store opens at 8 a.m., shoppers armed with carts rush in.

“We’re all here for the same thing, right?” one woman says.

Another yells a warning to a salesman in her path: “I wouldn’t stand in the aisles with all these carts coming through.”

Everyone heads for the “hot” toys: Nintendo games, Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Oopsie Daisy doll that “crawls, falls and cries.” No one can explain why they want to give their child a doll that exhibits pain.

Early crowds are light, but by 11 a.m., the store is packed and stays that way for hours. Rani Johnson and Cathy Dubin, neighbors from the Santa Clarita Valley, struggle to the check stand with two carts full of toys.

“It didn’t go too badly,” Johnson says. “We’ve only taken two Advil apiece.”

The constant crying of children fills the air, as do the angry voices of their parents. “Shannon!” “Raymond!” “Justin! Where are you?” Above this din, jingles play on the intercom--the same six or seven advertisements, over and over, like the ditty for the Oh Jenny! doll:

I know a girl and she’s named Jenny / Oh Jenny! Jenny Oh! / She likes fun and she has plenty / Oh Jenny! Jenny Oh!

“It’s really bad when you find yourself humming it,” says Matousek, who has worked at Toys R Us for six years.

Shoppers push their way down aisles that glare with purple bicycles, fluorescent green volleyballs, and an assortment of toys in pink, orange and red boxes.

“This is terrible,” says Arlene Clifton of Sylmar as she scans a wall of Fisher-Price toys. “There are so many boxes. I’m looking for something, and I don’t know where to start. I’m looking for Big Bird Express, and I’ve seen everything but Big Bird Express.”

It could be worse. Clifton could have come unprepared like Joan Reuner of Sherman Oaks, who doesn’t have the slightest idea of what to get for her granddaughter.

“It’s been so long since I was 5,” the 40-year-old woman says. “I guess I’d better locate a 5-year-old and follow her around, see what she likes.”

Jennifer Kirksey, 15, of Sylmar tries that strategy with her 3-year-old cousin, Richard.

“He wants them all,” Kirksey says.

She should have known that grown-up logic doesn’t stand a chance here. In this environment of games and playthings, adults are hopelessly out of place. A woman wearing a low-cut, black-lace blouse paws through infant toys. Another woman, with a diamond in her nose and a tattoo on her shoulder, searches through video games.

“How about this?” she asks a companion, holding up a game. “ ‘Skate or Die.’ ”

The kids know all the brand names, the specific attributes and limitations of each toy.

“This is a good game,” a small boy tells his mother, “but it’s not worth $13.99.”

Invariably, customers want toys that are stacked above the shelves, some 20 feet up, sending salespeople scrambling up ladders, leaning precariously to reach a heavy box.

“Some of the people who work here won’t even go on the ladders,” says stock clerk Christian Raun after retrieving a board game from overhead.

Business doesn’t slow until after 8 p.m. By 10 p.m., the store is quiet. Shoppers continue to trickle in, but rarely are more than 30 people in the place at one time.

The lull gives employees a head start on straightening aisles, many of which look as if they’ve been the site of terrorist attacks. Workers on the graveyard shift will clean and restock shelves. Toys that have been pulled from their boxes will be repackaged or, if damaged, tossed on the markdown pile.

“People have no respect,” says Louis Cotom, a stock clerk, as he rearranges toy cars. “People just throw things on the floor, leave them there.”

Cotom muses that only 14 hours earlier, the store was carefully ordered. Now, RoboCop figures have landed amid the Ghostbusters display. A plastic crayon bank has rolled two aisles over, into the electronic games.

Worst of all, the Barbie section lies in ruin. Dance Club Barbies are mixed with Doctor Barbies, Island Fun Barbies with Animal Lovin’ Safari Barbies. Who can make sense of it?

“You just have to tear the whole place down and start over,” Cotom says. “We’ll be doing that until tomorrow morning, until we open again.”

By 11:30, only a few shoppers remain. A waitress, who just finished working, picks through toys in the clearance aisle. A young couple, who look as if they’ve stepped off a dance floor, stand transfixed before a video game display. A blonde in a skin-tight minidress and spike heels totters up to the Ninja Turtle rack.

Mark and Sharon Blackman of Van Nuys are among the last customers making a few final selections as a voice on the intercom announces that the store will soon be closing at midnight.

“I would never come into this store during the day,” Mark Blackman says. “Too many kids.”

At the end of the day, almost 2,700 separate purchases totaling $170,000 have been recorded. Managers estimate that most of the holiday buyers came in with one or two companions, so as many as 8,000 people may have passed through the store. That’s about five times the usual daily number.

And, in the week since “Black Friday,” sales and crowds have continued to increase. Trucks bring new shipments every night, but they still have trouble keeping enough Oopsie Daisies and Ninja Turtles on the shelves.

Yet employees insist that the holiday season isn’t so bad. There is camaraderie under battle conditions, they say, and the store is so busy that workdays fly by.

Still, the biggest test lies ahead.

“The 10 days before Christmas will be hectic,” Matousek says. “All the last-minute shoppers will be coming in, looking for a bike and two baskets full of toys for their kids. It’s fun to see 20 cash registers going at once, but I guess by the time Christmas Day comes, we’ll be worn out.”