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How the Internet hurt Specialty Toy Stores | Melissa Bernstein

21 Oct 2024 · 1 min

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Melissa Bernstein describes how, for roughly the first 15 years of her business, small independent specialty toy stores were the primary distribution channel. She explains that the rise of the Internet — notably Amazon with fast delivery (Prime) — reduced customers' need to visit local toy stores, causing significant negative effects and attrition among specialty toy retailers.

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Our primary mode of distribution for the first, about, gosh, 15 years of our business were these small, independent specialty toy stores that existed across the whole world. And the Internet really hurt them because suddenly you didn't have to go to your local toy store to get that gift. You could get prime on Amazon and get it the next day. So we saw there was a negative to it as well, of course, in really hurting a lot of those specialty stores. And we saw major attrition in the number of stores over the years when Amazon was really growing. At Amazon and other websites too, of course.