When you here the name Toys R Us, what comes to mind. Even with the boom of E-commerce, I always believed it would be one of the last standing brick and mortars that offered an experience like no other. Unfortunately this was not the case. Brigham & Houston, (2021) explain corporate finance focuses on decisions relating to how much and what types of assets to acquire, how to raise capital needed to purchase assets, and how to run a firm so as to maximize its value. In June of 2018 Toys R us closed its stores, just a year before that, the company filed for bankruptcy due to its $5 billion in liabilities, they tried a new and updated relaunch but to no avail. Toys R Us had taken on more debt than it could handle, without considering the competitiveness of internet shopping. National Business Capital, (2019) elucidates that they could have alleviated some of this debt by decreasing commercial mortgage costs, labor costs, and shipping and packaging costs.

In 2003 Toys R Us closed all Kids R Us stores. By 2005 the company was taken private in a $6.6 billion leveraged buyout deal, in 2009 Toys R Us acquire Etoys.com, Toys.com, and KB toys, this is after closing all of its Kid R Us stores, they attempt to go public but failed to achieve their IPO in 2013 due to declining sales. Brigham & Houston, (2021) explains that a firm's value is dependent on its growth opportunities, which are dependent on its ability to attract capital. Toys R Us was unable to attract capital even after its second attempt of relaunching. I believe this was due to the notion that their competition; Walmart, amazon, ecommerce in general had already filled the void they had left after closing all of their stores. The ultimate demise of the company was in part due to stiff competition in the space, but also poor management decisions pertaining to the company's finances, futile acquisitions and an inability to shift their focus in an effort to work with the competition.

• Ask a question about the organization your colleague described regarding the practices that reflected good or poor financial management or the culture that supported those practices.
• Relate your colleague's experience of how the culture supported the financial practices to an experience that you may have had or that you have researched.