Good Morning Friends. This morning’s post is going to be a bit meandering, but stick with me and I promise I will wrap things up into a point. One of the things that I have long lamented was the closing of Toys R Us. Sure it generally offered the highest possible price point you could pay for an item, but what I miss is the foundational memory that it provided for me growing up. Getting to go to Toys R Us was a big deal because it was this magical place that had every toy that you knew about and a lot more than you had likely ever seen before. It was an even bigger deal for me because I grew up in a tiny town with Walmart as the only retailer, which meant that I had to make a special trip to the “Big City” in order to go there. This also meant that generally speaking I was on my best behavior in the vague hopes that maybe just maybe my parents would let me go to the magical oasis of toys.
Another piece of this puzzle is that my wife and I have had this weird pipe dream for years. We always wanted to create a store that had a jumble of all of our interests. So there would be a section for used books, teacher stuff, video games, vintage toys, and tabletop games all rolled into a single store. The closest thing to this that really exists is Gardner’s Used Books here in the Tulsa area and I feel like it probably only really exists because it was run at a loss for decades as a bit of a tax dodge for a successful accountant. Now that it has been taken over by his daughter though, the place has even got better and probably actually properly is a successful business. There are tales of warehouses full of stock that he bought throughout the years that have never seen the light of day. Going to Gardner’s at least in some part harkens back to some of that magic of a Toys R Us trip because there are just so many interesting and unexpected things to see.
Because of these combined interests, one of the things that I really enjoy is what I collectively refer to as “Shop Tube”. There is a wide array of channels devoted to running a brick-and-mortar store, specifically in collectible spaces. They generally offer a behind-the-scenes day in the life of a store experience as folks bring in items to sell and they figure out how best to price them. Since my wife and I have never really prioritized our daydream of running that penultimate combo store idea we have… this gives me a bit of a way to live vicariously through the eyes of folks who did go down that road. I’ve talked before about Toy Federation which has become a Sunday morning ritual of watching their new video each week. I’ve also talked a bit about Retro Rick’s Game Point channel which is actually close enough to me to reasonably go there, and at some point, I probably will.
So all of this said… when the YouTube algorithm started suggesting to me this new channel with a weird name, I was primed to click through and see what it was about. Essentially it is a Toy, Video Game, and Children’s Clothing store located in Jasper Indiana, and the channel is devoted to the process of standing up this store and then annexing the other part of the building to expand the business and the assorted growing pains that come with that. What is so cool about the store is that it is purposefully built to be a spectacle giving kids that magical experience of roaming through a place with seemingly endless possibilities. The name is explained… but also does not really matter because it is extremely memorable.
The channel is most often presented through the narration of Dallas the owner and his co-owner girlfriend, and the cast of characters that work at the store. What is so cool about this experience is that it is targeted specifically towards trying some interesting things out. For example, there is a giant bin of Mr/Mrs Potato dolls and parts and kids can effectively build their own custom-made ultimate version to buy. There is a Lego table with cups letting you fill up whatever parts you want to then purchase. There is a free make-your-own bracelet table with tons of assorted beds dumped into a big bin with pipe cleaners letting kids have a little arts and crafts activity for free as part of the total experience. Everything is bright and colorful and specifically designed in a way to be at the eye level for the target demographic… kids… or adults who are kids at heart.
The thing is this channel and store go much further than just a YouTube thing, but are attempting to be a force of interesting activities in their small community. On September 13th they held a Mario Kart Tournament and gave away store credit to the winners. The channel showed off the behind-the-scenes process of getting ready for the event and trying to figure out how to make a very cool and memorable trophy for the winners. It was just generally fun to watch a bunch of kids and a few adults having a blast playing Mario Kart. There are future plans to do something totally different and hold a Hot Wheel race throughout the store as their next big event. It feels like they are genuinely trying to create interesting memories for the kids who frequent the shop, and I am here for it. Like I said before… that is the big thing that the death of Toys R Us robbed us of, is those deep foundational memories from childhood.
Right now the channel is honestly sort of criminally underrated. It only has around 2200 subscribers but is doing some really interesting things. They recently started a live Saturday show from the store and Dallas has wired up a few cameras so that they can swap between the podcasting area in the Video Game store and behind the counter in the Clothing/Toy side of the store. What is sort of infectious is the generally chaotic energy of the store owner which has deep “big kid” vibes to it. More important than that though is that the employees seem genuinely happy there. There are often asides in the videos where one of them has been roaming around with a go-pro and just yammering unscripted about whatever is on their mind. A good number of retail store channels are very clearly staged and at least loosely scripted, and this just has more of a “giving a toddler your camera” vibe.
Dallas aka the face of the Duck Duck Blue channel had/has another channel with nine years worth of content called Tendo’s Trash. Once I started watching the Duck Duck Blue videos, the algorithm of course started recommending various videos from that channel. It was way more focused on Thrift Shopping, Garage Sales, and hitting up the Goodwill Bins to find deals to ultimately then flip on eBay or stock an Antique Mall Booth. It has the same chaos goblin vibes that Duck Duck Blue has but is a bit less focused. However, it also gives a bit of a behind-the-behind-the-scenes view of all of the events that led up to the grand opening of the store. There are over nine hundred videos on that channel dating back nine years, so I doubt I will be getting through all of them, but it has been interesting seeing the process that they went through to stock the store almost entirely through aggressively seeking out garage and estate sales.
If you are a child of the 80s/90s and have deep foundational memories centered around visits to the toy store… then you might legitimately dig all of this. I am legitimately hoping that five years from now we don’t find out that Tendo was a milkshake duck, but so far he seems like a genuinely good dude with a good heart.
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