NEW YORK — They couldn’t hang on two more weeks.
Just days ahead of the biggest day on the retail calendar, KB Toys filed for bankruptcy and planned to start going-out-of- business sales right away, choked by a downturn so severe that sales were down 20 percent in what should have been its busiest season.
Desperate to pull in shoppers, the company touted a “Buy 2, Get 1 Free” sale on name brands such as Playskool and Littlest Pet Shop, $25 off Mattel and Fisher-Price toys and other sharp discounts in ads distributed Thursday before the company filed for Chapter 11 protection.
KB Toys has stores in the Outlets at Castle Rock and Colorado Mills in Lakewood.
But the “blowout” sales turned into liquidation sales, as the company filed for bankruptcy protection for the second time in four years, unable to offset the “sudden and sharp decline in consumer sales” it had seen in the past two months.
“Manufacturers were concerned about shipping to them over the last couple of months,” said Jim Silver, a toy analyst at . “This did not happen all of a sudden.”
He said the timing of the filing was a surprise; he expected it in January.
That a toy retailer filed for bankruptcy just before Christmas shows how bleak things have become, as KB Toys joins a growing list of retailers in bankruptcy.
