[Boy Blunder]

My chief concern is for the employees, mostly due to the fact that, over the past few years, my wife and I have befriended quite a few of them at our local TRU, and have chatted at length with them about things going on in their lives outside of the store.

Especially one of the managers. He's a great dude who tries to help us get a leg-up on the local scalpers when it comes to ML and TFs, and he just recently finally moved into a larger place with his girlfriend. I doubt' he'll have trouble finding work, he has plenty of managerial and retail experience under his belt, but that's still a rough patch he'll have to go through.

The one bright thing I can think of here is that our local smaller toy store will see a boom in business, since it's very collector-oriented and tries to keep all the major niche lines in stock for reasonable prices, and it's just down the road from the local TRU.

But we'll have to wait and see. Even if "the writing is on the wall," I'm not going to rule out anything happening until TRU gives an official statement of full nationwide closure. I might be a damned fool for it, but I'm an optimistic damned fool.