Toys R Us: the birth - and bust - of a retail empire

In the early 1980s, a week before Christmas, a woman walked into a supermarket-size store in Tysons Corner, Virginia, and became so dumbfounded that she started talking to herself.

”Where’s the robot?” she said. ”And the hairy monster?”

A Washington Post story that recounted her muttering did not say she was delusional. She was simply overwhelmed by a…