Toy emporium FAO Schwarz is known to most of America as “that place Tom Hanks played that floor piano in that movie one time” as opposed to, say, a place they actually frequent and encourage with their shopping dollars. Naturally, this can prove problematic for any store not trying to work off of the “Sharper Image” business model, wherein the store itself is more of a novelty than the products inside (See Brookstone, et al.). So it’s no surprise that the company, which has filed for bankruptcy every single Tuesday going back to 1998, has been bought. What is a surprise is that the buyer is fellow future failure Toys R Us.

Toys R Us may have invented the text speak that ultimately devolved into the cringeworthy LOLspeak we so egregiously employ here with their cunning shortening of the too-hard-to-spell word “are” into its most base, guttural noise, and inspired the band KoRn by having the foresight to flip the letter R, but Toys R Us does not make money by bastardizing the English language. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make a whole lot of money selling toys either, but has at least fared better than FAO or what was once KB Toys.

As is so often the case with society’s ills, the blame for this rests squarely on Wal-Mart and its unethical business practice of selling the same products at lower prices. It doesn’t help that in these tough economic times, parents actually love their children less, and are buying fewer toys for their remaining children not left on the doorsteps of nunneries and hospitals. Also, Schwarz’s fail was pretty much guaranteed: its flagship NYC store is located in the General Motors building, so, you know.

With this acquisition, Toys R Us can finally say that its Schwarz is bigger than yours. But it shouldn’t get too accustomed to ownership; history shows us that it won’t be three weeks before Toys R Us sells FAO Schwarz to someone else. Here’s a list of who has owned the company over the past forty years or so, and what happened:

• Schwarz family – sold in 1963 to Parent’s Magazine
• Parent’s – sold to W.R. Grace in 1970
• Grace – sold to Franz Carl Weber in 1974
• Weber – sold to Christiana Companies (the landlord) in 1986
• Christiana – sold to Christiana’s CEO Peter Harris in 1986
• Harris – sold to the filthy stinking Dutch company KBB in 1990
• Dutch – KBB bought by more filthy stinking Dutch in 1998
• Dutch – sold to Right Start in 2001
• Right Start – went bankrupt in 2003, sold to D.E. Shaw in 2004
• Shaw – sold to Toys R Us today
• Toys R Us – went bankrupt a year or two later
• Bear outside the store – replaced bull statue on Wall Street
• Tom Hanks – got fat