I'll admit I was never a big fan of KB Toys, so the recent announcement that the 86-year-old retail chain was finally giving up the ghost after a torturous half decade of bankruptcies and aborted efforts to become something more than the nation's toy store of last resort was more of a relief than a cause for concern. My first thought, frankly, was that action figure fans looking for failed movie toys no one else wanted to buy at other toy stores nine months previously will have to find somewhere else to shop.

But what's struck me most deeply in the intervening weeks since KB's December 11 announcement that it would immediately begin going-out-of-business sales at all of its stores are the steady stream of posts by former KB employees to our website to either decry the wrong turns they feel the company made or to say publicly how much they'll miss working for the retailer. That loyalty, I'll admit, continues to be a bittersweet surprise to me.

It's been sobering to read how crestfallen some store-level employees are about KB's death. It's been even sadder to realize those employees aren't mourning the imminent loss of their own paychecks in what's certainly the worst economic recession since the 1930s, but are bummed because they cared about and worked so hard to try to ensure their individual stores' successes. To seemingly have those efforts squandered by a corporate management working off of an entirely different playbook may just be the most distasteful part of KB's poorly executed game plan. It seems that store associates thought they were working at a specialty toy emporium when, in fact, they were running a nationwide rummage sale. A lot of employees, apparently, never grasped that, and those that did weren't able to sway their immediate higher ups that what KB's customers wanted and what KB was delivering weren't the same thing. And with that, there went the entire ball game.

The good news for KB's former competitors is that there will be a lot of experienced toy store staffers looking for work by the time you read this. And if you find yourself thinking, “I wonder if all that vacant mall space might be the place for me to open my new toy store?” I'd bet there are any number of KB castoffs with better insights into the potential for toy stores to return to the nation's shopping malls than those of most professional retail consultants.

Whether the economics of a mall-based toy store chain still work is up for debate—the last 10 years have seen the retail landscape littered with the corpses of too many failed efforts to inspire any but the most brave to give it another go in today's marketplace—but one thing remains certain: selling toys, especially and particularly in a small space, is about selling emotion. Tap into that emotion and the dollars and cents will follow. A 1,500-square-foot toy store is not a mercantile exchange, a wholesale fish market, an auction hall or a Wal-Mart. To run one as such is to miss the point of a small toy store's purpose—and to misunderstand its ultimate potential. These days, that's something most KB Toy associates could probably tell you all too easily.