Just Us. The Toys Are All Gone.

WOODBRIDGE, N.J. — Cheryl Claude was two years out of high school, already married and raising her first child when she stopped at a Toys R Us to buy diapers one day in 1985.

The store manager noticed how Claude picked up a toy that had fallen on the floor and put it back on the shelf. He offered her a job on the spot.

She went on to spend 33 years stocking shelves and unloading trucks at one of the world’s largest toy retailers. “This was my home,” said Claude, 52.

Her career ended Thursday when the Toys R Us on Route 1 in Woodbridge, New Jersey, shut its doors for good.

By then, the shelves were mostly bare, except for a scattering of stuffed animals, tween jewelry and polyester pillows.

There were racks of Pokémon Christmas ornaments and summer outfits for Ken dolls, along with bright orange price tags on the refrigerator and folding chairs in the break room.

Another retail casualty, Toys R Us, a brand that dates to 1957, closed the last of its 735 stores across the country this week.

As more Americans shop online, the company’s cavernous suburban stores became outdated and the $5 billion debt from its private equity owners too onerous.

Most large companies that file for bankruptcy end up paring their debts, cutting costs and continuing to operate. But lenders to Toys R Us decided its U.S. operations were worth more in a final sale than as a functioning business.

Claude, an assistant manager, and the company’s thousands of other workers will not receive severance after they leave. Employees were told there’s not enough money left after paying the company’s creditors, bankruptcy attorneys and consultants.

Claude kept working into the final weeks, alongside other longtime employees who stayed out of a sense of pride, necessity or denial.

Iggy Abreu, the store’s 46-year-old “key carrier,” continued to arrive 15 minutes early to open the store at 6 a.m., just as he always had.

Maggie Kuziw, an inventory specialist, came in to keep up with the ever-changing price signs.

Cathy Koperwhats kept running the baby registry, and taking breaks for doctors’ visits before her health insurance ran out.

“We are leaving with nothing, and that is not a good feeling,” she said.

The plan was to empty the Woodbridge store, starting in the back and pushing all the toys to the front. The bike aisle emptied first, then Thomas the Tank Engine, then Lego and Fisher-Price.

With each week that passed, the store shrank from a sprawling showroom into just three aisles of toys that no one wanted.

As painful as the process was, this is what Cheryl Claude did best: unloading, stocking and moving product.

On a warm afternoon during the first week of June, Claude wore a roll of packing tape on her wrist and barked orders into her headset at the staff.

A delivery truck had just dropped off 18 pallets of Skylanders — plastic figures of video game characters. The regional managers figured the Woodbridge store might have the best chance of selling them.

“How are we going to get rid of all this?” she said.

Claude stands at 5 feet 1 inch tall, with shoulder-length blond hair. She wears a gold cross around her neck, a small tattoo on her wrist and has four metal rods in her back from years of heavy lifting.

Her first job was working overnights in the stockroom at the former East Brunswick store, earning $3.35 an hour. She took care of her daughter during the day, while her first husband worked as a baker at the nearby Sunshine Biscuit factory.

By the end, Claude was making about $62,000 as an assistant manager in Woodbridge. “This was a good job,” she said.

It could also be a fun job. There were Halloween parties at Chi-Chi’s, a Mexican chain, where the Toys R Us workers played limbo and did the chicken dance.

Local teenagers got summer jobs as “toyologists,” who scooted around the store on roller skates trying out new toys.

Even catching shoplifters could be amusing. Abreu remembered finding a stash of collectibles that a customer had tucked under a shelf. “These were grown men hiding toys, not children,” he said.

Many of the workers didn’t pay attention when the company was sold to the investment firms KKR, Bain Capital and Vornado Realty Trust in 2005. The company had good years and bad, but always seemed fundamentally fine.

At the time, Claude was working in the “back of the house” in the Toys R Us store in East Brunswick.

That’s where she met her husband John on a rainy day in 2008. His 6-foot-6 frame was sopping wet from collecting shopping carts in the parking lot. Claude immediately recruited him to work on her team unloading trucks.

They had their first date at the Toys R Us store in Times Square, wearing matching Timberland sweatshirts. She had never been to Manhattan, which is about an hour away from her house. “We were like kids,” she said.

Claude returned to Times Square in August 2016. She was one of dozens of employees being honored for their many years of service during a dinner celebration at a midtown hotel.

“Don’t worry,” read one presentation at the meeting, “everything will be fine.”

Everything was not fine.

A year after the party, Toys R Us declared bankruptcy, citing its huge debts. The company’s lawyers were confident the retailer could keep operating, once it cut its loan payments. But after a weak Christmas season, creditors doubted whether the company had a viable future and pushed to close its U.S. operations.

The employees in the Woodbridge store were told in March they had three months left to work. Koperwhats, 57, felt betrayed. She thought of all the Christmas Eves and Independence Days she had missed over 34 years because she was working.

She helped the new parents who came to the baby registry like they were her own children.

“When I heard the company had all this debt, it broke my heart,'’ she said. “I never knew about it until the bankruptcy.”

Abreu couldn’t believe it was over. He had started working at Toys R Us a few years after he graduated from college with degrees in political science and criminal justice.

He’s had other jobs in retail over the years, but toys — particularly Star Wars and Transformers — are his “passion.”

He usually wears a tool belt on his hip holding scissors, a screwdriver and an assortment of colored markers. To stay current, he liked to research the latest toys on the manufacturers’ websites.

“I was told that the next assistant manager position that opened up was mine,” said Abreu, who earned $12.46 an hour.

Claude’s hurt over the closings soon turned to anger. She considered Toys R Us her family. Many of her co-workers attended her wedding on the South Amboy waterfront.

In her living room is a plaque honoring her 30-year work anniversary. Her store also gave her a coupon for 20 percent off her next purchase at a Toys R Us to recognize her service.

When the store gave her the coupon, Claude discovered, it had already expired.

Claude stood by the front door of the Woodbridge store two weeks ago, greeting customers.

“Can I help you find anything?” Claude asked, politely and with a smile, even as the store was being dismantled around her.

Away from the store, Claude took on a different persona. She met with New York City’s comptroller and U.S. Sens. Cory Booker and Robert Menendez of New Jersey to warn about the downside of debt-fueled private equity investments.

She shouted one morning through a megaphone in the lobby of Bain Capital’s offices on Madison Avenue.

“How can you sleep at night?” she yelled, as other Toys R Us employees cheered and a phalanx of New York police officers looked on, carrying plastic handcuffs on their belts.

Led by the worker advocacy group Rise Up Retail, Toys R Us employees have been taking part in protests across the country, demanding new laws that would require retailers to pay their employees severance and limit the amount of debt that private equity-owned companies can incur.

The workers are owed roughly $75 million in severance. The company’s bankruptcy lawyers and advisers, by comparison, are expected to be paid as much as $348 million in fees.

Claude has started looking for another job. But she worries about working in the retail industry again. Her husband works two jobs, at BJ’s Wholesale Club and in a Barnes & Noble warehouse. Her sister works at Home Depot.

With only a few days left, many customers came to the store in Woodbridge to buy shelves and light fixtures, not toys.

To save money, the company wanted to shut off the soundtrack playing over the loudspeakers, but Claude wouldn’t let them. “I am not working in silence,” she said. A man from the real estate company that looked after the property arrived one morning and attached a small box next to the front door.

He explained to Claude that the employees should deposit their keys in the box once they had locked up the store for good.

One customer, Sean Fennick, 43, browsed the aisles wearing a Slayer T-shirt and a Batman baseball cap. He had been coming here since he was a boy, and he still preferred shopping for toys in a store, rather than online.

“This isn’t supposed to happen to Toys R Us,” he told Claude. “I am sorry.”

Tensions flared at times. A heated argument broke out between two customers over the store’s last Minnie Mouse car. Another customer hurled a stuffed white rabbit against the wall, after being reminded that all sales were final and he couldn’t return it.

In private, Claude’s usual toughness started to wane. She started adding up her credit card bill, rent and lease payments. She called her daughter in North Carolina in a panic.

“How am I going to get through this?” she said.

On the last morning, Claude and her co-workers gathered by the cash registers for a breakfast of bagels, brownies and orange juice.

A small crowd of customers waited outside the door. The workers in their sky-blue shirts got ready to greet them one last time.

But the doors never really opened. At the last minute, a toy reseller cut a deal with the company to buy everything that was left in the Woodbridge store.

The reseller’s moving crew hustled inside and started stuffing black garbage bags with pink baby blankets and what was left of the Skylander action figures. The company, based in Richmond, Virginia, planned to resell them on the internet.

Claude looked on in frustration. But then she couldn’t help herself. She went back to work, telling the resellers how best to load up their rental truck to make room for all the boxes.

As the Toys R Us workers rang out the resellers, a man in a tank top and a little girl in pink Crocs walked up to the front door, hoping to come in.

“I am sorry, partner,” Claude said. “We are closed. There is nothing left.”