Santa stumped? The right toy is out there, if you know where to look.

With the demise of Toys R Us in March, retailers everywhere are vying for a piece of the holiday gift pie.

Grocery giant Kroger has paired up with the remnants of the Toys R Us brand, selling flats of former Toys R Us brands such as Imaginarium and Journey Girls in special Geoffrey’s Toy Box sections in more than 600 stores across the county. The selection of 35 toys are priced between $20 and $50

Walmart is expanding selection this year in its “America’s Best Toy Shop,” which includes toys rated by kids. Those include the kid behind the YouTube toy-review sensation “Ryan’s World,” who even has his own line of toys.

Tuesday afternoon, toy shoppers were already crowding the aisles. At the store in Hamburg, Walmart workers had already assembled a mountain of in-demand toys at the formal entrance to the toy department — although toys were lining the shelves from the time a customer enters the store.

A Fur Real dinosaur toy drinks out of a bottle and makes a purring noise, like a dinosaur/kitten hybrid. The toy company L.O.L., which had the top toy of 2017 with its doll assortment, is back this year with the L.O.L dollhouse. Store manager Jared Elkins thinks that although the L.O.L. dollhouse will make a run at the perennially popular Mattel Barbie Dreamhouse, Barbie will still emerge the winner.

“Anything with L.O.L. is just huge,” Elkins said.

For the TV-oriented among toy buyers, there’s a Pioneer Woman version of Barbie, featuring a Ree Drummond-resembling doll with an assortment of rib-sticking plastic “food.”

Walmart employed 17 national “kid influencers,” many of them kids themselves, to rate its top toys for 2018.

But it’s also betting heavily on the gotta-have toys of other years, including Fingerlings, Hatchimals, My Life dolls and Nerf.

“As a company we’ve bought up the best of the best,” Elkins said.

Other companies are pulling out their best strategies, too. Target has nearly doubled its toy offerings and has revamped many stores that were within a few miles of defunct Toys R Us locations.

Retail advisory firm Coresight Research says that Walmart and Target shoppers have the biggest overlap with former Toys R Us shoppers.

Amazon is printing a toy catalog to hand out at Whole Foods, and Kohl’s, Michael’s, Best Buy, T.J. Maxx and Meijer are adding more toys this year. Amazon already rules the toy industry, with $4.5 billion in toy sales in 2017, up 12 percent from the year before. The online giant accounts for about one in every six dollars spent on toys in the United States, according to analystics firm One Click Retail.

But many parents (and kids) still want the hands-on experience and stores are betting heavily on that, even unlikely retailers. So if it seems like toys are everywhere this year, it’s because they are.

Rebecca Husz, owner of The Magical Toy Shoppe at 700 East Main in Lexington, has noticed. There are toys “in places that have never carried toys before. Kroger is a big place, Walgreens, Rite Aid ... everyone’s trying to cash in and take a piece of that Toys R Us business.”

Sales at her independent toy shop are up, too., she said. People find her by “Googling toy stores in Lexington … and we’re the only one that pops up because we’re especially just for toys,” she said. Most of the parents she sees say they hadn’t shopped at Toys R Us in years, she said.

The problem with Toys R Us was that there was “nothing fun about it,” she said. “We try really hard to have lots of demos out for kids to play with.”

And, unlike Amazon and many big-box stores, she can help you pick out the right toy, not just what’s hot right now.

“I have people all the time say, what can I get for a 3-year-old, or for a boy’s birthday part,” Husz said. “I think that’s how we’ve able to survive. That one-on-one personal experience. ... Toys are everywhere but we work very hard to find toys you won’t find every where.”

There’s a lot of toy sales to go around, according to NPD Group’s retail tracking service: Through September, U.S. toy sales were up 2 percent to $11.6 billion and with the long holiday selling season (there is more than a month between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year) toy sales are expected to be very strong this year.

Even eBay has entered the fray, with the e-commerce marketplace offering its first toy book this year. Called Toytopia, the catalog shows that many of the company’s offerings are targeted to youngsters, but also offers something for the nostalgic parent: That would be the kind of person who would consider purchasing the $25,000 life-sized Lego statue of Batman.

This story was originally published November 21, 2018 at 10:20 AM.