At the risk of sounding melodramatic, all toy shops give me a cold sweat and none make me feel remotely nostalgic. Toys R Us takes me to Christmas Eve circa 1985, trying to find the last brunette doll for my younger sister, who was implacably opposed to dolls that were blond, even while she herself was. John Lewis, 2009, eyeball to eyeball with a foe for the last 50% marked-down Buzz Lightyear; she was the very devil, wild-eyed and determined, but I could have been looking in a mirror. Hamleys, Christmas Eve again, 2015, trying to fabricate new interests for my six-year-old daughter, because I was against gendered playthings and we already had all the Nerf guns it was possible to have.
I was anti-consumerist while consuming quite a lot, against plastic while simultaneously grossed out by other anti‑plastic parents, and didn’t want to raise spoilt little Fauntleroys yet at the same time hated saying “no”. It’s not easy holding on to that many contradictions or, if you prefer, being that dumb.
One shop, The Entertainer, was an oasis by comparison, because it seemed angled towards the small and the cheap. Loom bands, Lol dolls, single-unit Lego men, mechanical puppies that could backflip – which can still make me stop and marvel (so agile and for only £9.99!) even now the kids are 17 and 15. The font on the shopfront looked cheap, too, and I mean that in the best possible way.
It doesn’t surprise me to learn that the founders, Gary and Catherine Grant, built that up from a single unit, which they bought on loan in 1981, to a 160-store, multimillion-pound empire in the UK. They didn’t know anything about toys when they started, but they knew what parents wanted, which was not to have a nervous breakdown. But I was still amazed when they announced this morning that they would be transferring the business to an employee trust, so that it will soon be 100% owned by its workforce of nearly 2,000 people.
The normal expectations of the self-made entrepreneur run as follows: it’s very male-coded, “self-made man” being the default, “self-made woman” sounding a bit like a grammatical error made in a foreign language. Nobody explains why, because the self-made man is too busy to explain, he is always shouting. (That bit comes from Alan Sugar; Lord love him, he actually doesn’t shout that much, he just deploys his plosives to dramatic effect and is very sure of himself. Let’s say he is shout-adjacent.)
Having come from nothing, the generic self-made man is expected to put profit above everything – and considered noble for doing so. He hates handouts, complains about tax and doesn’t like plodders, which is to say, anyone who isn’t the boss – which is everyone, because he is, and how could there be two of him?
Even while the terminology is very masculine, he can, of course, be female. If anything, that just makes her more of a one-off. Since astronomical wealth can be alienating to behold, self-made men generally take the edge off, rehumanising themselves with their devotion to family – again, it’s always “family man”; there is no such thing as a “family woman”. This, twinned with his or her admirably shark-like quest for profit, turns into a rationale for keeping all the money. It’s billed almost as a kind of altruism, that the self-made man will stop at nothing to give his or her children what he or she never had, with greed and rapacity washed away by the irrefutable logic of the entrepreneurial character.
The Grants were known already as a different sort of self-made, cleaving to values other than profit as a result of their Christianity, most memorably when they refused to stock Harry Potter merch in the late 00s because they didn’t want children to experiment with “darkness”. It’s probably faith that has informed this decision, too, but they land an important point for the religious and irreligious: it’s not written in the stars that the price of profitability is carelessness and that all entrepreneurs are the same. The necessity of ruthlessness in business has had a hell of a PR campaign, but that doesn’t make it true.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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