After a long decline, Bed Bath & Beyond finally filed for bankruptcy on Sunday, and will begin shutting down some stores this week.
As in most bankruptcy filings, this gives the company a chance to get its financial house in order and potentially find a buyer. But even if it can sell part of its business, analysts tell my colleague Nathaniel Meyersohn, the BB-n-B is never going to rise to its former status as the retail industry category killer that it was in its 90s heyday.
Back then, in the pre-Amazon Prime era, Bed Bath & Beyond was the highlight of Saturday errands in Suburbia.
It had everything — blenders, beauty supplies, margarita glasses shaped like cacti, throngs of parents and their 17-year-olds buying those extra-long fitted sheets that were (for some reason) required for dorm life.
Wandering around a cavernous BB-n-B allowed you to fantasize about a home so perfectly appointed and organized that Oprah would want to have you on her show to talk about your menagerie of decorative vases and scented candles.
Was it chaotic? Yes. But it was also beautiful.
Of course, like many other "category killer" superstores of the 1990s — think Toys "R" Us, Circuit City, Sports Authority — Bed Bath & Beyond failed to adapt to the internet age.
"We missed the boat on the internet," co-founder Warren Eisenberg, said in a recent Wall Street Journal interview.
It wasn't just the internet that sank BB-n-B, Nathaniel explains.
Big-box competition from Walmart, Target and Costco played a role, and sales began stagnating in 2012.
And then, of course, the pandemic came.
Bed Bath & Beyond had to temporarily close all of its stores while many of its rivals stayed open as "essential" retailers. Sales fell 17% in 2020 and 15% in 2021.
Meanwhile, the company itself couldn't seem to stick with any of its turnaround plans as it shuffled through executives in the past several years. Anticipation of its bankruptcy has been looming for months as it tried all manner of financial maneuvering to remain solvent, including the incredi bly uncool move of withholding severance pay to some laid-off workers at closing stores.
None of it was enough to keep the company from joining the growing ranks of this year's retail bankruptcies.
RELATED: For decades, blue and white paper coupons defined Bed Bath & Beyond's brand. But those beloved scraps, which became known as Big Blue, backfired spectacularly as the industry evolved.
Comments
Post a Comment