Bed, Bath and Bye Bye: Company is officially in default

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Re: Bed, Bath and Bye Bye: Company is officially in default

Post by storewanderer »

The Reddit and Layoff.com forums on Bed Bath and Beyond are wild lately. A few things I've read:

Budgets cut so thin in recent days that there is basically no budget for labor other than managers.
Warehouses closing at random for days/a week due to lack of product to move
Inventories being canceled
Stores being told they will no longer receive anything from the warehouse but not being told they are closing

I am surprised here we are today and still no prepackaged Chapter 11 has been arranged.

At this point with every passing day I am thinking the likelihood of a prepackaged Chapter 11 is growing more and more slim.
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Re: Bed, Bath and Bye Bye: Company is officially in default

Post by cjd »

I didn’t see how they could compete with stores like Walmart or even Marshall’s in some categories.

Pretty much every product category was higher, a lamp that would be $10 at Walmart would be $25 for a similar at BBB.
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Re: Bed, Bath and Bye Bye: Company is officially in default

Post by arizonaguy »

It was a great store for finding wedding registry items but when they had $80 pillows (that elsewhere would've been $20) it became a rip off.

I never shopped there unless I was buying something off of a wedding registry.
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Re: Bed, Bath and Bye Bye: Company is officially in default

Post by storewanderer »

arizonaguy wrote: January 29th, 2023, 1:43 pm It was a great store for finding wedding registry items but when they had $80 pillows (that elsewhere would've been $20) it became a rip off.

I never shopped there unless I was buying something off of a wedding registry.
They lost that business under the new management. They quit offering the big ticket/big brand items that couples were looking for. They also laid off some employees in the stores who were responsible for engaging customers and couples to assist with the set up/purchase of registry items.

Other stores were quick to eat up the wedding registry business from them, especially since they were doing their destruction to the mix right during the pandemic when the stores were closed and couples looking to set up a registry were forced to go online (or to Target..).
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Re: Bed, Bath and Bye Bye: Company is officially in default

Post by ClownLoach »

storewanderer wrote: January 28th, 2023, 9:05 pm The Reddit and Layoff.com forums on Bed Bath and Beyond are wild lately. A few things I've read:

Budgets cut so thin in recent days that there is basically no budget for labor other than managers.
Warehouses closing at random for days/a week due to lack of product to move
Inventories being canceled
Stores being told they will no longer receive anything from the warehouse but not being told they are closing

I am surprised here we are today and still no prepackaged Chapter 11 has been arranged.

At this point with every passing day I am thinking the likelihood of a prepackaged Chapter 11 is growing more and more slim.
I think they had a chance to do a pre-packaged Chapter 11 after they canned the CEO but for whatever reason, probably executive ego, they chose to plow ahead and completely run the company off a cliff.

The shelves are so empty that I do not believe there are anywhere close to enough assets for an actual Chapter 11 reorganization. I think that there in fact is so little left that they are not filing because they can't get DIP financing as there is nothing left to secure it with. The stores look like Fry's Electronics did when the doors closed and didn't reopen. They may have to go right to Chapter 7.

When your company strategy changes have to be coupled with discussions that you "aren't going down the same road JCPenney did" it is obvious that you are in fact heading down a worse road. The difference is that any normal person with half a brain could figure out that total sales were not going to increase when all the merchandise was replaced with low quality items that sell for a tiny fraction of the original product lines. When the funeral for BB&B is complete only then will it be true that they didn't go down the same road as JCPenney, instead BB&B accelerated to 120 MPH and drove right off the highway into a canyon.

Ron Johnson was actually a good visionary; he foresaw the collapse of the American Department Store industry, the end of the traditional mall, as well as the resulting D2C shift by major brands. He screamed about the fact that nobody else in that industry saw the bullets coming, that nobody took the lead on transforming the department store business for the 21st century, and took it upon himself to start the process with JCPenney. Where he went wrong was the fact that he acted like the collapse of the industry was imminent and therefore there was no time to test solutions and educate customers about what needed to change. Instead the changes were rolled out with speed and the customers rebelled. But as I continue to see the same Macy's ad every week for the "One Day Sale" this Friday, Saturday and Sunday (isn't that more than one?) I wonder if things had been different if Ron Johnson had taken over Macy's instead...

Tritton proved himself to be completely inept at a magnitude we haven't seen in a long time. Massive, colossal capital expenditures to remodel stores where the end result is basically almost the same layout with purple signs and denim color curtains but still no sightline across the store. Billions of dollars spent up front to install nice-to-have distribution center processes, but at a cost that was actually more expensive to operate than the previous archaic processes of vendor to store shipping. On top of that the DCs weren't owned but instead 3rd party logistics facilities that charge for every step of the process and cannot be booked as assets. And again the merchandise that somehow was more Walmart than Target quality but at Macy's prices. It's not hard to see when you remove the $100 item with decent sales and replace it with a $20 item then you must sell 5 of those $20 items to make the same sales. But even if you did now sell 5 to 1 on the new item that costs 1/5th you will now need 5 times the labor because it gets stocked 5 times, rung up 5 times, etc. I mean seriously these concepts are not rocket science.

It's true, they didn't follow JCP. JCP was a master class compared to the Tritton Era of BB&B.
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Re: Bed, Bath and Bye Bye: Company is officially in default

Post by pseudo3d »

ClownLoach wrote: January 30th, 2023, 8:25 am Ron Johnson was actually a good visionary; he foresaw the collapse of the American Department Store industry, the end of the traditional mall, as well as the resulting D2C shift by major brands. He screamed about the fact that nobody else in that industry saw the bullets coming, that nobody took the lead on transforming the department store business for the 21st century, and took it upon himself to start the process with JCPenney. Where he went wrong was the fact that he acted like the collapse of the industry was imminent and therefore there was no time to test solutions and educate customers about what needed to change. Instead the changes were rolled out with speed and the customers rebelled. But as I continue to see the same Macy's ad every week for the "One Day Sale" this Friday, Saturday and Sunday (isn't that more than one?) I wonder if things had been different if Ron Johnson had taken over Macy's instead...
I think you're giving Ron Johnson WAY too much credit. He took charge, in what, 2011? The decline of the shopping mall and the department stores wasn't exactly new information at the time, and he couldn't wrap his head around the fact that maybe the solution was just to have attractive, well-merchandised stores with better staffing.

Forcing the stores to convert to EDLP and giving JCPenney one of the worst-looking logo redesigns of the decade wasn't exactly the shot in the arm the chain needed.
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Re: Bed, Bath and Bye Bye: Company is officially in default

Post by ClownLoach »

pseudo3d wrote: January 30th, 2023, 9:08 am
ClownLoach wrote: January 30th, 2023, 8:25 am Ron Johnson was actually a good visionary; he foresaw the collapse of the American Department Store industry, the end of the traditional mall, as well as the resulting D2C shift by major brands. He screamed about the fact that nobody else in that industry saw the bullets coming, that nobody took the lead on transforming the department store business for the 21st century, and took it upon himself to start the process with JCPenney. Where he went wrong was the fact that he acted like the collapse of the industry was imminent and therefore there was no time to test solutions and educate customers about what needed to change. Instead the changes were rolled out with speed and the customers rebelled. But as I continue to see the same Macy's ad every week for the "One Day Sale" this Friday, Saturday and Sunday (isn't that more than one?) I wonder if things had been different if Ron Johnson had taken over Macy's instead...
I think you're giving Ron Johnson WAY too much credit. He took charge, in what, 2011? The decline of the shopping mall and the department stores wasn't exactly new information at the time, and he couldn't wrap his head around the fact that maybe the solution was just to have attractive, well-merchandised stores with better staffing.

Forcing the stores to convert to EDLP and giving JCPenney one of the worst-looking logo redesigns of the decade wasn't exactly the shot in the arm the chain needed.
I agree that the treatment didn't cure the disease, but if he was in an environment that wasn't in such a hurry for a quick fix like JCPenney was I wonder if the situation would have turned out differently? They were 100% right about the D2C change and embraced it. The pricing model in the department store industry is preposterous and still to this day has not been fixed. When it's day 3 of this week's One Day Only sale and you see that the sale sign has an end date of 01/10/2024 (not a typo, it's real and hundreds of similar end dates) that doesn't work either. The time period in which a department is at the full price because they can't be on sale 365 days a year they could install an electric fence around it and nobody would notice. At least he tried to do something to fix it. Signing brands for D2C was the right thing to do, and what have these D2C brands done with their own real estate? They sell at EDLP until the end of the product life when it goes clearance. It's pretty universally agreed that the failure point was the immediate implementation of the new pricing model without actually testing it or educating the customer on it. I also think that the immediate reduction of advertising to a single monthly catalog was possibly more damaging than the pricing model because it was too easy to miss with a new logo that wasn't familiar and then there was no other avenue to educate the customer about the changes.

Again the JCPenney changes were nothing when compared to the destruction caused by the Tritton BB&B leadership team. The systematic removal of slow turning but high dollar merchandise to be replaced with product Kmart would be embarrassed to sell, while spending billions on unnecessary new programs like 3rd party DCs and remodels that didn't remodel were catastrophic.
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Re: Bed, Bath and Bye Bye: Company is officially in default

Post by Romr123 »

I just made a $15 order at BBB of some random clearance stuff--will be interesting to see how long before I get the email to come pick it up (Palm Spgs, CA) and how complete the order is.

Of all the random things that JCP brought in (then clearanced out) back in the day they had a line of really attractive Swedish greeting cards which had (quite early--probably 2012) some attractive same-sex marriage cards which I cleaned them out of and am still using.
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Re: Bed, Bath and Bye Bye: Company is officially in default

Post by storewanderer »

Something else of perhaps key significance:

The Harmon Stores closing are having a liquidation firm handle the closing sales.

Also it is my understanding there is a brief delay in starting the BBB/Baby closures announced last week as they also retained a liquidation firm for that. Some of those liquidation sales have started but not all yet pending the liquidators being placed.

Previous BBB closures they self liquidated.

I am suspicious in this batch of closures they found a liquidation firm to give them cash up front (to continue operations) so they went ahead and let a liquidation firm do this round of closures.

It will be better for a liquidation firm to handle the liquidations. The liquidation firm will manage the liquidations properly. The liquidations they started earlier this month are having issues paying payroll; the one I went into last week which only operates 10-6 daily only had 1 employee/the store manager total working in the store due to payroll cuts that were sent down.
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Re: Bed, Bath and Bye Bye: Company is officially in default

Post by norcalriteaidclerk »

https://www.dallasnews.com/business/ret ... s-jobless/

Now even key fulfillment facilities in 'business friendly' states aren't being spared.

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For your life,Thrifty and Payless have got it.
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