Bed Bath & Beyond: Dying?

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Re: Bed Bath & Beyond: Dying?

Post by Alpha8472 »

I first learned about that word from reading Soap Opera reviews. Apparently there have been some famous ones on TV.
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Re: Bed Bath & Beyond: Dying?

Post by norcalriteaidclerk »



The unfortunate first batch of 55 closures.No Sacramento closures yet though there are locations in the bay area and socal on this list.

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Re: Bed Bath & Beyond: Dying?

Post by Alpha8472 »

The San Leandro, California closure is no surprise. The store is only open 10 AM to 7 PM. That store at Bayfair Mall was looted back in 2020 along with the rest of the mall. They say if you walk out of the mall and your car is still there you are lucky.

The mall is planned to be closed and turned into condos. Target will remain. It is in a very dangerous area next to a train station. What kind of people would want to pay high prices for a condo in that area?
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Re: Bed Bath & Beyond: Dying?

Post by buckguy »

norcalriteaidclerk wrote: September 13th, 2022, 11:03 am

The unfortunate first batch of 55 closures.No Sacramento closures yet though there are locations in the bay area and socal on this list.

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Heavily weighted toward small markets (including places I wouldn’t expect to find them) and outer suburban locations, plus a few places like Paramus where they should do well.
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Re: Bed Bath & Beyond: Dying?

Post by norcalriteaidclerk »

Alpha8472 wrote:The San Leandro, California closure is no surprise. The store is only open 10 AM to 7 PM. That store at Bayfair Mall was looted back in 2020 along with the rest of the mall. They say if you walk out of the mall and your car is still there you are lucky.

The mall is planned to be closed and turned into condos. Target will remain. It is in a very dangerous area next to a train station. What kind of people would want to pay high prices for a condo in that area?
This has the ingredients for a gentrification gone wrong,and I wouldn't doubt it if there has already happened in other places as well.

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Re: Bed Bath & Beyond: Dying?

Post by ClownLoach »

Yesterday I visited a Cost Plus World Market in Oceanside, CA. This is a somewhat lower end center anchored by a Walmart and a Stater Bros that at my last visit still had a Lucky decor package and walls of merchandise to funnel the customers in and out through the checklanes to combat high shrink. I entered the store with the lowest of expectations. I was absolutely blown away.

No costly "remodel" has occurred and this is an older store. What has happened is a remarkable improvement in assortment, merchandise quality, and store presentation. In stock for years at Cost Plus has resembled BB&B today - out of stocks everywhere coupled with random mountains of about every 25th SKU in each department. The store looked perfectly stocked - very little overstock except for foods that appear to be bestsellers. No holes or out of stocks anywhere. The store was gently rearranged to have a "racetrack" established so now you can make a coherent journey around the store. Every single display was impactful and meaningful and told a story. The store was clean and employees for the first time looked like they were happy but also hustling. I found the product to be more on trend vs. the overly oddball and eclectic product they used to carry which was interesting to look at but hard to picture in your own home. Pricing seems higher, but everyone is high priced right now and I was able to draw favorable comparisons to some furniture I saw at HomeGoods recently which of course is supposed to be a "great value.". I also had flashbacks to the products that I miss from the long departed Pier 1 Imports, like they had opened a "best of Pier 1" type brand. Every customer who came in while I visited bought something - which is very important knowing so many changes had been made to the brand which does include some obvious price increases. It was obvious that what I observed was not a singular example of a better than chain average store - what I saw was a representation of the revamped business model under their new ownership outside of BB&B.

I had no intention of buying a single item and walked out with about six things from multiple departments. And I actually can't wait to go shop the location that is closer to my home.

This was a clear example of exactly how incompetent the leadership of the BB&B organization is. Cost Plus was infected with what seemed to be a terminal case of neglect from their parent company. This new management clearly "gets it.". I believe that they will survive and thrive - and certainly outlast BB&B. It is night and day comparing the two stores today. Everything Cost Plus is doing right is what BB&B is doing wrong.
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Re: Bed Bath & Beyond: Dying?

Post by storewanderer »

Yes, the Save Mart group has made some very major improvements to Cost Plus World Market. I would actually say the stores look better than they ever did. Before BBB bought them, they were sort of a cluttered mess of odd disjointed merchandise. The chain was failing before BBB bought it and I think BBB just sort of ran it on fumes. They do not feel like a cluttered mess at this time, but they feel like they have a lot of interesting and attractive products to offer throughout the store. Cost Plus World Market is so lucky to have been sold by BBB. BBB made one bad decision after another. For instance, closing World Market during COVID. Why? 1/4 of the shelf space in World Market is consumable food/liquor; World Market codes on credit card statements as a grocery store; they would more legitimately be open as an "essential retailer" during COVID than Target (where like 1/10 of the store is consumable food/liquor).

So back to BBB, the Sparks BBB is closing. I am very surprised by this. That area of Sparks is growing like crazy and that is the newest BBB in the area. The flooring around the perimeter of the store is clean and shiny and it is a sharp looking store. Now in that shopping cluster in Sparks there is a Marshalls/Home Goods across the street, other than that Wal Mart is it for home items (well there is Ross or Costco or Kohls). When I was doing the shopping for clearance items in Wild Sage, that Sparks Store was the one that had the least stuff left (maybe other clearance customers got to it before I did) and of the BBB Stores in the area that store has been the neatest and best merchandised. The formerly busy Reno BBB is a disaster, run down, and very poorly merchandised/stocked, and hardly has any traffic anymore. Reno was a very busy store but I think after disappointing so many customers by not having product, their formerly large group of upper middle class 50's and 60's age group customers lost patience and surrendered to Amazon. The employees in the Reno Store also seem defeated and unhappy, and unhelpful. The Carson City BBB (this thing does no sales; it is open daily from 10-6; I am shocked it is staying open) is smaller and since it does no sales it feels well stocked; the 2 employees on duty at any given time there are very helpful.
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Re: Bed Bath & Beyond: Dying?

Post by ClownLoach »

storewanderer wrote: September 13th, 2022, 11:19 pm Yes, the Save Mart group has made some very major improvements to Cost Plus World Market. I would actually say the stores look better than they ever did. Before BBB bought them, they were sort of a cluttered mess of odd disjointed merchandise. The chain was failing before BBB bought it and I think BBB just sort of ran it on fumes. They do not feel like a cluttered mess at this time, but they feel like they have a lot of interesting and attractive products to offer throughout the store. Cost Plus World Market is so lucky to have been sold by BBB. BBB made one bad decision after another. For instance, closing World Market during COVID. Why? 1/4 of the shelf space in World Market is consumable food/liquor; World Market codes on credit card statements as a grocery store; they would more legitimately be open as an "essential retailer" during COVID than Target (where like 1/10 of the store is consumable food/liquor).

So back to BBB, the Sparks BBB is closing. I am very surprised by this. That area of Sparks is growing like crazy and that is the newest BBB in the area. The flooring around the perimeter of the store is clean and shiny and it is a sharp looking store. Now in that shopping cluster in Sparks there is a Marshalls/Home Goods across the street, other than that Wal Mart is it for home items (well there is Ross or Costco or Kohls). When I was doing the shopping for clearance items in Wild Sage, that Sparks Store was the one that had the least stuff left (maybe other clearance customers got to it before I did) and of the BBB Stores in the area that store has been the neatest and best merchandised. The formerly busy Reno BBB is a disaster, run down, and very poorly merchandised/stocked, and hardly has any traffic anymore. Reno was a very busy store but I think after disappointing so many customers by not having product, their formerly large group of upper middle class 50's and 60's age group customers lost patience and surrendered to Amazon. The employees in the Reno Store also seem defeated and unhappy, and unhelpful. The Carson City BBB (this thing does no sales; it is open daily from 10-6; I am shocked it is staying open) is smaller and since it does no sales it feels well stocked; the 2 employees on duty at any given time there are very helpful.
I think at this point the whole ship is going under; it just takes a while to sink. It seems like BB&B will close literally any store regardless of volume and profit if the lease is up. They can't afford lease break fees and the only other way out of leases is bankruptcy, but they know they have dead zero chances of making it out of Chapter 11 without being pushed into liquidation; I'm sure Hilco and Gordon Bros. would be ready to bid immediately to put this chain out of its misery. They failed to make the right decision years ago before the brand fell into distress (cull all the bad and unprofitable locations at once with DIP financing lined up for a prepackaged chapter 11 to dispose of the bad leases, leaving a leaner and profitable core group of stores to rebuild the business around). It is too late to go down that path now and they've already lost many of the stores they should have kept open just because they needed the liquidation money.

Due to the age of most of their stores they are all in the later stages of leases where they renew in 3 to 5 year term increments meaning that at any given moment they could close anywhere from 20% to 33% of the chain annually. It is a Sears-esque controlled liquidation outside of the court at this point. Their near total departure from the South Orange County market last year, including closing a store that had just been heavily marketed as having a "Grand Reopening" (the type of marketing that they have failed to do at most of their remodels - other than removing the bleak black tile behind the usually faded and mismatched white signs and painting it purple nobody would have a clue from the outside that anything is new inside). My understanding is that it was a bad coincidence that all of the stores in the market except one were at lease renewal and as such all were subsequently liquidated due to the desperate need for cash. This was probably the best market in the US for them as they didn't depend on coupons for traffic with a customer base that has zero price sensitivity. It wasn't the seemingly obvious question of if they couldn't make it there... Then how could they possibly make it anywhere? They were making it there but needed the liquidation cash to keep the lights on elsewhere. There is zero leadership that will deliver a going concern business. They'll keep closing stores like Sparks (rapidly growing area) or Huntington Beach and Burbank (wildly high volume market, the type of store that delivers the kind of profit leverage that makes up for dozens of other marginal stores) until they can't cut anymore and I predict that they will finally do what they just said they wouldn't: either Buy Buy Baby will be sold or it will be the surviving brand - and the BB&B chain will be liquidated. The current turnaround plan is a sudden 180° back to national brands only. This is only because nobody will make store brands for them anymore (plus they didn't sell) and it is easier to get vendors to deliver product that they can pivot and sell elsewhere if they have to halt deliveries due to non payment. But the fact that suddenly they'll be back to selling the same product as everyone else will just accelerate their demise as they will fail to have the best price, best store experience, and/or best service for these same brands like OXO kitchen goods that you can also buy at Target or Walmart. They claimed the need for private brands was because they were becoming an Amazon showroom, just scan what you want and get it delivered tomorrow cheaper than after a 20% off coupon. Now they are down to a measly $500M in the bank, on loan, they seem to lose $200M every 90 days, and they need to buy enough goods that will sell to deliver Christmas sales expectations in the BILLIONS. Seems unlikely to me.

I wonder if they will be forced to move into consignment inventory for their higher dollar/lower margin kitchen electrics and such? They don't seem to have the money to build up the mountains of Instant Pots and Keurig machines that used to carry their sales volumes... And besides, doesn't everyone who would buy one already have an Instant Pot or knockoff now?

Nobody is going to produce anything branded or exclusive for BB&B unless they've already got a secondary sale agreement for future deliveries to a liquidator like Big Lots to minimize risk (such agreements do exist however they drive up cost for the initial buying company so they'll be at a competitive disadvantage with lower margins than their competitors). If anyone believes that the turnaround plan is anything other than a placeholder until liquidation then I've got some swampland in Florida that is prime for high rise development I'd like to show you...
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Re: Bed Bath & Beyond: Dying?

Post by storewanderer »

I notice Kroger has been promoting BBB and BBBaby too with some kind of tie up where you can order BBB/BBBaby products through Kroger. Of course Kroger has a competing home/bed/bath/baby program in the Fred Meyer and abbreviated version of that in the Marketplace Stores. At this point Kroger has significantly more branded product than BBB has. I wonder if they could potentially try to tie up with Fred Meyer and get Fred Meyer to help them fulfill some customer orders of branded products? That doesn't seem like a long term solution but may at least give them some stuff to appear to "sell" in the short term.

I agree it looks like this whole chain will go. Supposedly another closure round comes in January. I question if they can even make it that long. What happened to Back to College, that was supposed to be a big time for them? Must have been a total disaster. Can we expect the Holidays to be anything different for them?

And it isn't just them; with the inflation the retail environment is going to be extremely tough for anyone other than retailers of essential goods at fair prices like Costco, Wal Mart, and such.
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Re: Bed Bath & Beyond: Dying?

Post by Romr123 »

Finally had a wander through the store at Autry/Ramon in Palm Springs. Contrast with the Cost Plus in PSP (111/Farrell about 2 miles away) is amazing. Cost Plus--exactly as described here upthread--pleasant upbeat, well-stocked (was rocky for awhile...tbh) well displayed...enticing.

BBB--this store was quite tidy and clean, but very uncompelling (I'd just made a couple of clearance online orders which arrived flawlessly). I'd think the entire Coachella Valley would be similar to Orange County for this type store/merchandise---price insensitive, far more the "show" than the "go"...I rarely shopped BBB before and saw nothing to bring me back.
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