Bed Bath and Beyond closing stores just remodeled

[storewanderer]

Poor Pocatello / Chubbuck, can't catch a retail break to save its life. Many shopping $$$ moving 50 miles up I-15 to Idaho Falls / Ammon at this point.

Good news for Fred Meyer.

[storewanderer]

The real problem is that BB&B addicted their customers in the pre-internet age to 20% off coupons. Now that pricing is transparent as a Google search they're always overpriced as they marked up their products to account for the coupon. So the younger generation never walked through the doors because they could see online that BB&B was way overpriced, and the core coupon shopper one by one realizes they've been had for years so they stop going back.

The coupon centric stores are really struggling to translate to 2022 retail... The only way it works is if 99% of products are store brand. Otherwise you have to get rid of the coupon (bad for traffic), create exclusions to lower prices to market level for brand names (customers hate coupon exclusions and EDLP on traditional high/low price models though), or try to replace the brand names with store labels (and risk alienating the customer if the quality isn't up to snuff). The craft store chains are going through this same problem as they also depended on coupons to drive customers into the store to try to sell them products with inflated prices that the coupon would cancel out.

Various problems with those BBB 20% off coupons. They accepted them expired, they accepted multiple coupons at once, I observed overrides done to give the discount on excluded items sometimes, they even gave you another one if you did a return of something purchased with one. They may as well have just renamed themself to The 20% Off Store because that was in effect what they were.

The craft stores struck me as slightly different with the coupons. While Hobby Lobby took one for the team and made the move to eliminate the coupons (guess they could get rid of those hazardous scanners too), I always thought it was a little different as the craft stores seem to sell customers a large quantity of small value items. While I know there are some high value items in those stores I often see people redeeming 40% off coupons on say a $12.99 item then they have $25 of various less than $12.99 items in the basket in addition. I used to joke when I was a teenager working on school projects (back then no mobile coupons) I would find the store's ad every day and go in and buy one item with their 40% off coupon and eventually get the project done. I also think the craft stores are in somewhat of a unique position as if you want their merchandise you basically have to shop them. While Wal Mart has a good pedestrian level mix in this category at much lower prices, the issue is Wal Mart is often not in stock and that pedestrian level mix gets boring pretty fast.

Also I wonder how their Beyond+ Membership Program is doing. They were trying to force phone number entry in their pinpads earlier in 2021 to bug people with text messages about signing up for that. When I hit cancel on the pinpad the employee got very upset with me, told me I HAD to give them my phone number. No I do not, I tapped my card, and it was already processing. She actually tried to cancel the processing but it was already going through. I did notice last time I bought something there, the phone number prompt was gone.

[Romr123]

Read an American Business Journal's postmortem of Service Merchandise in 2002 quoted in a FB group...sounds very similar...business model just not compatible with shopping habits any longer, plus getting rid of traffic-building lines. That said, I do long for the days (I worked in a department store linen department in 1986-7) where there were multiple lines of high quality linens and you didn't have to guess--they were branded and offered good-better-best so you could get exactly what you (and your pocketbook) needed.

[Super S]

I see that Longview, WA made the list. The closure doesn't exactly surprise me. That store doesn't seem like a good fit in a "working class" town.

The Triangle Center where the store is located has had some vacancies crop up in recent years, but recently a Verizon store moved in to the former Starbucks, and Auto Zone is opening in the former Ace Hardware. I gotta wonder about leases and the future of some original stores to the redevelopment, such as Michaels and Petco, which have not updated their stores here to the current logos. The center does draw customers though, there is a WinCo, Ross, Rite Aid (the last building remaining of the original enclosed mall) and an Ulta store. With that said though, the closure is one less shopping option locally.

[mjhale]

The Vienna, VA location is on Route 123 going south out of Tysons Corner towards the Town of Vienna. You pass the store before you get to the light where you turn to enter the service road that goes to the store. It is an odd location that isn't easy to get in and out of. The building was originally a Hechinger location which went to Linens and Things after Hechinger went bust. The Tysons Bed Bath and Beyond was originally at 8204 Leesburg Pike (Route 7) which itself was a marina style Safeway many years back.

I haven't been in the Tysons Bed Bath and Beyond for several years. At one time there was a food, wine and beer section marketed under the World Market banner that they also own. The area around Tysons certainly has the demographic to support the type of merchandise that Bed Bath and Beyond has historically sold. I wonder how much the "watering down" of the merchandise selection in the current iteration of the store has turned off those looking for supposed "high end" selections. The Fairfax Bed Bath and Beyond is in my area and I go there every so often. As others have said, the new remodel feels like a glorified Target at much higher prices. I noticed that the depth of selection in particular categories like linens and towels has been cut back as well. Things like kitchen dish towels are now in pack of 6-8 or more where they used to be in three pack in addition to the larger packs. The bath towel section had only the most common colors (white, blue, beige, gray) without the less common ones they used to stock. The reduction in coupons is a good observation too. The coupon made the pricing more similar to competitors but it made you "feel" like you were getting a deal. Everyone likes the feeling of a deal, even those with lots of disposable income. The joke always was "Never shop at Bed Bath and Beyond without a coupon".

[Brian Lutz]

Selling high end merchandise, especially in categories like kitchen, is a bit of a two edged sword. On one hand, if the stuff is too expensive then the market for it becomes limited to higher incomes. On the other hand, the quality of the products means they last a long time, and often once people buy them they never need to buy them again. Around 2005 when I moved into my own apartment I paid somewhere around $120 for a set of Wolfgang Puck branded pans being sold at Sam's Club. 15+ years later I still have and use all of the pans regularly, and have never found a need to replace any of them. Granted, non stick pans do wear out (which is why I avoid them for most things) but often you can buy something like good pans or knives and never need to buy them again. Which makes those items a hard sell when nobody needs them.

Also, it's been years since I have seen a Bed Bath and Beyond 20% off coupon anywhere (mail, newspaper, online, etc.) I just assumed they discontinued them at some point.

[storewanderer]

At one time there was a food, wine and beer section marketed under the World Market banner that they also own.

What happened to these sections?

They sold World Market last year.

I had been hearing about those sections for the past 10-15 years but never saw one as virtually every BBB I ever entered had a freestanding World Market right next to it... the only one I can think of that didn't was in Medford, OR which was a very small awkward BBB in the mall there made out of a handfull of small tenant spaces.

[buckguy]

The locations with World Markets that I saw were former Linen & Things stores whose size and layout lent themselves to including World Market items. Those sections rarely had customers and I don't think they ever figured out how to market them.

The 20% coupons are still around. I get them by mail and on my phone. They have a great many exemptions. The house brand strategy seems like it will be a non-starter---it's probably good for profits if people buy the stuff and I suspect they won't.