Beyond Bed Bath & Beyond, To What?

We'll miss the category killer when it's gone

I wrote about Bed Bath & Beyond recently for The Bulwark—my last three pieces there have been about retail (here, and here, are the other two) so I guess I’m kind of their informal retail analyst. My editor wondered if I could/was interested in writing something about the bankruptcy of Bed Bath & Beyond, and I had already been thinking about doing something on it. So I did.

It’s a long-ish piece with a few distinct points. I go over the immediate issues in the beginning—things like smaller families with less space to fill, poor corporate management choices, etc.—none of which I find particularly interesting. However, this bit seems important to me:

There is also a definite turning point in the company’s recent history: Though Bed Bath & Beyond remained the same continuous company from its origins in New Jersey in the early 1970s down to its bankruptcy and expected closure, in 2019, activist investors forced the company’s board to hire as CEO former Target chief merchandising officer Mark Tritton, who implemented a strategy of taking merchandising authority away from store owners, clearing out the regular brand-name products to which shoppers were accustomed, and pushing private-label goods in their place. This had worked at Target, where Tritton had implemented the strategy to great effect. But it left Bed Bath & Beyond shoppers confused and disappointed, and brought about a steep decline in sales from which the company did not recover.

As I go on to discuss, one of the key elements of the “category killer” strategy—really of the retail concept itself—is curation and product knowledge. These are supposed to be stores that pick a wide, deep, broad, and basically good selection of products on the one hand (specialty store), but use their size and economies of scale to discount them (discount store). Those two halves are essential to the success of a category killer. Otherwise, it is just an overpriced big-box store with no particular distinction. I would argue that category killers have failed in such numbers not because the concept is flawed, but because the execution has frequently been flawed. I wrote:

The category killer, in theory, is genius, giving the customer something like a mashup of Walmart and a boutique. That can mean anonymity, a huge sales floor, and low prices combined with a broad, deep, curated product selection and employees who are knowledgeable in a specific area. Those characteristics, however, would represent the best of Walmart and the boutique, a truly ideal arrangement. In execution, this hybrid often ended up being the worst of its two lineages: the same generic warehouse environment, poorly trained and overworked employees, and low-quality merchandise you might find at Walmart, but combined with the high prices of a boutique.

Here I’ll pull up a recent piece right at this newsletter about Micro Center: the last remaining category killer in the computer/hardware category. It’s a store that perfectly embodies what the category killer is supposed to be. It’s not a coincidence that it survived. Other surviving stores in this segment, like Best Buy and some sporting goods chains, also lean into the knowledge/curation side of things. Again, not a coincidence that they have survived.

Bed Bath & Beyond lacked any of this. It mostly felt like a big department of a Walmart with prices just a tad too high. (Last time I shopped at Bed Bath & Beyond, I did, however, get an open box Zwilling coffee maker, which retails close to $200—for just $20. That might also be an element of why they didn’t make it.)

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I also discuss the nostalgia element here. These types of stores were part of the landscape when I was a kid. They were more interesting and engaging to explore than warehouse-style big boxes; they often had little nooks and crannies, small sections clustered around a center; maze-like. I remember CompUSA and Bed Bath & Beyond (and Linens N Things) fondly; I remember the huge desk-and-chair department in Staples.

I was quoted awhile ago in this CNN Business piece on current fast food architecture:

“I don’t know if you’d be able to identify what they were [similar-looking modern fast food buildings] if they had a different name on the front,” said Addison Del Mastro, an urbanist writer who documents the history of commercial landscapes. “There’s nothing to engage the wandering imagination.”

What I said after that didn’t make it in the piece, but I think it was also an important point. I recalled my mother’s childhood memories of lying down on the pew in her church, looking at the paintings on the ceiling, looking at the statues and the stained glass, not paying attention to Mass, per se, but still engaged. At some point, following the American rollout of Vatican II, the ceiling was painted over.

When I compare the ornamented fast food restaurants of my own childhood—the sunrooms, the mansards, the toys, the play areas, the life-size Ronald McDonald—to the bare, blank, stripped-down buildings of today, I think of those bare Catholic churches of the post-Vatican II era.

Even though all of that was in the service of consumerism, I still feel that we’ve lost something in the texture and interest of everyday life. And I feel that with the shifts in retail too.

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And the final point I make is that much of what has ailed category killers has nothing to do with immediate consumer behavior. The trends in retail in general—concentration, national distribution, cheapening quality—hurt category killers much more than they hurt Walmart or Amazon. Those companies already compete this way, but category killers are supposed to stick out from the pack in terms of quality and selection. The execution of the category killer concept has probably gotten harder over the last 15 years. Here’s a bit from the piece on this:

I’m thinking, for example, of a company based in New Jersey that manufactured plastic strainers with a hook that could attach to the kitchen faucet, meaning the strainer could hang on its own above the sink. My mother bought them at Jamesway, a regional discount chain, in the 1990s. They were sturdy, useful, and well designed. Like Bed Bath & Beyond, Jamesway was also based in New Jersey; like Bed Bath & Beyond, it also declared bankruptcy. The subtle processes that changed the commercial landscape to make it inhospitable to both companies have also quietly changed—and narrowed—the variety of products consumers have to choose from.

I conclude with this:

here’s a concept in environmental economics known as “existence value,” which is how much a person would be willing to pay—in actual money—for the knowledge that an endangered species is being protected and still exists. Studies show that people are willing to pay something, but, of course, there are limits. In a way, the existence value of these stodgy big-box specialty stores is greater than their value as actual everyday shopping outlets: I like knowing that I can go spin around in the office chair department, but I can’t imagine actually buying an office chair more often than once or twice a decade. I like the idea that there’s a store within driving distance that stocks more bath towels than my supermarket has peanut butter varieties. But at the end of the day, except in special cases, I’m not going to actually pay more just to be able to turn down a larger number of purchasing possibilities.

It’s tough, and kind of sad, and kind of wistful: there’s simply no way to keep these places without using them. They’re enterprises, not specimens. And at the end of the day, although our shopping habits weren’t the only factor in their demise, I guess they weren’t worth it to us.

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Related Reading:

Roses Are Red, Walmarts Are Blue

Office Depot Time Capsule

Micro Superstore

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