The Rise and Fall of Bed Bath & Beyond: The Store That Lived on a Coupon

The blue coupon built Bed Bath & Beyond, and it was the one thing the chain could neither afford to keep nor survive giving up. Two managers from a failing discount chain opened a pair of tiny linen shops in 1971, turned them into towering, stacked-to-the-ceiling superstores run by local managers, and mailed close to a billion twenty-percent-off coupons a year. By 2017 the company ran more than fifteen hundred stores and sold over twelve billion dollars of sheets, towels and kitchen gadgets. Then the coupon ate the margins, the internet passed it by, and a turnaround meant to save it emptied the shelves instead. In this episode: How Bed 'n Bath began as two small linen shops near New York in 1971 The decentralized superstore where every manager stocked the walls to the ceiling How the big blue mailer became the chain's entire advertising department Buy Buy Baby, Old School and the store's place in American weekend life The coupon arithmetic, the buybacks and the missed internet The 2019 activist campaign, the new chief executive from Target and the house brands The meme-stock months of 2022 and the 2023 bankruptcy What became of the name after the last store closed Subscribe to Mainstreet Memories for more stories of the American stores and brands that filled our weekends and then disappeared from Main Street. #BedBathAndBeyond #MainstreetMemories #RiseAndFall #RetailHistory #DeadMalls #RetailApocalypse #BuyBuyBaby #Coupons #AmericanNostalgia #BusinessHistory