The store is where the dirty work of making a house a home happened.
Bed Bath & Beyond, the home goods retailer that announced its bankruptcy earlier this week, is hardly a safe space for many, but for me, it was. Upon walking into the last remaining Manhattan location on Sixth Avenue on Thursday, I was expecting to see chaos: shoppers clamoring for liquidation bargains, tussling it out for Casper bed sheets and Shark vacuums as blue-aproned employees refereed, fellow journalists appearing at the store for the first time in forever for their obits. But what I was met with was anything but—a sea of calm and quiet greeted me, though the vibes were slightly worse for wear.
Plonked on a corner in Chelsea, directly across from The Container Store and housed in the same building as a mediocre Marshall’s and a decent TJ Maxx, Manhattan’s last standing Bed Bath & Beyond has always been a bit of a mess—dark and cluttered and generally too warm—but it seems that the newly bankrupt retailer had a bit of a makeover prior to the news, a last ditch effort to save themselves from the inevitable. The aisles are wide and organized in a way that feels intuitive and the café and packaged food section, which never made much sense in the first place, is gone. Part of Bed Bath & Beyond’s questionable charm was that it always felt a little bit like an upscale dollar store—a high end version of New York chain DII, where one could find Tupperware, a bath mat, or a beach chair in a pinch. With this renovation, though, the experience is different, like wandering the halls of a suburban Target, but somehow less gratifying.
Frankly, I was curious about the inevitable liquidation deals that are perhaps the best part about something as depressing as a major retailer and cultural institution shuttering for good. Unfortunately, the deals are not quite as hot as they likely will be in the future, as the store’s final days approach: Xerox’ed signs calculating 10 percent off of various prices adorned random end caps and shelves, with seemingly little rhyme or reason as to what was on sale and why. Big ticket items like KitchenaAd mixers and Simplehuman trash cans that people might actually find on sale at places like Amazon and even Target were definitely not marked down, but a lot of in-house brands were. I contemplated a 72-pack of moth repellent sachets for about ten minutes, carrying it around the store until I realized that my desire for that item was a want and not a need.
Despite the store’s new look, the energy was that of despair. I asked an employee stocking placemats when the sales had started and how low they’d go. "I don’t know," she said. "We don’t know anything. It sucks." Downstairs in the bedding section, I squeezed Casper’s memory foam pillows and listened to an employee named Leslie have an enthusiastic conversation with another shopper about what the store’s closing meant to her. "I love working here," she said. "I don’t need this job. I have this job because I love Bed Bath & Beyond."
Part of Bed Bath & Beyond’s allure and its dedicated customer base is certainly due to the ubiquitous coupons, which are now no longer eligible for use. These coupons cluttered mailboxes and email inboxes, lived in junk drawers, and were honestly quite handy in a pinch when you found yourself fresh out of clothes hangers or were in desperate need of a shoe rack and didn’t want to wait. But even without a coupon, a Bed Bath & Beyond is intrinsically tied to the memories of making a home.
Anyone faced with the daunting prospect of an empty living space understands that a visit to Bed Bath & Beyond, no matter how hellish it may be, will be worth it in the end. College students buying twin XL sheets and shower caddies and towels are making decisions for themselves about what their home should look like, and how it should feel, for the first time, even if the home in question is a dingy cinder block dorm (and even if mom or dad is with them guiding the purchases and armed with the checkbook). Couples armed with a scan gun zap the SKUs of dishware sets and stand mixers for wedding registries, filling the shelves of their shared space. It’s a bit of a stretch to romanticize a big box retailer’s demise, when the retail landscape is littered with corpses already, and the present and future of home retail for the masses lies in the hands of Jeffrey Bezos’s evil empire, but the slightly dingy, run-down charm of Bed Bath & Beyond has always warmed my heart.
There’s nothing glamorous or particularly enjoyable about shopping for new pillows or a mattress pad, but physically doing so in person feels productive. What always appealed to me about Bed Bath & Beyond was the sense of possibility. Walking in armed with little else than a vague list and a large iced beverage on a Saturday when the weather is sort of blah sounds like a nightmare for most, but for me, it’s a perfectly good way to kill some time. As someone who is constantly on a quixotic quest towards home improvement, the rumpled aisles of Bed Bath & Beyond present a vast wealth of opportunity; there are few things more thrilling than stumbling upon a fellow shopper’s pile of discards on the way to a register. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure and that cliché applies to a pile of bath towels, a dish rack, and a tin of gourmet caramel and cheddar popcorn abandoned on a shelf in the kitchen tools section. There’s something to be said about how Bed Bath & Beyond is for the rest of us unable to afford Italian chairs and table linens, but that’s rude to the people who love the store for what it was—a place that helps you make home.