Bed Bath & Beyond seemed to be a retail chain that was going to be around for a long time. They always seemed to stock good quality merchandise in their stores. What most people do not know is that retail chains like Bed Bath & Beyond are products of big corporations. Some of these corporations generate Billions of dollars in revenues and hire thousands of people. All of these corporations are run by a board of directors and their officers. This is a much smaller group of people that the public does not see. They can make a company or break it!
The information that I found about how Bed Bath & Beyond became defunct was very fascinating. According to U.S. News Money “Bed Bath & Beyond is one of the more recent COVID-19 failures.” According to the article, it lost money and ran out of cash. It eventually had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and sell off assets and its shares fell to zero. It liquidated all of its remaining stores and many of the shareholders lost their investments.
My research also turned up additional information about the operation of the Board of Directors for Bed Bath & Beyond that might have been part of the causative factors of the fall of this company. The additional articles and reports that I included in this article about the Bankruptcy of the company give a picture of how complex it was to dissolve this corporation.
According to Wikipedia, Bed Bath & Beyond was considered to be a Fortune 500 and the Forbes Global 2000 company. It became Defunct on July 30, 2023. Bed Bath & Beyond was an American big-box retail chain specializing in housewares, furniture, and specialty items. Headquartered in Union, New Jersey, the chain operated stores in the United States and Canada.
COVID-19 may have been one of the factors that caused Bed Bath & Beyond to fail but it was more complicated than that. There were problems with their Board of Directors. According to Wikipedia. In March 2019, three activist investment firms, (Legion Partners, Macellum Advisors, and Ancora Advisors) announced their intent to remove current CEO Steven Temares and restructure Bed Bath & Beyond’s current board of directors. The activist investors highlighted several instances of perceived nepotism, including the acquisition of Buy Buy Baby, which was founded by two of Bed Bath & Beyond co-founder Leonard Feinstein’s children, and the acquisition of Chef Central, which was created by co-founder Warren Eisenberg’s son, as examples of poor business practices at Bed Bath & Beyond. Sometimes family and business do not mix. This pressure led five independent directors to step down on April 22, 2019 and also resulted in the company restructuring its board.
Additionally, as reported by Wikipedia, On September 2, 2022, Gustavo Arnal, the company’s chief financial officer, committed suicide, by jumping from the balcony of his New York City apartment. Arnal was one of the targets of a class action lawsuit alleging that Bed Bath & Beyond’s stock had become a pump-and-dump scheme. Two weeks later on September 16, the company named 56 stores targeted for closure of the 150 announced in August; later, on September 26, the company announced the closure of Decorist.
As you can see from this information, this was more involved than just COVID-19. There was more drama and suspense involved with this company and its fall than what has been reported on the network TV news reports. This seems to be a story for a Hollywood movie. TJC wants to produce a documentary film about it! Bed Bath & Beyond had to file for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy and has gone out of business. There may be lawsuits filed against the board of directors and shareholders of this company in the years to come.
SOURCES
Wikipedia. (N.D.). Bed Bath & Beyond. Retrieved on May 19, 2024. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed_Bath_%26_Beyond
Ian Bezek, (2023 May12). U.S. News Money, 7 Companies That Went Bankrupt Due to COVID, https://money.usnews.com/investing/stock-market-news/slideshows/covid-bankrupt-companies