Bed Bath & Beyond to Close Seven More Stores Across SoCal

A beleaguered Bed Bath & Beyond is throwing seven Southern California stores out with the bathwater.

The New Jersey-based home goods retailer, facing bankruptcy after announcing the closure of 150 stores nationwide, will shut seven more in Palm Desert, Hawthorne, Upland, Culver City, Glendora, Pasadena and Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Daily News reported.

The firm tied to the sale of bed sheets and food blenders announced Tuesday it would close 87 additional stores nationwide. They include the seven Southland outlets, five Buy Buy Baby stores outside California and all its Harmon beauty brand stores, including one in West L.A.

The latest closures feature stores in 30 states, including Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Nevada and New York.

On Jan. 11, the company announced it would lock the doors at 126 of its 150 planned store closures, including outlets in Valencia, Palmdale, Burbank, La Habra, Lakewood and Buena Park.

A timeline was given for the store closures.

The closures are part of a plan to stabilize the company’s finances and turn around declining sales. A year ago, the company had 32,000 employees.

In August, Bed, Bath & Beyond secured more than $500 million in financing and announced it would close 150 of its 955 stores, while laying off one in five workers.

Its executive suite suffered a leadership turmoil, including the elimination of its chief operating and chief stores officers. CEO Mark Tritton was fired in June and replaced by Sue Gove.

The company, once valued at $17 billion, has struggled to keep its shelves stocked. It said last month it would likely soon declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy, according to the Guardian.

Any path forward will likely include more store liquidations and layoffs, according to Bob Phibbs, CEO of The Retail Doctor, a New York-based consulting firm.

“If they file for bankruptcy, they’ll come out of it, even if they have to cut their store fleet in half to succeed,” Phibbs told the newspaper. “I don’t see anyone else coming in to take it over. They’ll look to where most of their online sales and store volumes are coming from and they’ll keep those.”

Bed Bath & Beyond launched a turnaround plan in the third quarter of last year, but it failed to gain enough traction, according to Gove.

“Although we moved quickly and effectively to change the assortment and other merchandising and marketing strategies, inventory was constrained and we did not achieve our goals,” Gove said in a statement.

The retailer posted a net loss of nearly $393 million in its third quarter, deeper than the $276.4 million loss a year earlier. Sales slid 33 percent to $1.26 billion for the three months ending Nov. 26, compared with $1.88 billion the previous year. Sales at stores open at least a year — a key gauge of a retailer’s health — dropped 32 percent.

Despite its stock price surging 45 percent last month to $3.66 a share, Bed Bath & Beyond announced it has been in talks with Sycamore Partners to sell its assets, including its Buy Buy Baby chain, as part of a potential bankruptcy filing, according to the New York Times.

The company — like GameStop and AMC — is a “meme stock,” whose share price was driven upward by online traders who sometimes coordinate efforts and strategies through internet forums such as Reddit’s WallStreetBets.

Bed Bath & Beyond may not be gone yet, but news of its potential bankruptcy has landlords already looking beyond the retailer to lease potentially vacant storefronts.

— Dana Bartholomew