After four tumultuous years, Bed, Bath and Beyond (BBB) has filed for bankruptcy. They have run out of cash to operate and bankruptcy court will give them freedom to explore a sale or a restructuring.
I have written previously about the strategic mistakes made by BBB. They went against what their customers wanted, focused too much on Amazon and failed to adapt to the internet. The last two statements are not contradictory. All retailers need to make the most out of the internet but that doesn’t mean becoming like Amazon.
It’s easy to blame Amazon but BBB made several poor decisions. Their strategy of going all-in into private labels—what Amazon does—didn’t make sense for their customers. If you had asked any store manager, they would have told you the same thing. Copying competitors isn’t innovation. Every company has to figure out what makes sense for them instead of what other organizations are doing.
Bankruptcy may not be the end of BBB. They may come back after restructuring in some similar format. Or they may just become like Blockbuster, a company of a previous era.
The lesson here is that you can’t outrun bad decisions. They compound over time, making it harder and harder to dig yourself out. That’s why it is so important to avoid making them in the first place. Consumers may forget BBB but their story will live out in some obscure case study example in some university classroom.
Photo by Melinda Gimpel