Bed Bath & Beyond announces more store closures
Bed Bath & Beyond continues to announce store closures with 12 more in California, including one in the North Bay, slated to shut their doors.
On Tuesday, the retailer said it would shutter 87 additional stores nationwide, including locations in Palm Desert, Hawthorne, Upland, Culver City, Glendora, Pasadena and a Harmon store in Los Angeles.
Northern California stores added to the company closure list are at 105 Plaza Drive, Suite 107, Vallejo in Solano County and in Folsom in Sacramento County.
A company spokesperson told the Business Journal the Vallejo store would be closed “in the coming months,” without giving specifics.
“We previously shared this information with our valued Associates. While the decision to close a store is always a difficult one, customers can shop online at bedbathandbeyond.com and our mobile app,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.
Elsewhere in the North Bay, there are Bed Bath & Beyond locations in Santa Rosa in Sonoma County and Vacaville also in Solano. The Marin County store, in Larkspur, was shuttered after an announcement of closings last fall.
On Jan. 11 the company announced 126 of its 150 planned store closures, including locations in Valencia, Palmdale, Burbank, La Habra, Lakewood and Buena Park.
A timeline has not been given for BB&B closures.
The retailer on Tuesday also announced it closed five buybuy Baby stores, none of them in California, as well of all locations of its beauty store brand, Harmon.
Thirty states will lose stores in this latest announcement, including Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Nevada, and New York, among others.
The closures are part of a plan to try to stabilize the company's finances and turn around its declining sales.
In August, the home goods retailer secured more than $500 million in new financing and announced it would close 150 of its stores and slash its workforce by 20%. The company has indicated the strategy likely will involve bankruptcy.
As of Feb. 26, 2022, the company had about 32,000 employees.
Any path the company chooses will likely include more store liquidations and layoffs, according to Bob Phibbs, CEO of The Retail Doctor, a New York-based retail 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," he said. "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 initiated a turnaround plan in the third quarter of fiscal 2022, but it failed to gain enough traction, according to President and CEO Sue 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 fiscal third quarter, deeper than the $276.4 million loss posted a year earlier.
"Multiple paths are being explored and we are determining our next steps thoroughly, and in a timely manner," Gove said.
Sales slid 33% to $1.26 billion for the three months ending Nov. 26, compared with $1.88 billion a year earlier. And sales at stores open at least a year — a key gauge of a retailer's health — dropped 32%.
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North Bay Business Journal reporter Jeff Quackenbush, Bloomberg and USA Today contributed to this report.
