In the 2003 comedy classic Old School, Will Ferrell’s character Frank, a reformed party animal now attending a college party as a middle-aged man, lays out to a bunch of drunken partygoers why he has to take it easy on the shindig’s available refreshments.
“Well, um, actually a pretty nice little Saturday, we’re going to go to Home Depot. Yeah, buy some wallpaper, maybe get some flooring, stuff like that,” Frank says, then adds, “Maybe Bed, Bath, & Beyond, I don’t know, I don’t know if we’ll have enough time. ”
Twenty years later, it appears time is truly running out for the once-successful retail location known for its selection of various essential housewares.
While Bed Bath & Beyond saw its outlook on Wall Street improve briefly in 2021 as it became a popular meme stock and seemed to receive an unexpected lifeline when Chewy cofounder Ryan Cohen bought millions of shares in the company to become chairmen of its board, its retail fortunes have not turned around.
The company’s stock saw an 800% spike between its 2020 pandemic-induced low point and its meme stock heights in 2021, but it still lost $559 million in the February 2021-February 2022 fiscal year and $700 million in the first and second quarters of 2022 combined, according to SEC filings.
As for Cohen, he sold all of his stock in the company in August, earning $68.1 million in profit while touching off the steepest one-day stock drop in the company’s history. The stock currently sells for about $35 per share – down 93% from its 2021 peak.
Now it appears the 2022 holiday shopping season may have been its last.
This really was Custer’s Last Stand, and it’s going to pretty much end the same way that it did for Custer,” Loop Capital managing director Anthony Chukumba told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday. “We will not be having this same conversation a year from now about Bed Bath & Beyond. Bed Bath & Beyond will be gone.”