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Bed Bath and Beyond files for bankruptcy

nytimes.com

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Re: Bed Bath and Beyond files for bankruptcy

#181

Post by MandieD »

pavon wrote: post #74
bearjaws wrote: post #31

This is a huge loss IMO, buying kitchen supplies and bedding on Amazon is complete shit. Target isn't much better due to lack of variety and types of bedding. I've bought the same bed sheets for 5+ years, a few months ago I bought new ones since some bleach got spilt on one set, it comes in and I could tell immediately the quality was far worse. One wash later, its ripping & fraying. Thankfully I could return them. S…

I greatly preferred JC Penny Home Store as it had better prices than BBB but better selection than general stores like Target/Walmart (and I often liked the bedding/curtain patterns they carried better). Unfortunately their financial troubles caused them to consolidate the Home Store into their main stores, and the selection is now no better than those later options, and I've thus been going to BBB more often. I hope…

"The gap between Target and Williams Sonoma" is a decent summary of my frustration with an awful lot of product selection in both the US and in Germany.

Re: Bed Bath and Beyond files for bankruptcy

#182

Post by darkhelmet »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #133

Anecdotally, the last time I went to Bed Bath and Beyond, it was an absolute ghost town. No one was there, the prices were absolutely garbage, and the inventory was no better than anything you'd find literally anywhere else. I looked around and thought to myself, "Wow, I bet their corporate rent costs a fortune to just be here, and they're probably burning cash hand over fist." I'm not surprised in the slightest. Con…

It's not just BBB. This description could apply to a good number of chain stores these days. There are exceptions but this seems to be an increasing trend. There are ghost town stores everywhere you look.

If I make a trip to (for example) Target, it feels nothing like Target of 20 years ago. The chances are good that they don't have what I hoped to find there. I'm getting used to being regularly disappointed and am learning to plan around waiting for an Amazon delivery.

This seems to be a vicious circle. The thing stores had which Amazon didn't was that they used to have a decent selection of things you could get "right now" and they're giving up on that niche to try and compete on price. I don't see this ending well.

Re: Bed Bath and Beyond files for bankruptcy

#183

Post by itsoktocry »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #97
jandrese wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because a risky behavior works out sometimes doesn't make it any less risky.

I never said it wasn't risky. I'm saying it's unfair to assume it's proof someone is "financially illiterate", i.e. uneducated or stupid. Educated people can have different assessments of risk.

>I'm saying it's unfair to assume it's proof someone is "financially illiterate", i.e. uneducated or stupid.

Assume, sure. But you could follow along on Twitter or StockTwits and see why many of these people were buying Hertz. That's the beauty of modern times. I certainly didn't see many doing risk analysis, it was mostly "Burn the shorts!".

And, many people bought all the way down from $20 to get an $8 payout.

Re: Bed Bath and Beyond files for bankruptcy

#184

Post by justincormack »

mrguyorama wrote: post #155
exsf0859 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's covered the decline of BBBY many times in his newsletter, explaining the financial details and shaking his head each time. His Monday April 24th, 2023 newsletter, titled "Bed Bath Moves Beyond", covers the situation once again. It ends: "Bed Bath saw that its retail shareholders wanted to throw their money away, and that its sophisticated lenders wanted to get their money back, and realized that there was a trad…

>The lawsuits are gonna be great. Why can you be sued because idiots convinced themselves you were a good buy while you were showing everyone your terrible finances?

Everything is securities fraud, as Levine likes to say.

Re: Bed Bath and Beyond files for bankruptcy

#185

Post by Entinel »

bearjaws wrote: post #31

This is a huge loss IMO, buying kitchen supplies and bedding on Amazon is complete shit. Target isn't much better due to lack of variety and types of bedding. I've bought the same bed sheets for 5+ years, a few months ago I bought new ones since some bleach got spilt on one set, it comes in and I could tell immediately the quality was far worse. One wash later, its ripping & fraying. Thankfully I could return them. S…

Target is much better than Amazon They may not have the wide variety you want but what they do have is good enough for the price.

Re: Bed Bath and Beyond files for bankruptcy

#186

Post by adam_arthur »

humanlion87 wrote: post #8

I find the whole situation fascinating. Bed Bath continued to sell hundreds of millions of shares while they were preparing for bankruptcy and retail investors (or meme stock investors) continued to buy them. I assume Bed Bath did all the paperwork that is necessary (like calling out risks, that the raised capital will go to creditors first, etc) for such a stock sale. But it is clear they were doing it out of bad-fa…

They didn't sell nearly enough shares.

They could have probably saved their business, at least in the short term, by selling more. Their shares outstanding barely increased even as the price rocketed unjustifiably higher on meme energy. I'm consistently amazed by the poor management by CFOs of companies not selling shares when their P/E or even P/S multiples are 100x+.

This is 100% free and exploitable money available to businesses, that quite clearly won't last into perpetuity. NVDA should be selling 10%+ of their share count into the market at this price. You can buyback the shares later when the price will, inevitably, and quite obviously materially fall. You could immediately put the money into a MMF yielding 5% rather than the current 1% earnings yield. There's just obvious, no brainer stuff here for many CFOs to take advantage of.

Looks like BBBY share count has declined materially over the past decade, which was quite surprising. Goes to show that buybacks mean nothing for shareholder returns until you sell. And the buyback itself is a disposal of cash on hand (or accrual of debt), so is price-neutral in the immediate term. Who wants to bet that BBBY would rather have the cash right about now?

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BBBY/bed-bath-beyo...

Re: Bed Bath and Beyond files for bankruptcy

#187

Post by RecycledEle »

neurobama wrote: post #52
humanlion87 wrote: post #8

I find the whole situation fascinating. Bed Bath continued to sell hundreds of millions of shares while they were preparing for bankruptcy and retail investors (or meme stock investors) continued to buy them. I assume Bed Bath did all the paperwork that is necessary (like calling out risks, that the raised capital will go to creditors first, etc) for such a stock sale. But it is clear they were doing it out of bad-fa…

The whole stock market in 2023 makes no sense to me, not just Bed Bath and Beyond. So many companies no longer pay dividends. So many classes of stock are now non-voting shares. Common stock shareholders usually get nothing if a company goes bankrupt and liquidates. So if I don't get dividends, can't vote, and am not entitled to a share of the company's assets, what is the actual value in owning stock? Do I just wait…

You are correct.

If we ignore trades between investors, then people buy stock, receive dividends, and one day the company goes out of business. (Nothing lasts forever.) The dividends have to exceed the purchase price (accounting for an acceptable rate of return) to justify the purchase.

Without dividends, stocks are a zero-sum game where someone has to lose a dollar for every dollar someone else gains.

If a stock will never earn dividends, and the company will never buy it back, then it is worthless.

Re: Bed Bath and Beyond files for bankruptcy

#189

Post by nprateem »

crooked-v wrote: post #135
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, but it’s increasingly frustrating as an average person. Apartments around me keep appreciating in value every year, rents keep going up astronomically even when the houses stay empty. My income went up, but housing in my area went up nearly 2x. I’m being priced out of areas I’ve lived in forever. I feel like a social contract has been violated. Everything, from products to housing seems to be targeted a…

Housing prices keep going up in the US because, fundamentally, there's not enough housing and hasn't been enough housing built for decades [1]. In most big cities, this is a self-inflicted problem caused by bad zoning and by planning and permitting processes that can take years and add huge amounts to home prices. (This is a big part of the reason there's so much "luxury" housing; adding a superficial high-end gloss…

House prices go up because they're now investments. Bring in land value tax and you'll quickly see a reversal.

Re: Bed Bath and Beyond files for bankruptcy

#190

Post by blakesley »

neurobama wrote: post #52
humanlion87 wrote: post #8

I find the whole situation fascinating. Bed Bath continued to sell hundreds of millions of shares while they were preparing for bankruptcy and retail investors (or meme stock investors) continued to buy them. I assume Bed Bath did all the paperwork that is necessary (like calling out risks, that the raised capital will go to creditors first, etc) for such a stock sale. But it is clear they were doing it out of bad-fa…

The whole stock market in 2023 makes no sense to me, not just Bed Bath and Beyond. So many companies no longer pay dividends. So many classes of stock are now non-voting shares. Common stock shareholders usually get nothing if a company goes bankrupt and liquidates. So if I don't get dividends, can't vote, and am not entitled to a share of the company's assets, what is the actual value in owning stock? Do I just wait…

> So many companies no longer pay dividends. So many classes of stock are now non-voting shares.

This seems normal to me. (I'm in my late 30s) Dividends aside, you're saying you used to do a lot of voting and now, in 2023, you're not anymore?

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