A Bed Bath & Beyond employee who plans to hang on and work until her store closes in Southern California says that while some customers are being nice, others are showing a lack of empathy.
“A lot of customers are really kind and say, ‘I’m so sorry you’re losing your jobs,’” said the 20-something store employee, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear for her job. But she has also answered the phone and talked to customers who have gotten upset about not being able to use their gift cards beyond the early-May deadline and said, “I’m glad you guys are closing,” she said.
In response, she said she told those callers: “That’s rude. All these people, we are losing our jobs.”
As Bed Bath & Beyond
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winds down operations and holds liquidation sales at its hundreds of remaining stores after filing for bankruptcy in April, current and former employees report chaos, confusion over exact store-closure dates and questions about severance packages — and, in some cases, insensitive customer behavior.
“I’m human. It’s not fun when people get mad at me for things that are out of my control,” the Southern California store employee said in an interview with MarketWatch, echoing the sentiments many other company employees are posting in online forums such as Reddit and Facebook
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The home-goods retailer stopped accepting its famous big, blue coupons in late April, and gift cards were only good through May 8.
“It’s all a mess,” the employee added. She said her location, which typically has not been busy since she started working there a couple of years ago, is now seeing increased traffic and shipments that have been hard to handle. “We’ve been getting trucks all the time. The [goods] are supposed to be on individual pallets, but they’re not.”
But she plans to stay until the end — perhaps the end of June; she’s not sure — because she expects to need the unemployment benefits as she figures out her next move.
“‘We would get shipments in that we would not need. Like Ugg comforters in the summer. Not one, but like 35 of them. We were expected to figure it out.’”
A former employee who worked at a Nashville store before it closed in April told MarketWatch he thought his managers had handled a bad situation as well as they could.
“The managers and supervisors knew what they were doing,” said Zachary Creson, who worked at the store for about a year and a half. But “corporate … was always tripping over themselves,” he added. For example, Creson said, his location was given “a whole bunch of product” in January, then told a month later that the store was shutting down.
From the archives (April 2023): Bed Bath & Beyond: from home-goods behemoth to bankruptcy
A former manager who worked at another California store for five years, and also asked not to be identified, had a similar experience before their store was shut down.
“The last eight months, I would dread [coming] to work,” they said. “We would get shipments in that we would not need. Like Ugg comforters in the summer. Not one, but like 35 of them. We were expected to figure it out.”
They said that was in line with their experience for the past year or so — that the company’s standards had deteriorated, and that the stores were not fully staffed and managers were expected to make up for it. A couple of years ago, in contrast, they loved working at what was “like a whole other company,” they said.
The retail chain had struggled for the past few years to compete with online home-goods retailers such as Wayfair
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and one-stop retailers such as Amazon
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and Target
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Its challenges were exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, which gave way to supply-chain issues and then inflation. Last year, the company became a meme stock after activist investor Ryan Cohen invested in it and demanded leadership changes. Cohen made a profit, then dumped his stake.
From the archives (April 2023): From meme stocks to empty shelves: The top 5 reasons Bed Bath & Beyond failed
There appear to have been four waves of closures and job losses at Bed Bath & Beyond since late last year. During the first couple of waves, employees reportedly received severance packages, though there are reports to the contrary. The third wave of employees to lose their jobs reportedly got severance, though it was delayed. The current and fourth wave of employees are not receiving severance, according to media reports and remaining employees who have been told so.
In New Jersey, where the company laid off 1,300 employees right before a deadline that would have required it to pay them severance, Bed Bath & Beyond has now reportedly said it will pay severance after all.
Creson, the former Tennessee store employee, said he was working part time and would not have qualified for severance. The 19-year-old lives with his parents and now works for another retailer. But he said one of his store managers, who had worked for Bed Bath & Beyond for 11 years, left immediately when he found out he would not be receiving severance.
“He’s got people to take care of,” Creson said. “They said a week after [announcing the closure] that we’re not getting severance. … That’s when he said, ‘I have no loyalty to the company anymore, and I’m done with this place.’”
Bed Bath & Beyond did not return a request for comment about its current and former employees’ experiences, nor about a report by the Wall Street Journal Monday that said the company may sell its Buybuy Baby brand to Go Global Retail, the owner of children’s clothing brand Janie and Jack.
This story originally appeared on Marketwatch
