Agreed, you basically now only have discounters who sell in store small appliances/kitchen supplies. It must not be profitable enough since there are really no other stores in that market other then BBB.

They call stores like Bed Bath and Beyond a "category killer" for a reason.

If a BBBY hits your mall, there's no point selling appliance / kitchen supplies there. You simply can't compete.

If your store is clean, reasonably well stocked, and has minimally competent sales staff, you might be preferable to a BBBy.

Today, sure.

But I'm talking about even in October 2022, just a few months ago. No one was going to open a bedding store when BBBY was within walking distance.

No, we're going to order from LL Bean. We gave up on BBY years ago, the service has sucked for a long time.

Does LL Bean sell frying pans now?

Not sure what you mean, most if not all department stores today sell small kitchen appliances and supplies. From Target and Walmart to Macys

Best Buy (!!!) has great deals on appliances especially clearance.

Target/Walmart are discounters and their variety, stock and quality are not good. I always forget about macys!

I want to buy a mattress. Mattress review sites are all phony. Amazon is all phony reviews. Mattress FIRM is hugely overpriced. Bed, Bath, and Beyond's brands were just names they'd acquired. That entire industry has managed to shoot itself in the foot. Probably better to order from an actual manufacturer on Alibaba.

During the pandemic I bought a $500 mattress from Amazon but didn’t like it. So they just gave it to me for free and refunded my purchase. So now I’m sleeping on a free mattress that I don’t really like but it was free.

The seller probably paid about $60 for that mattress.

Also, FYI, with mattress firm, your warranty is null and void if you ever spill anything on your bed. I bought a mattress from them and within a year, in the literal use of the term, came apart at the seams. One night I woke up and my elbow was... in the bed rubbing against a spring.

I assumed such a structural failing would be under warranty, but they rejected it because of a roughly 2" stain on the mattress. Apparently, that stain was structural. I'm still salty about it.

My bed developed a huge sink hole within three months. I was able to take it back, but c'mon. I'm average weight, and I bought the mattress brand new. We paid an arm and a leg later for a Sleep Number and it's been totally fine for years and years.

Small claims court.

Consider the Foam Factory. We've bought a mattress and separately a foam topper from them and they've been great. You can tell they're legit because their products are listed in tables and because the styling on the website is completely out of fashion.

https://www.thefoamfactory.com/mattress/memorymattress.html

Holy hell you're not kidding. It's like I'm browsing a site in 1999.

It's pretty refreshing, though. The entire page loads in under 1/4 of a second for me.

You made me check, 150ms from start to finish

We're really missing out

> You can tell they're legit because their products are listed in tables and because the styling on the website is completely out of fashion.

I have noticed that the closer something looks to a 1995 HTML skeleton, the more I trust it these days. I assume anything else has been run through a layer of marketers.

I wonder if they're ever gonna pick up on that?

WTF, this is an e-commerce site?

Ikea is a good option in this market. And generally for household basics.

Agree, their mattresses are decent. Bought an expensive one from a seller with a guarantee recently, had to refund it as it sucked which turned in to a month long process. In the end, it was donated to charity and replaced from Ikea. Ikea's come in only two styles: firm (IMHO commonly ordered, more profitable for Ikea, but less likely to be considered comfortable by more than one person and more likely to lose shape) and extra firm (safe for more than one person, lower profit margin for Ikea, typically longer lasting).

The only place to get a new mattress these days and not get ripped off is Costco

They're still 5x more expensive than Alibaba. Which is where most mail order mattresses come from. Making a mattress costs under $100.

Alibaba is super cheap because you're buying the literal bargain basement version of the product, and what you're getting almost always violates local product safety laws that domestic manufacturers and/or sellers must contend with.

Yes, the mattress at Costco is 5x the price. But it's probably 20x the value.

My experience is the opposite - I've bought the exact same products from Alibaba that I could have gotten on Amazon for 4x the cost. The only difference being random brand printed on the plastic.

It depends on the product. All those random USB C docks and hubs? Sure, you can find identical ones on baba. But there are products that aren’t really available. I’m sure you can get stuff identical to Harbor Freight, but actually identical to Milwaukee or Dewalt? A bit harder.

The stuff on Amazon is the stuff from Alibaba.

The stuff in Target, Walmart, etc., is not. (And specifically, I mean the stuff physically sold in retail stores.) That is because retail stores are held to product liability laws in a different way than Amazon is (was? depends on the outcome of several pending product liability lawsuits against Amazon).

Arizona Premium Mattress. It’s basically, build your own mattress. Only down side, they are slooooooooow

Ah but they don’t offer the Alaskan King! Because a mattress nine feet on a side is what everyone needs.

Mattresses are a huge racket in general. Think about how often you need to buy a mattress and then consider how many stores in you area sell only mattresses out of expensive storefronts full of salesmen. The margins per mattress have to be astronomical to support a business model like that. But on the other hand they are very heavy and bulky which makes them expensive to ship and since people generally need to try several out before finding one that is comfortable they aren't great for an online business model.

The places like that around here seem to make their money off expensive massage recliners and other deluxe furniture, where the mattresses are just there to get people in the door every so often.

Maybe around there. Where we are you can't find a store that charges under $2500 for a Mattress. Was such a racket I rolled the dice on a $300 shipped mattress from Amazon. No issues insanely comfortable. I'd absolutely buy another

And here they have all the sale campaigns going on almost year round. Dropping price 40-50% or more. And they likely still make hefty profit...

Try Avacado Mattress. I genuinely love the product and if you were to believe their spiel it’s probably sustainable and eco friendly…

$2,000 for a queen sized mattress? No thank you.

It's funny how you wouldn't blink at a $20,000 car, but $2,000 for a mattress that you'll use for eight hours every day for the next several years is "No thank you."

A good mattress can make your life better in ways that few other things will, on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Sleep is important.

Difference is there's not a car I can buy for $2,000 that's just as good (and maybe identical) as the $20,000 car in all aspects.

I went to a hotel and loved the mattress so I emailed them, and it was a Classic Brands Cool Gel. I bought one and am very happy with it, and it was relatively cheap compared to some of the DTC brands out there and extremely cheap compared to mattress stores. You can get it on amazon but some of the branding is confusing. I think we bought the Cool Gel Chill, although a quick glance online shows there are fairly similar. I also recommended it to some of my family and they are happy with the choice.

The hotel was also great. If you're ever in Houghton in the UP of Michigan, I would highly recommend the Vault hotel.

this is relatively common, some hotels even list the brand on the website and I’ve seen one that had a coupon.

Nothing like spending a night or few on the mattress to test.

IMO, Costco does a good job of balancing quality and price.

But terrible at offering selection. If you don't like the color, well, tough because that's the one they stock. Maybe if you're lucky they'll have a second color or style for sale.

That's what sheets are for...

Or: You saw it last week? We’ll, too bad. We have a completely new set for sale today.

I say this as a huge Costco shopper and fan. Serendipity and spontaneity is the name of the game at Costco.

wal mart and department stores exist. bed bath and beyond was almost always super overpriced, and the quality on a lot of things isnt the best.

Totally agree. Online shopping is only going to get worse: more expensive, less quality, harder to return. On the other hand, brick and mortar places are going to have less variety, and lower quality. You'll spend more time driving all over town to return things or driving all over town to find simple things in stores. Fifteen years ago Target had some pretty solid clothing options, but now it's basically only good for t-shirts and underwear.

I just want to go to a store that has what I need, at the right level of quality, with enough clerks working at any given time. I'll pay extra for that.

> Totally agree. Online shopping is only going to get worse: more expensive, less quality, harder to return. On the other hand, brick and mortar places are going to have less variety, and lower quality

What I am hoping might change things is a near-total collapse in the value of commercial & retail real estate. This is clearly already happening and doesn't show any signs of slowing - who is going to take a long term, expensive lease on retail real estate now?!

But once prices have collapsed & property owners are forced to adjust to the new reality, I'm hopeful it might lead to a bunch of new competitors able to roll the dice by focusing on smaller scale speciality stuff, which will eventually grow. Kinda like capitalism has promised forever, except maybe this time it might actually happen?!

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 this is a restructuring and not a shutdown. It will be crummy for there to be no stores filling the gap between Target and William Sonoma.

"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.

Williams Sonoma always feels like the sky mall catalog; overpriced and basically as crappy. It’s quite annoying to find actually good products- it’s usually still possible but takes some serious digging.

No, BBB had low quality crazy overpriced items.

Yes it was good to be able to see and try items before buying, but then they'd just fall apart.

With Amazon, yeah it sucks I sometimes have to return things because you couldn't try it in person. But on the other hand, I wind up buying much higher quality items on Amazon, and at a cheaper price, because the top 15 reviews together usually give really solid feedback on how the item is holding up after a year or two.

When there are 500 or 5,000 reviews on an item, you generally know what quality you're going to get. At BBB that was never the case. Especially with so many items manufactured exclusively for BBB.

I tend to find myself extremely dubious of Amazon reviews for anything but a brand I know and more-or-less trust already. There's just too much product listing manipulation and too many fake reviews.

I think it really depends.

If an item is 4.5 stars with over 10,000 reviews, I find it's pretty trustworthy.

It's when it has under 100 that I raise an eyebrow. Under 20, and it's most likely fake.

BBB had high prices, but I've never gotten the impression that there was anything low quality.

Besides the as seen on tv crap they added over the last few years.

EDIT: I didn't know about the store brand push.

It wasn't just the store brands that came more recently, but the longtime "name" brands that made lines of items exclusively for BBB. This was especially the case with things like bedding, shower curtains, towels, bathmats, anything with memory foam, and so forth. They were just overpriced crap, you'd discover after a few months.

They used to have higher end stuff, but shifted to different brands over the last few years. See: https://www.wsj.com/articles/bed-bath-beyond-ceo-private-lab... (https://archive.is/xacpG)

Have you been to BBB lately? They tried to pivot to store brands, people didn’t like that, then they tried to pivot back to name brands but couldn’t afford the inventory. That’s why they are bankrupt.

I agree about Amazon (I never buy anything there anymore) but BBB was pretty shit too, in terms of products. Lots of plastic garbage made in the third world, maybe a few name brand untensils and small appliances.

Last things I bought there were new pillows, they turned into bags of cement within a few months.

Girlfriend and I bought new, $30 "jersey cotton" sheets from Target. They are already piling and we only had them 2 months.

Everything is made to be trash nowadays.

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.

Just be sure to scan the in store barcode and make sure it’s not cheaper on target.com; it often is and they you have to ask for a price adjustment after purchase.

If you want kitchen supplies, brick and mortar, and quality, Sur La Table and Williams Sonoma are both better then BB&B.

God help me if I ever took my GF to Sur La Table, I'd need a line of credit handy.

You're right on their cookware and bed sheets. But the rest of the store is basically Amazon trash in a retail store :(

If you want high quality home goods from amazon then you have to search for high quality materials: silk, linen, wool.

Same for knives: damascus steel, high carbon steel, etc.

If you just search for knives or sheets, or even cotton/bamboo sheets, the results are all a commoditized race to the bottom on price.

The only thing BBB was good at is spending that 20% coupon they send on some expensive item (iRobot Roomba for example or a Dyson). Everything else is overpriced and low quality, or costs the same as on amazon.

For bedding, etc, LL Bean or IKEA is the way to go. For kitchen stuff, William Sonoma or Crate & Barrel.

It costs more but you get more. In the 1990s, you could count on department stores for this stuff, but now you need to go up market.

BBB was great until about 5-6 years ago. The previous management made some execution errors and ended up messing up the product mix.