As the company announces it will begin winding down operations, it can be easy to forget that the company was once counted among the Fortune 500. A string of poor decisions and trouble adapting proved to be the undoing of the company, found in 1971.Primarily, the downfall of Bed Bath and Beyond can be traced to its ill-advised stock buyback policy.
The policy of stock buybacks isn't uncommon; this year, companies are projected to spend over $1 trillion buying their own stocks for the first time, up from $882 billion in 2021 and $936 billion in 2022. “We missed the boat on the internet,” co-founder Warren Eisenberg admitted to the Wall Street Journal.