You might have noticed out of the corner of your eye, but Bed Bath and Beyond is a sinking ship. They've already closed dozens of locations and have just announced
that they're closing dozens more. They've been losing money steadily for more than a year, and the company just finally throwing in the towel and declaring bankruptcy is an any-day-now thing at this point. The company has been brutally honest about this the entire time, and the company's CFO
jumped from his high-rise apartment building last September. The company has replaced officers as they've resigned too, but there is explicitly just no plans for a revival or revitalization - not even an attempt at one. It's a controlled flight into terrain.
But despite the tragedy involved, there's an inappropriately funny side to the whole thing, which is that there's a certain like sub-group of BedBath shareholders who are weirdly and
firmly convinced that the company actually has a secret turnaround planned that (I'm not joking here) it has been dropping hidden clues about in its bleak P&L reports and shareholder meetings - think like QAnon counting the number of times President Trump taps the handrail with his fingers while boarding Marine One, that same kind of thing - and believe that all of the indisputably bad financial news (and, you know, dozens upon dozens of store closures) is a fake ploy to manipulate the stock price, and they are so convinced of the reality of this that they're refusing to sell away their stock and are even trying to be bullish about it as it death-marches. They're trying to make it a new Gamestop-type meme stock.
www.lemonde.fr
