That life is more satisfying when you can touch something before you buy it, when vendors near you sell things you might need at the last minute, when people in your community can gather in places to do the mundane errands and chores of living. The accumulating absences have left many malls and commercial corridors, especially those in more rural or less wealthy areas, to languish half-vacant, and this has begun to eat away at one of the core structures of modern American life. In broad terms, Bed Bath & Beyond’s fall mirrors those of many other once-powerful retailers-Toys “R” Us, Sears, Gap, Kmart, and The Limited among them-that have been forced to close stores or cease operating entirely. It was a business responsive to the actual rhythms of daily existence-the cooking, the laundry, the showering-and a convenient place to have nearby. If you needed a garlic press or a summer-weight duvet, Bed Bath & Beyond had enough versions of either to make you feel like you really had options, but not so many that they all began to feel like meaningless junk, as so often happens online. You knew when Bed Bath & Beyond was the right place to go, and you knew what you could expect to find there: extra-long twin sheets for your first college dorm, a housewarming gift that might actually be useful, a citrus juicer and some serving bowls before hosting the year’s first cookout. As a place to shop, it had a lot working in its favor. I’ll cop to a bit of personal nostalgia for Bed Bath & Beyond, even though it’s not the kind of business that is especially easy to romanticize-retailers of its era and size are among the corporatized chains that helped put many mom-and-pop stores out of business a generation ago. Read: Of course instant groceries don’t work It plans to close its remaining stores nationwide and stop accepting its signature big blue coupons this week. On Sunday, after years of financialized chicanery and strategic blunders, the company announced that it had filed for bankruptcy. Twelve years later, my tenure in New York has outlasted not just that Bed Bath & Beyond location, which closed at the end of 2020, but also the business as a whole. After I paid, I felt so flush with competency that I walked all the way home in the rain. Inside, I assembled such a voluminous pile of textiles that I could not carry my purchases to my apartment and arranged for a delivery later that night. Soon I was looking up at a staggeringly enormous Bed Bath & Beyond, complete with a cart escalator between floors. I looked up the East Side bus routes, found my M2 stop, and watched carefully out the window until the street signs indicated that we were nearing the Queensboro Bridge. On that first day, I began the process of figuring all of that out by getting myself to a store that sold affordable bed linens. I had no idea how to navigate anything about New York, and I was looking everywhere for signals that this new life would be viable for me. This shopping trip was the kind of minor domestic milestone that abounds in young adulthood. I had spent most of the previous year saving every cent possible so that I could rent and furnish a bedroom in an unfashionable, relatively cheap part of Manhattan, but before I could unpack my clothes or sleep in the new bed I had scheduled for delivery the next day, I needed to buy everything else: sheets, blankets, pillows, towels, hangers, a hamper. It was a rainy spring Monday in 2011, and like generations of optimistic 20-somethings before me, I had just washed up on New York City’s shores with two bulging suitcases and the keys to a tiny, dingy apartment. On the first day of the rest of my life, I went to Bed Bath & Beyond.
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