When I moved into my place in Southeast I found nine Bed Bath & Beyond coupons in a kitchen drawer. Blue and white, twenty percent off one item, every one of them expired, every one of them still perfectly usable, because everybody knew the expiration date was decorative.
That is the strongest brand asset the company ever built. A piece of junk mail people kept.
Last Wednesday they announced they are closing roughly a hundred and fifty stores, cutting staff, and restructuring the balance sheet, capping a genuinely strange summer of meme stock swings and a private label push that did not land.
The private label part is the piece I keep chewing on.
A coupon can build a habit. It can never build a preference.
Store brands work when the customer already trusts the store. Trader Joe's can put its name on anything because the name means somebody with taste picked this. Costco can sell you a hundred dollar suit under Kirkland because the membership is a promise about judgment. When Bed Bath & Beyond swapped out the national brands people came in for and replaced them with in house lines, the shelf lost the only thing that gave the trip a reason. They had trained people to arrive holding a discount and hunting one specific thing. Then they took the thing away and kept the discount.
Here is the part that gets lost. Discounting is not a pricing decision. It is a positioning decision you make one quarter at a time until it is permanent. Every coupon teaches the customer what full price means, and after twenty years of teaching, full price means the number you charge people who were not paying attention.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. Somebody always says the promotion is temporary. It is never temporary. The promotion becomes the brand within about four cycles, and after that, removing it reads to the customer as a price increase, which is why nobody ever removes it.
Ask what a customer can describe about you unprompted. Salt & Straw gets described as the strange flavors and the line out the door. Patagonia gets described as the company that told you not to buy the jacket. Bed Bath & Beyond got described as the coupon, for two decades, by everyone, including me.
Every coupon teaches the customer what full price means.
None of this is a eulogy. Most of the stores are still open, there is still a version of this that works, and a hundred and fifty closures is not the end of anything.
I threw the nine coupons out on Sunday. It took an embarrassing amount of deliberation, because some part of my brain still believed they were worth money. That is what twenty years of training buys you, and it is not nothing. It just was not a brand.