Bed Bath & Beyond said in a filing on Monday it will be closing 150 more stores as the struggling retailer cuts costs and works to turn around its beleaguered business.
The retail chain has been reducing its brick-and-mortar footprint significantly over the past year.
The latest round of closures builds on the previous shutdowns of approximately 200 Bed Bath & Beyond stores and approximately 50 standalone Harmon stores in the United States, according to a regulatory filing.
In total, it will have shut down 400 stores in the past year, almost half of the 955 stores it had open in May 2022.
In a Tuesday press release, Bed Bath & Beyond says it anticipates to maintain 360 namesake stores in addition to 120 BuyBuy Baby stores.
The home goods chain forecasts first-quarter sales to be down by 30 percent to 40 percent, with “sequential, quarterly improvement after that,” the filing said.
Bed Bath & Beyond provided a list of affected store locations as of Tuesday.
‘Band-Aid’
Bed Bath & Beyond also said this week that it had raised about $1 billion through preferred stock offerings and warrants to purchase the company’s common stock. The funds will be used to pay off its debt, it said.
Bed Bath will receive a waiver on its recent bank default should the proposed offering succeed, the company said.
Analysts have said the new cash might afford Bed Bath & Beyond only a few quarters to revive its business, and a weakening economy would diminish any chance of a successful turnaround.
The offering “may be a Band-Aid but I’m not certain of all the makeup of their balance sheet,” said Robert Gilliland, managing director at Concenture Wealth Management. “The problem is that they’re probably not going to be a big turnaround story.”
Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, also voiced doubts about the retailer’s ability to make a successful comeback.
“Many investors are likely to be deterred by the incredibly weak balance sheet, the mountain of debt, and a business that remains fundamentally broken. They will see this as throwing good money after bad,” Saunders said.
In its securities filing on Monday, Bed Bath & Beyond warned that it might have to file for bankruptcy protection even if the offering is completed, as “trading in our securities is highly speculative.”
It also warned: “We may not be successful in implementing our transformative plan, including building back our inventory and increasing customer sales, and we have historically underperformed in implementing management plans, which may force us to seek additional strategic alternatives in the future.”
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.