After Bed Bath & Beyond announced it would be closing all its store in Manhattan except its one flagship store in Chelsea, shoppers aired their concern about the future of retail in the city.
The home goods chain announced 150 store closures nationwide Monday in a regulatory filing as part of a strategy to avoid filing for bankruptcy.
The list of upcoming closures includes all of Bed Bath & Beyond’s New York City locations except for its recently renovated flagship store at 620 Sixth Ave. in Chelsea. Stores on the Upper West Side and in Kips Bay are among the doomed locations on the list.
The moves come as big box retailers adapt to a climate in which more New Yorkers than ever are relying on online shopping, but a vocal contingent of in-person shoppers amNY interviewed outside the Chelsea location defended the merits of brick and mortar stores.
“It’s a sad reflection on the results of the lockdown, the pandemic and Amazon, sadly. I mean, my heart goes more out to the mom-and-pops, but it’s just sad to see something that just seemed like it’d be around forever to be such slim pickings and going this way,” said George Liter on his way out of the store.
The city has said that roughly 2.4 million packages are delivered in the city every day — around a 60% increase from before the pandemic. In 2019, there were more than 1.5 million packages delivered across the five boroughs every day, according to the New York Times.
In the years following the pandemic online home goods deliveries had the second highest proportion of new adopters after grocery deliveries, according to a study conducted by José Holguín-Veras and Cara Wang, professors at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Though the survey marked an increase in online deliveries, it also showed that consumers’ technology acceptance is much more complex during a pandemic than during normal conditions, and raises that some online shopping trends boosted by the pandemic may revert back over…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply