Edit Desk: Going above and Bed Bath and Beyond

“Hello, thank you for calling Bed Bath and Beyond in North Dartmouth! This is Brendan speaking. How may I direct your call?” 

“You’re looking for sheets? Sure! I’ll transfer you to our soft side associate. Hold for one moment, please!”

If you were to call my local Bed, Bath and Beyond any time from 2018 to early 2021, that’s likely the spiel you would have heard on the other line. 

I said those exact words, along with some other canned phrases like “don’t spend it all in one place” or “this coupon looks older than me,” and laid out our store hours and return policy more times than I can count.

Looking back now on my tenure at the store, in between exchanging those familiar customer service platitudes, I was picking up invaluable information about how to conduct myself in the world.

Working as a cashier for my first job at the age of 17 was certainly intimidating at first, but the experience I gained by talking to people of all ages and temperaments made me a far more confident and well-spoken individual.

Having people argue with me and leave dejected when the total price was higher than they expected was difficult, but it taught me important lessons in empathy and patience for people with less privileged backgrounds than my own.

Waking up at 5 a.m. on a Saturday to work the opening shift was excruciating, but it taught me how to push through and, on a small scale, how to do things I didn’t want to do.

The job also taught me many miscellaneous things, including what brand of air fryer is the best value for my money and how to count change while simultaneously picking up the coins without messing up either task.

Overall, my time at Bed Bath and Beyond is part of why I am the person I am today. This made it all the more disheartening to see that the store has become the next in a long line of retail stores to be closing its doors in the coming months.

Even pre-pandemic, my Bed Bath and Beyond was never the busiest store in the area — we would be lucky to have more than ten customers inside at once. 

That being said, the customers we did have — from newly married couples enthusiastically setting their wedding registry to sweet old ladies wandering the store asking my coworkers and me questions just to have someone to talk to — would always be a joy to work with.

After the pandemic hit and the store closed in-person shopping, a new type of culture began to emerge.

My coworkers and I would spend our shifts preparing curbside orders and packaging items to be shipped to customers who didn’t feel comfortable with contactless shopping.

I truly am nostalgic for these shifts. Listening to podcasts while wandering a dimly lit sales floor, looking for a particularly elusive item on a customer’s list, working in the back with the older Portuguese women I was happy to call my friends at the time and learning about my coworkers lives in between strips of packing tape precariously placed on cardboard boxes filled with Yankee Candles and Donut Shop K-cups.

In a few weeks, the doors of that store will be closed forever, and the memories of it will be locked away inside waiting to burst through any time I spot a kitchen appliance or piece of cookware that, once upon a time, I knew every little detail about.

Soon, those sweet old ladies will have to find another store to frequent when they feel like conversing with a captive audience. Those newly engaged couples will probably compile their wedding registries through the emotionless face of an online store.

The purpose of this piece is not to rouse you to get off of Amazon and march down to your local Bed Bath and Beyond to do your shopping. There is no call to action, no moral plea.

This is simply a love letter to a store that gave me so much more than I ever realized and a chapter of my life that ended far too soon.

“Here’s your receipt, you’re all set. Have a great rest of your day!”