What if you bought Bed Bath & Beyond in 2003?
US Consumer · Retail. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0× · S&P 500 same money: $7,727
Every dollar is gone. Bed Bath & Beyond went bankrupt in 2023, so $1,000 invested in any of these years is worth exactly nothing today.
The story
Bed Bath & Beyond was a steady winner for decades: big stores packed with home goods and the famous blue 20-percent-off coupon. The shares rose through the 2000s, shrugged off the financial crisis and peaked in the mid-2010s. But sales stopped growing as Amazon, Walmart and Target took customers, and the stores became cluttered and dated while the company spent heavily on buybacks.
In 2019 new CEO Mark Tritton, from Target, replaced many national brands with private labels, which shoppers did not want, and inventory problems followed. In 2022 the stock became a meme favourite when Ryan Cohen, of GameStop fame, took a stake and urged change; it spiked dramatically before he sold out in August. Shortly after, the company's finance chief died, and Bed Bath & Beyond struggled to pay suppliers. It filed for bankruptcy in April 2023 and closed its stores. Overstock bought the brand name and rebranded itself, but the old shares became worthless.
The lesson: Buybacks at high prices can quietly drain a retailer's resilience; cash spent on shares is cash unavailable when the business needs reinvention.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2003 | $17.00 | $0 | $7,727 | — |
| 2005 | $20.00 | $0 | $5,763 | — |
| 2007 | $40.00 | $0 | $4,789 | — |
| 2008 | $28.00 | $0 | $4,626 | — |
| 2010 | $39.00 | $0 | $6,071 | — |
| 2012 | $58.00 | $0 | $5,312 | — |
| 2015 | $76.00 | $0 | $3,301 | — |
| 2018 | $22.00 | $0 | $2,519 | — |
| 2020 | $17.00 | $0 | $2,092 | — |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
There was no good entry point: every starting year ends at zero. The same $1,000 in the S&P 500 from 2003 would be $7,727 today.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Bed Bath & Beyond is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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