We tried all the hot colors, red, yellow. We went with Pantone 2735c.

December 20, 2020 8:10 AM

They're big, they're blue, and they never expire. And you probably have one in your house right now. The oral history of the world's biggest coupon [NYT] - from Bed Bath and Beyond.
posted by Mchelly (32 comments total)

My niece worked at BBB for a short time. She reports the staff called it "Blood Bath and Beyond." One positive: she met her now-long term partner there.
posted by PhineasGage at 8:30 AM on December 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

Great story.
posted by theora55 at 8:33 AM on December 20, 2020

they never expire

Except for online purchases.
posted by zamboni at 8:53 AM on December 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Those coupons make it unthinkable in our household to go anywhere else.
posted by whuppy at 10:28 AM on December 20, 2020

I don't work at BBB and also call it Bloodbath & Beyond. Hmm.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:40 AM on December 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

Soon, Bed Bath & Beyond was sending out nearly a billion pieces of mail a year

In a dystopian future, cockroaches and BBB coupons will likely outnumber the surviving humans.
posted by mundo at 10:41 AM on December 20, 2020

So they're AOL CDs of the twenty-first century?
posted by DanSachs at 10:59 AM on December 20, 2020 [9 favorites]

> you probably have one in your house right now.

That's a nope.
posted by glonous keming at 11:49 AM on December 20, 2020 [5 favorites]

For the last ten years, apparently, I have referred to it “Bed Bath and Your Mom” thanks to this AskMe comment, but also had great appreciation for “Linens N Shit”
posted by sageleaf at 11:57 AM on December 20, 2020 [9 favorites]

Bed, Bath and Beyond Me.
posted by Ideefixe at 11:59 AM on December 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Sure would be nice if I could find an outlet that wasn't completely sold out of Kitchenaid stand mixers. Or, indeed, if I could buy a stand mixer anywhere at all.
posted by J.K. Seazer at 12:13 PM on December 20, 2020

Sure would be nice if I could find an outlet that wasn't completely sold out of Kitchenaid stand mixers.

It’s been a hell of a year for late-stage capitalism.
posted by heyitsgogi at 12:20 PM on December 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Indeed, I brought my KitchenAid from BBB, because the 20 percent off really starts to matter at that price range. I don't know if they still do it, but at the time you could pick out the exact one you wanted in the online store and have it sent to the store to be picked up and paid for, which I did because the coupons weren't valid online at the time.
posted by tavella at 12:26 PM on December 20, 2020

Paper coupons don’t track your personal browser history nor do they use annoying pop-up ads to distract from your reading. Clear advantages compared to internet ads. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if BBB coupons are responsible for a significant percentage of paper material at recycling centers.
posted by mundo at 1:04 PM on December 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Sure would be nice if I could find an outlet that wasn't completely sold out of Kitchenaid stand mixers. Or, indeed, if I could buy a stand mixer anywhere at all.

They had a Black Friday special on Kitchen Aid Stand Mixers- I think it was $250 off. We got one for our daughter for Christmas.
posted by COD at 1:43 PM on December 20, 2020

Is this something for which I would need to own a bed or a bath to know about?

In all seriousness, I have never seen one of these things.
posted by emelenjr at 3:04 PM on December 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

> Paper coupons don’t track your personal browser history nor do they use annoying pop-up ads to distract from your reading.

The coupons are barcoded with data that is correlated to the recipient and address the coupon was mailed to, and the barcode is scanned when you use it in the store.

Granted, if you're using ten year old coupons you ganked off a friend's junk mail pile, the tracking data isn't necessarily going to tell them everything they hoped to get out of it. But it's something all the same.
posted by ardgedee at 3:22 PM on December 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

>> you probably have one in your house right now.
> That's a nope.

How can you be so sure? They're like spiders. It's said that you are never more than six feet from a Bed Bath & Beyond coupon.
posted by Syllepsis at 3:53 PM on December 20, 2020 [8 favorites]

Blue Coupon Invites Area Consumer To Shop Beyond Bed, Bath
posted by straight at 3:53 PM on December 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Perhaps I should be embarrassed to admit this, but I pay $29 a year for their "membership" to get permanent 20% off my whole purchase (with some exceptions, but not a ton) online and in store. IIRC it gets me free shipping too. I find it always pays for itself especially as I am trying not to shop at Amazon.
posted by misskaz at 4:30 PM on December 20, 2020

The coupons are barcoded with data that is correlated to the recipient and address the coupon was mailed to, and the barcode is scanned when you use it in the store.

Interesting, nice to know thank you (I don’t shop at Bed Bath & Beyond.) This paper coupon still seems better than the personally targeted ads Google would show me and the personal info they use for ads such as my browsing history, my IP address location, or how old they think I am.
posted by mundo at 4:35 PM on December 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

It's said that you are never more than six feet from a Bed Bath & Beyond coupon.

Actually statistical error. Coupons Georg who receives 10,000 coupons per day is outlier and should not have counted
posted by Huffy Puffy at 4:40 PM on December 20, 2020 [11 favorites]

“Linens N Shit”

Sheets 'n' Shit
(alliterative glory!)
posted by notsnot at 5:39 PM on December 20, 2020

Sheets 'n' Shit

I'm more of a Wawa guy.
posted by zamboni at 6:12 PM on December 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

My niece worked at BBB for a short time. She reports the staff called it "Blood Bath and Beyond"

This might have something to do with that?
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 6:48 PM on December 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Hand out enough coupons and open enough stores, and eventually Wall Street has some questions. On quarterly conference calls, the company started getting asked about how much those discounts might be lowering profit margins.

And there is the problem with public companies: the moment a company goes public, their core customer ceases to be the people who go to the store, and becomes the investors, who only care about a line on a spreadsheet. "I realize you are making money. But, couldn't you be making more money by screwing over either the customers or the employees?"

I realize it's a business, and they have to make money. A lot of private companies can make money while meeting various intangibles (corporate citizen ship, a satisfied and well treated workforce, happy customers). Wall Street doesn't care: just make the spreadsheet show growth quarter after quarter, year after year.
posted by MrGuilt at 8:01 PM on December 20, 2020 [6 favorites]

"This paper coupon still seems better than the personally targeted ads Google would show me and the personal info they use..."

It's all part of the same ecosystem. All that offline and online data gets merged together for marketers to use. The data brokers love when you use those coupons, or scan your discount membership program card at the checkout... eventually it's mapped to your online behavior (albeit not 100% accurately) in order to create a richer profile of you as a consumer of media and products.
posted by Stu-Pendous at 8:09 PM on December 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

Et tu, paper coupons?

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. It feels like an arms race to slow down modern-day marketing. Hopefully DuckDuckGo, ad-blockers, an iPhone, and a non-Chrome internet browser makes them work harder for their money.
posted by mundo at 9:08 PM on December 20, 2020

I can no longer think about them without remembering a really weird comedian (whose name escapes me) telling a joke that he was an employee at Bed, Bath and Beyond (Pause) "I work in Beyond."
posted by pangolin party at 8:18 AM on December 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

We have a Bed Bath and Beyond in Fargo, but I don't think I've ever seen one of these coupons before (I also don't think I've ever shopped there either) -- they supposedly mail these to literally everyone? I guess our postmaster just sends 'em straight to the dump like the article says. It's weird to have never encountered some sort of significant cultural icon that apparently is buried deep enough into America's psyche to warrant being a topic on sitcoms or a NYT article.
posted by AzraelBrown at 8:38 AM on December 21, 2020

WE have always called it "Bed, Bath, and Beyonce" -
but I think we could adapt to "Bloodbath and Beyonce"....
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 10:14 AM on December 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

So I was just a Bed Bath and Bankruptcy like last week, with a coupon and an empty SodaStream canister, and the manager told me that they were phasing out the paper coupons. Any existing will still be honored, but they will be email only starting ... very soon.
FWIW.
posted by ApathyGirl at 12:23 PM on December 21, 2020