In April it was announced that all 360 Bed Bath & Beyond and all 120 Buy Buy Baby stores will be closing permanently. Buy Buy Baby’s sole Montgomery County location, at 1683 Rockville Pike in Rockville’s Congressional Plaza, will be closing its doors forever on Sunday, July 30th. The Rockville location was the first Buy Buy Baby store to ever open.
Currently, the store is offering major discounts on all products, but is out of furniture, toys, and other items. There is still a high volume of clothes offered with major discounts. An employee let us know that this is changing by the day, so we recommend anyone checking it out to those who are interested and won’t get into specifics on what is available aside from the clothes.
At its peak, Buy Buy Baby operated 137 stores across the country. Buy Buy Baby was founded in 1996 by brothers Richard and Jeffrey Feinstein, sons of Bed Bath & Beyond co-founder Leonard Feinstein. The first location opened in Rockville, Maryland, in May 1996. The chain consisted of eight stores when it was acquired by Bed Bath & Beyond in 2007 for $67 million. Its primary competitor was Babies “R” Us, prior to that chain’s closure in 2018. Bed Bath & Beyond operated the largest home furnishing retailer in the United States with over 970 stores across all 50 states, consistently at the forefront of major home and bath trends. Operating stores spanning the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, Bed Bath & Beyond offered everything from bed linens to cookware to electric appliances, home organization, baby care, and more.
Additional history of Bed Beth & Beyond: The Bed Bath & Beyond story originates with Lenny and Warren—two retailing icons whose last names need no mention in the world of specialty home furnishing. As friends and executives at the struggling American discount chain Arlans in the 1960s, Leonard Feinstein and Warren Eisenberg saw what others did not. There was an impending department store shakeout and a window of opportunity into specialty retailing that was, in their view, ripe for the taking. “It was the beginning of the designer approach to linens and housewares,” Lenny reflected. This prescient sense of a looming and seismic shift in retailing trends towards specialty stores led Lenny and Warren to resign their senior posts at Arlans and bet big on themselves. In 1971, with an investment of $50,000 each, a small chain of specialty linen and bath shops known as Bed ‘n Bath was born. The philosophy was simple: offer name brands at a discount. With one store in Springfield, New Jersey, near where Warren lived and another store in Cedarhurst, New York, closer to where Lenny resided, the two friends embarked on a more than 50-year long journey to develop the ultimate American titan in specialty retail.
Featured photo courtesy of Google Maps