Bed Bath and Beyond: A Curatorial Disaster

Bed Bath and motherfucking Beyond.

The Bed Bath and Beyond in Chelsea is a black hole, an anxiety-inducing eventuality of any standard set of life-needs, a clusterfuck.  It's an insufferable abomination of late capitalism, at once toxic and indispensable.  It seems impossible to follow a normal life trajectory in New York City without intersecting the Bed Bath and Beyond at some time or another, be it by virtue of product selection, location, or witchcraft; and yet, the store threatens acute psychological trauma (if not physical) exacted on all who set foot under its roof.  I can't explain the former, but I've discovered why the store is so pathogenic to human vitality: it's an utter curatorial disaster.

The closest you'll want to get

Stepping through the unholy threshold of what was surely once a beautiful standout of prewar architecture, now adorned in BBB's trademark blah green, you're quickly siphoned through the building's lobby and towards the left-hand orifice of the Bed Bath and Beyond.  This is the store's entrance; the exit is to your right.  In front of you will be beckoning a TJ Maxx and a Marshall's, two bargain-bin retail bastions whose own malaise I shall detail another day.  If you're able to keep your cool in the face of the disorienting sensory assault mounted upon entering Bed Bath and Beyond -- the suspiciously boisterous cafe, the bullshit sale items stacked in the front, the bustling confusion of impatient patrons and staff in the customer service area, the battlements of humidifiers blasting probably-moldy steam in your face, the stressed-out NYU parents with overflowing carts -- you will realize that the "horseshoe" or "C" layout (entrance on one end, exit at the other) is an obvious plot to churn you through as much of the store as possible before you can escape.  Prepare to be bounced like a pinball through overstuffed shelves and colorful columns towering high with shit you might conceive of needing, on average, perhaps once in the next half-century of life, until you finally claw your way, gasping for air, to the checkout lines -- to look down and find your basket FULL of STUFF and your bill exceeding your anticipated budget by several orders of magnitude.  Yes, this is by design.

Once you come to grips with this realization -- assuming you've negotiated the said entryway sensory assault without suffering a dissociative psychological breakdown and run screaming -- you take a gulp of the oxygen-deficient air and try to focus.  Something is still off about the store.  You can't quite put your finger on it, at least not yet: the staff are genuinely friendly, there look to be some decent products on the shelves, the branding strategies seem relevant, etc.  So you brush aside your concerns and proceed with your errands.  Looking down at your list -- a few miscellaneous life-items scrawled on a post-it note -- the first item is "sponges."  Let's see.  Waltzing deftly through the traffic jam of shopping carts adjourned awkwardly along aisles as their operators inspect clothes hanger options, you slide into the kitchen section.  This is where sponges would be, right?  Hm -- you see plenty of flatware, plates, and -- ooh wait! -- over here are some scrubbing brushes, the sponges can't be far!  But no, simple disposable sponges are nowhere to be found in this alleged kitchen area.

At this point you're beginning to realize the store makes you feel like a shark: stop moving and you will literally die.  So instead of dilly-dallying wondering where the sponges might be you decide to move -- physically -- onto the next item on the list.  "Face wash."  Lately, you've become a little self-conscious that you don't use a dedicated face wash product.  You've opted for the budget route of smearing body wash onto your face in the shower and calling it a day; after having a thoroughly humbling and disorienting experience trying to shop for an upgrade at Muji, a well-curated store for beautiful people, you've decided to realign your aims and ease your way into the face wash game with an entry-level product.  Bed Bath and Beyond seemed like the place to go.  So you snake your way out of the kitchen section and roll on over to the hygiene section, relishing the fleeting comfort of actually knowing where something can be found in this place.

Give me the good old days

You're into the hygiene section and you can't help noticing how offensively temporary the aisle signs look (those signs that tell you what products are on which aisle).  A very utilitarian sans-serif black text on white background, with insufficient line spacing to boot.  Funny they couldn't spruce up the most coherent section of the store with, really, anything else.  Nevermind -- you've found the face wash and, hallelujah, there are five hundred options.  It's insane.  Suddenly longing for the haughtiness of Muji's lean face product selection, you scan the shelf, wondering what glitch of capitalism precipitated such a preponderance of seemingly identical products.  No, literally, there must be a glitch in the system -- some forgotten subsidy for face wash, some fucking tax break buried somewhere in the annals of legislature, a wad of overlooked pork lodged on the underside of some mongrel bill, greased through the congressional cracks with high-end hookers on some lobby's dime -- fuck it.  You grab a green one, because green seems like a good color for face wash, and move onto the next item on the list.

"Wipeys."  No shame in staying fresh.  These would be found near the toilet paper, no doubt.  If only you knew where the toilet paper was.  Figuring it can't be far from the hygiene section, you wander around the area (keen not to stop moving, of course).  The hygiene section is very near the exit of the store; again, clearly contrived: the store's architects knew that section would tend to yield the most impulse, "oh right I forgot I need this too" purchases, so they stuck it at the end of the horseshoe-funnel, launching all manners of ephemeral hygienic merchandise at the customers and hoping anything sticks.  So you catch a tantalizing glimpse of the checkout area as you fumble around for the toilet paper, and you pray for a swift and successful end to your bout of errands.  But your work is not yet done.  Rounding a corner, you stop dead in your tracks to see -- a real hallelujah this time -- a wall stacked a thousand miles high with toilet paper!  Excellent.  Taking stock of what you assume must be the toilet paper area, you come to realize there actually aren't any other toilet paper options: that glorious wall of bathroom tissue is composed entirely of a singular Charmin offering, and there is no sign of even a second Charmin product line, much less another brand, for sale in the vicinity.  By this point, you've lowered your expectations of finding wipeys in this section to nil, and you write the whole TP wall off as some half-sauce Warholian prank likely perpetrated by a bored Tisch undergrad.  Hoping you'll be able to muster appreciation for it later, you move on.

But you only get so far.  You're in the thick of the exit vortex, and the not-so-subliminal "BUY ME" messages are getting cranked up pretty hard.  Fortuitously, in this swirling retail miasma you spot an item that is actually on your list -- hand soap.  You like the Method foam hand soaps; even though they don't seem to be stocking the "sea mineral" style you like, you figure "hibiscus flower" and "lemon mint" can probably do the trick.  Beautiful, you tell yourself, an unexpected victory.  Yet your time in this pre-exit purgatory has been too good to be true.  Did you really think you'd make it through without a superfluous purchase?  American Crew Fiber.  All of the sudden, there it is, staring at you.  You have their pomade back at home but lately it's been feeling a little overbearing on your delicate coif.  Hasn't it?  It's $17 for a jar of it, but fuck, the stuff lasts like three years anyway.  You throw it in your basket almost involuntarily and, with a tear in your eye, rip yourself away from exitland and head back into the heart of the store.

On your way back past the main hygiene area -- remember, the part with the poor signage -- you spot a familiar shape in your peripheral.  Wipeys??  Your subconscious jerks your gaze in its direction.  Alas, no -- as your conscious catches up with its overeager counterpart, you process the hopeful shape as merely a certain feminine hygiene product.  But wait -- it's worth a shot, right?  That would maybe make sense, stocking the wipeys near the feminine products?  You make your way over, and, motherfucker, there they are: the wipeys.  Right next to the feminine products.  A layout that might almost make sense to a rational human.  There may be hope yet for this atrocity of retail.  What's next?

Oh, right -- the sponges.  Since the fateful attempt to find them early on, you feel like you've adjusted to the environment, and you're a little more in tune with the arrhythmic nonsense of the store.  It's worth another go.  With your wits about you, you head back to the kitchen section, and resume snooping around.  But still -- goddammit -- no luck.  It's time to get some help.

You approach the first employee you see -- a young woman milling around in the area.  "Excuse me," you say, "do you know where the sponges are?"

A brief shade of puzzlement crosses her face.  "Sponges?  Hm..."  She leads you over to where the scrubbing brushes are (a wall of effectively infinite cleaning utensils, somehow none of which are sponges).  "We have these scrubbing brushes," she offers.  You politely decline the scrubbing brushes and assert that you're in the market for simple, good-old-fashioned sponges.  She appears to have another thought and leads you out of the kitchen section and on towards a different part of the store, glancing over her shoulder periodically to make sure you haven't lost each other navigating the maelstrom of shoppers, employees, and products, products, products.

"Just regular sponges?" She inquires along the way.

"Yeah exactly, just, you know, like regular green and yellow sponges."

"Okay -- I think we have blue and yellow ones," she reassures.

"Well, I can really only do the green and yellow ones."  You're not sure if she realizes it's a joke.

She eventually leads you to the cleaning products section of the store -- and you bang your mental head against a mental wall.  Of course, you idiot, you say to yourself, this is where sponges would be.  You've been in the cleaning products section in the past -- must be that you've repressed all your memories of the store.  Alright, Bed Bath and Beyond, you did something right.  Your guide gestures towards the back of the section.  "We should have sponges back there," she says; you smile, nod, and thank her for her help, making clear your self-sufficiency from this point forward in the sponge quest.  Should be a walk in the park from here.

Oh my.

As you move towards the back of the section, where you will most surely find a teeming cornucopia of sponges for sale, you take note of a more generous selection of Method hand soaps stocked here than up by the exit -- including the "sea mineral" flavor -- but by this point you do not want to spend a literal second more than you have to in the place.  And who knows, that "hibiscus flower" might really be some slam-bang stuff.  Rounding the end of a shelving unit, you peer along the back wall -- hm, no sponges yet.  You peruse the narrow back ends of the shelves, praying the plentiful bounty of sponges Bed Bath and Beyond undoubtedly stocks has not been relegated to the "odds-n-ends" status of shelf-end products.  Your hopes dip as you spot a spongelike product on one such shelf end.  No, there have to be more.  Am I doing something wrong?  Now you're starting to wonder if you're actually losing it; maybe all the "problems" with this store you've encountered today are really just symptoms of an impending mental collapse.  You glance down at your extended fingers.  Your hand looks normal -- okay, you're not tripping.  What the fuck is going on?  There are two sponge options for sale in this heaven-forsaken wasteland of unprincipled and misguided domestic sanitation.  Neither of which, it should be noted, are green-and-yellow or blue-and-yellow.  In frustrated acquiescence, you grab the most viable option -- an O-Cel-O four-pack of nonrectangular sponges printed with some insipid suburbanite pattern betraying a laughable obliviousness to all conventions of modern consumer product design -- and high-tail it the fuck out of there.

By some miracle you make it to the checkout lanes without further incident and manage to breeze through with relative ease.  The bill, while higher than expected, clocks in mercifully shy of inducing tachycardia.  As you slide out of the back end of the horseshoe and into the building's lobby, your evaporating ire leaves a sort of tingling almost-forgiveness; Bed Bath and Beyond makes you want to rip your hair out, sure -- but for some reason, you keep coming back.  Maybe you've grown fond of the ridiculousness.  Maybe there's some of that subtle, essential everyday life-humor at play here.  Shuffling out of the revolving door and onto the sidewalk, you pause at the foot of one of the columns at the building's entrance to put your bag of hard-earned merchandise into your backpack, smiling to yourself as crowds hungrily funnel their way into the yawning behemoth of retail within.  Maybe everyone's a little masochistic.  You unzip your backpack and -- before you can stuff your shopping bag into it and be on with your life -- your heart abruptly sinks.  There inside your bag, staring back at you, is the very reason you ended up here in the first place, and which, curse the stars, you've woefully forgotten about until now: an empty Sodastream canister.  To be exchanged for a new one.  At the customer service desk.  Inside Bed Bath and Beyond.