Bed Bath & Beyond customers are starting not to care about the best reason to shop there
- Bed Bath & Beyond uses its famous $5 and 20% off coupons to get customers in the store.
- That strategy has apparently become less effective recently as customers are starting to care less about the coupons, according to a survey by Morgan Stanley.
- Walmart and Amazon are poised to pick up Bed Bath & Beyond's slack.
Customers seem to no longer care about one of the biggest perks of shopping at Bed Bath & Beyond stores.
The retailer is famous for its coupons that offer 20% percent off one item and $5 off any purchase of $15, which customers get by mail.
But now, it seems, those coupons are becoming less of a draw for shoppers. They're instead going for other options like Walmart and Amazon, which carry 15.8% and 14.3%, respectively, of the home furnishing market, according to Morgan Stanley.
Bed Bath & Beyond, meanwhile, owns 9.8% market share.
According to a survey conducted by Morgan Stanley, 47% of Amazon customers and 44% of Walmart customers shopped these websites for home goods because they were the cheapest in the shoppers' minds.
Only 26% said they shopped Bed Bath & Beyond because they thought it had the lowest prices.
According to the survey, only 50% of Bed Bath & Beyond customers said they shop there because of the coupons. A year ago, 57% said so. In May 2016, that figure was 63%, according to Morgan Stanley.
"Consumers seem to be growing indifferent to this offer," Morgan Stanley analysts wrote.
Bed Bath & Beyond has been moving away from the coupons for a while now. In 2016, CEO Steven Temares indicated that it would change its approach to couponing and rewards.
"The coupons critically - it's always been an important part of our value proposition, but at the same time we're committed as an organization to smarter, more intelligent marketing, personalized, targeted, being more meaningful and being more efficient," he said in a September 2016 call with analysts. "We need to be working and we are working on becoming a lot more intelligent about our marketing and making it much more personalized."
It launched its $30-a-year Beyond+ program at the same time, which offered perks like 20% off all purchases and free shipping.