Meme Stock’s Big Bet on Bed Bath & Beyond

Bed Bath & Beyond is a struggling home-goods retailer whose underlying business is so bad that stories about the company carry headlines like “Bed Bath & Beyond’s Big Dilemma: Can It Survive?” But for most of August, Bed Bath & Beyond was also one of the hottest stocks on Wall Street, rising almost 500 percent in a matter of weeks. And that strange divergence happened for just one reason: Meme-stock mania made a sudden and unexpected return.

You probably remember meme-stock mania from early 2021, when hordes, AMC, and, yes, Bed Bath & Beyond, sending them soaring to unimaginable heights. (At its peak, GameStop had gone from little more than $1 to $80 a share.) The frenzy faded and, in the big in 2022, interest in these companies waned. But then, as the overall market perked up in July, the interest in meme stocks improbably returned—and for no company was that more true than Bed Bath & Beyond, which is also known on Wall Street by its Nasdaq abbreviation, BBBY.