• digger@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I worked there in college. I had to straighten these all the time because people tried to reach up and take one… Instead of the nicely folded ones that were within arm’s reach.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    At first glance I thought these were towels on some rooftop and now I have the hardest time unseeing that

  • z500@startrek.website
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    1 year ago

    Well there goes my dream of quitting my job and living in a towel fort at Bed Bath and Beyond

  • Marxism-Fennekinism@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Wait till you hear about the plastic and play-dough “food” they use in advertisements and the glamour shots on a restaurant menu or order board.

    • Dublin112@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Watching a video that showed how they do cheese for pizza makes seeing those commercials absolutely hilarious to me knowing its basically nothing but glue.

    • TheRealKuni@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      If you ever go Beyond, and find the Fell Beasts, just remember the Words of Power to banish them:

      “Bed, Bath, and BEGONE!”

    • Num10ck@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      but whats the point of pretending to be a dangerously overstocked warehouse? they would have done better with just a gigantic poster of ferris bueller in a towel.

      • Alec@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        It demonstrates they have stacks and stacks of towels and that they are to be fully trusted as your local towel authority.

        • jballs@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Honestly, it did kind of psychologically have that effect. I remember thinking “Damn, these people have a shit load of towels. People must be buying a lot more towels than I do. Maybe I should be replacing my towels more often.”

      • Elderos@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        I have seen a doc about Home Depot (not the pictured store) some time ago. Apparently the overstocked facade was a big deal because those big stores want you to think they have everything that can possibly exist in their inventory so you only always go there and make no further stops.

        Of course, it’s smoke and mirror and a lot of stores adopted the big warehouse style for the same reasons. Some stores have legit empty boxes filled with crap all over. If you ever went into one of those store looking for something very specific tho, it is pretty apparent that they only overstock a few profitable items and the rest is no better, or worse than smaller locally-owned shops inventory-wise. Only exception around here would be Costco, which is a.legit warehouse.

        • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I would say that they’re worse than local hardware stores. Not only is it really difficult to get help in a Home Depot, but they rarely have any even remotely specialized. Lets say you need a specialized gasket to fix your bidet. Home Depot probably doesn’t have it, and if they do, they’ll make you search for it for an hour, and then make you buy 12 of them for $10. The local hardware store will have a little white haired dude who knows exactly what you need, exactly where it is, will explain how to prevent it from going bad again, and will sell you one gasket for 37 cents.

            • hamburglar26@wilbo.tech
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              1 year ago

              I think they are all locally owned though. Every ACE in my area is like this, smaller but with helpful knowledgeable staff who either take care of you or tell you where to go if they don’t have it.

            • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              It really depends on who is working when you go, so of the younger guys just known where stuff is, not every arcane solution ever used in home repair.

      • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        My guess is that you never had the (dis)pleasure of shopping at Bed Bath & Beyond or Linens & Things.

        Both stores featured stuff like this. A relatively small footprint for a “superstore”, that did a lot by drawing your attention upwards to generate a sense of space. Every “department” had stuff like this, showing inventory 10-20 feet off the floor on very high shelves. Meanwhile the floorplan was rather claustrophobic and not somewhere you want to be on a busy shopping day. But if you needed to outfit a kitchen, bathroom, and a bedroom all on one trip, it was the the place to go.

        Anyway, it’s no surprise that there was stuff like this going on purely for show. Makes sense, actually. You wouldn’t want staff restocking on ladders half the time.

    • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      It’s probably just marketing, the super high stack is visible from far away and advertisers many available colors. If one catches your eye, you then have to walk through a bunch of other aisles to actually get to the towels. It’s like putting the milk at the back of the grocery store.

    • hinterlufer@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I could see this be a way to show how the towels look like when neatly stacked. And to show what belongs into that shelf if it were empty.

  • UltraMagnus0001@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I worked at K-Mart in the towels section when Martha Stewart started her line. Trust me when I say there were hundreds, there were. I was in a very busy store at Green Acres mall in NY Queens and people loved to mess up my wonderfully folded towels.

  • BlinkerFluid@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    why yes I’d like to buy all of your towels

    …sir, um.

    now I’d like to sue you for fraud!

      • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Takes more resources to produce all those extra towels that won’t be sold than the foam stand with one cleverly manipulated towel.

        • FluorideMind@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The assumption is the towels would be there to be sold. That seems less wasteful then having fake towels to advertise real ones.

          • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, this is the top shelf ABOVE the ones they’re selling. Turns out that an appearance of overabundance of an item makes people more likely to buy stuff and this is making that appearance in a less wasteful way than actually making dozens if not hundreds more towels than they could ever sell.