Pier 1 Imports was the home-furnishings chain that turned a bohemian taste for imported wicker, scented candles, and the bowl-shaped Papasan chair into a national habit — and on May 19, 2020 it asked a bankruptcy court for permission to close every one of its remaining stores. Founded in 1962 in San Mateo, California (the company moved its headquarters to Fort Worth, Texas, by the mid-1960s), Pier 1 grew into one of the largest specialty home retailers in the United States, peaking at roughly 1,100 stores and sales approaching $2 billion. For a generation of first apartments and dorm rooms, it was where you bought the rattan chair, the bin of cheap glassware, the candle that made a rented room smell like an idea of somewhere else.
The chain had already filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on February 17, 2020, hoping to slim down and find a buyer. Then the COVID-19 pandemic shut its stores in March, froze the sale process, and removed the one thing a court-supervised turnaround needed: time and foot traffic. With no buyer willing to take on a closed retail operation in the depths of the lockdown, Pier 1 converted its reorganization into a liquidation. The court approved the wind-down on May 30, 2020, and the last stores went dark by the end of October.
Pier 1’s problem long predated the virus. Its merchandising niche — affordable, slightly exotic, of-the-moment home decor — was the exact territory that Amazon, Wayfair, HomeGoods, At Home, and Target spent the 2010s carving up. Pier 1 answered a structural threat with tactical discounting, training its customers to wait for the next promotion and grinding its margins toward zero. The pandemic did not invent the chain’s troubles; it foreclosed the only exit Pier 1 had left.
What survived was a logo and a customer list. In June 2020, Retail Ecommerce Ventures — a holding company that buys distressed retail brands and reopens them as websites — acquired Pier 1’s intellectual property for about $31 million. Pier1.com sells home goods to this day, but the stores, the smell of the candle aisle, and the roughly 1,000-store fleet that defined the brand are gone. The fate word is Liquidated because there was no reorganization to survive: the assets were sold and every store was closed.
Bed Bath & Beyond was the home-goods superstore that taught a generation to never shop without the blue 20%-off coupon — and on April 23, 2023, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and began liquidating every store. Founded in New Jersey in 1971 by Warren Eisenberg and Leonard Feinstein, the chain grew into a roughly 1,550-store giant by 2017, its identity built on overflowing aisles of towels, gadgets, and kitchenware, and on the relentless flood of those instantly recognizable coupons that customers hoarded, stockpiled, and used long after they expired. For decades it was the default destination for a wedding registry, a college dorm haul, or a new kitchen.
The decisive cause of death was not a flood or a fad but a strategy. In 2019, under pressure from activist investors, the board hired Target merchandising veteran Mark Tritton as CEO. His turnaround pivoted the company toward higher-margin private-label “Owned Brands” and away from the national brands customers came for, while cutting back the coupons that drove foot traffic. Shoppers, confronted with unfamiliar in-house labels where the brands they trusted used to be, simply left. Same-store sales at the namesake chain crashed 27% in a single quarter, and Tritton was ousted in June 2022.
What followed was one of the strangest end-stages in retail history. As the business deteriorated, Bed Bath & Beyond became a meme stock — its shares pumped on social media, briefly inflated when investor Ryan Cohen took a stake in 2022, then collapsing 40% when he sold. The episode was inseparable from tragedy: the company’s chief financial officer, Gustavo Arnal, named in a “pump and dump” lawsuit alongside Cohen, died by suicide in September 2022. CEO Sue Gove reversed Tritton’s pivot back toward national brands, but there was no money and no time left.
The April 2023 bankruptcy quickly became a liquidation: roughly 360 namesake stores and about 120 buybuy Baby locations were wound down. Overstock.com bought the Bed Bath & Beyond name and intellectual property for about $21.5 million in June 2023 and rebranded its own website, so the brand now survives online-only with no plan to reopen stores. The fate word is Liquidated because the company did not reorganize and re-emerge; its stores all closed and its assets were sold off.
Stein Mart was the off-price apparel-and-home chain that sold discounted brand-name fashion to an older, value-minded Southern shopper for more than a century — and that, in August 2020, was liquidated by the COVID-19 pandemic just months after a buyout that would have taken it private collapsed for the same reason. The company traced its roots to 1908, when Sam Stein, a Russian immigrant who had reached the Mississippi Delta by steamboat, opened a store in Greenville, Mississippi. His descendants turned it into an off-price retailer — buying overstocks and end-of-season brand-name goods to sell below department-store prices — opened the first true Stein Mart department store in 1964, moved headquarters to Jacksonville, Florida in the 1980s, and grew it to roughly 280 stores across Florida and the South. Its customer skewed older and loyal, the kind who came for a designer label at a markdown and a familiar layout.
The chain was already under pressure from the forces flattening mid-tier apparel everywhere — e-commerce siphoning off the brand-name bargain hunt, and off-price giants T.J. Maxx and Ross out-buying and out-scaling it. In January 2020 it found an exit: the private-equity firm Kingswood Capital Management agreed to take Stein Mart private at 90 cents a share, a 38% premium, with chairman Jay Stein — the founder’s grandson — rolling equity to keep a one-third stake. For a struggling regional chain, it was a soft landing.
Then the pandemic arrived. Stein Mart was forced to close all its stores in the spring, and on April 16, 2020 the merger agreement was terminated: the company could no longer meet the deal’s minimum-liquidity condition. Stores reopened in June with briefly hopeful sales, but a July resurgence of COVID-19 across the Sun Belt — Florida, Texas, Arizona, California, where most of its stores sat — crushed the recovery. On August 12, 2020 Stein Mart filed for Chapter 11, planning to close a significant portion, if not all, of its 281 stores. It closed all of them; the going-out-of-business sales ended on October 26, 2020. The name was bought at auction for about $6 million by Retail Ecommerce Ventures and relaunched as an online-only brand in 2021 — a website where a 112-year-old chain of stores used to be.
Forever 21 was the cavernous, cheap, ever-changing fast-fashion chain that defined the American mall in the 2000s, and in 2025 it liquidated all of its US stores — for the second time in six years. Do Won Chang and Jin Sook Chang, immigrants from South Korea, opened a 900-square-foot store called Fashion 21 in Highland Park, Los Angeles on April 16, 1984, with about $11,000 in savings; the first year did $700,000. They renamed it Forever 21, perfected a model of trend-led clothing priced for impulse and replaced almost weekly, and grew it into a chain that at its mid-2010s peak ran more than 800 stores in 57 countries, employed over 43,000 people, and sold more than $4 billion a year. The big neon-yellow bags were ubiquitous; so were the stores, some of them two and three stories of fluorescent-lit churn.
The size was the problem. Forever 21 expanded into enormous mall footprints — leases signed for decades, square footage in the tens of thousands — at almost exactly the moment American mall traffic began its long decline and apparel spending migrated online. The company was a family-run private business with a thin e-commerce operation and a single supply chain straining to serve dozens of countries. When growth reversed, the rent on all that space did not. Forever 21 filed for Chapter 11 on September 29, 2019, closing operations in 40 countries.
A consortium rescued it: brand-management firm Authentic Brands Group, with mall landlords Simon Property Group and Brookfield, bought the operating assets for $81 million in early 2020. The logic was the landlords’ — keep a big tenant paying rent — and the flaw was one Authentic’s chief executive Jamie Salter would later name, calling the purchase “probably the biggest mistake I’ve made.” By the 2020s the fast-fashion price floor Forever 21 had once defined was being driven through by something faster and cheaper still: the Chinese ultra-discounters Shein and Temu, shipping straight to the customer and, by Forever 21’s own court filing, exploiting the de minimis tariff exemption to undercut it on its own product.
The second filing came on March 17, 2025. By then the US operation had about 354 stores and more than 9,200 employees, and had lost over $400 million in three years, including roughly $150 million in fiscal 2024 alone. Liquidation sales ran the inventory down and all US stores closed by the end of April 2025. The brand itself did not die — Authentic Brands keeps the trademark, the international franchise stores continue, and a digital-only US relaunch was announced for later in 2025 — but Forever 21 as an American store chain is gone.