Saturday, December 19, 2020

An oral history of Bed Bath & Beyond's 20% off coupon

NYT

We had an outside agency, Berenter Greenhouse & Webster. Bill Berenter, he saw the postcard for what it could be, I believe. We went to them and said that we were playing with this little postcard, and they are getting buried in the mail. The agency did all these markups, and they came up with this big, blue thing.

It was big enough that when you put it into a pile of business letters and bills, you can see it behind all the other letters. They came in with a stack of mail, and had it tucked right behind, and sure enough, he was right.

We tried all the hot colors, red, yellow. They were just too harsh. We went with Pantone 2735c.

GROSSFELD I came to know it as blurple.

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Ten percent, we felt like it was nothing. Thirty percent we couldn’t afford. 

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GROSSFELD For a long time, there were batches of Big Blues sold on eBay. I want to say that expired ones sold in batches of five for $5 to $7 and the nonexpired ones were more.

I remember laughing and being like, are you kidding me? But at that time, people didn’t know when the next one was coming and didn’t feel like they were getting them all the time.

LITTLE In Queens, at the Rego Park store, there was, let’s call them entrepreneurs. They would take them from apartment buildings, where they had “found” them. And they’d be outside the store selling them for $5 apiece.