United States of America eSeries: Bed Bath & Be-YAWN 💤

Bed Bath & Be-YAWN 💤

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Minimalism is overrated. Let's get into it.

By Allison Morrow

🛁 BED BATH AND BORING

Walking into a Bed Bath & Beyond has, since time immemorial, meant winding through utter chaos. Need a shower curtain? First you'll have to pass through the Forest of Flatware, make a right at the Valley of As Seen on TV and keep going all the way past Blender Mountain.

By the time you find the shower curtains — and there are approximately 1,200 of them — you've loaded your cart with a Shake Weight, a tea kettle, three closet organizers and a portable Swiss Army microwave you didn't know had been missing from your life all this time.

As CNN's Dave Goldman puts it: BB&B is like the Las Vegas casino of retail — there are no windows, no clocks (apart from the ones you can buy, and those are all wildly off), and no easily identifiable exits. By the time you find your way out, you've blown all your money, feel slightly hungover and have no idea how much time has passed.

It's a magical place.

But now, BB&B is unsparking all that joy and embracing Marie-Kondo-esque minimalism like it's 2015.

At its flagship location in New York City, my colleague Nathaniel Meyersohn reports, the chain has eliminated 44% of the products it once housed. What's left is arranged by category (😱), price and brand. The company calls it "modernizing." I call it super boring and lame.

Here's the deal: Sales and foot traffic have been falling for years as customers defect to Target and Amazon. You know, places where it's easy to find the thing you're actually looking for. I get it. But I'll miss the dependably controlled chaos of BB&B's past — the hodgepodge of perilously stacked crap that made shopping for basics just a little less blah.

NUMBER OF THE DAY

$26 billion

Johnson & Johnson and three major American drug distributors reached a historic $26 billion settlement that, if approved, would release them from legal liability in the opioid epidemic. If states approve the deal, J&J and the three distributors — McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health — would pay the funds out to communities that have been devastated by the crisis, which has killed an estimated 500,000 Americans over two decades.

💰 DON'T GO, J.D.

JPMorgan Chase is giving its CEO a rather cushy bonus to get him put off retirement a bit longer.

How cushy are we talking? The bank is awarding Jamie Dimon with 1.5 million stock options that allow him to make what financial advisers refer to as apesh**loads of money if the bank's shares keep going up.

Those options start to vest in 2026, and he must hold the shares until 2031. By then, they could be (read: almost certainly will be, assuming we avoid an apocalypse between now and then) worth much, much more. At Tuesday's average share price, this "special award" from the bank would net Dimon more than $220 million.

See, this is why I am not a bank CEO (truly the only reason). Because if I had a net worth of nearly $2 billion (as Dimon does) and was 65 years old (as he is), there's no amount of money that could get me to keep working a minute longer. What lifestyle amenities is Dimon unable to attain with his current wealth? The answer, of course, is none. Because at Dimon's level, money is merely symbolic — this is JPMorgan's way of giving him a hug and saying "hey, we really really like you."

This feels like a good time to remind y'all that it was Dimon who in May said that Americans are making plenty of money and just "don't feel like going back to work." *COUGH* eat the rich *COUGH*

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

📺 Maria Taylor, one of the top NBA analysts on ESPN, is leaving the network just weeks after remarks from one of her colleagues — who said suggested Taylor was promoted because of her race — became public.

🍨 Several kosher grocery stores in the United States have decided to pull Ben & Jerry's from their shelves after the company said it would stop doing business with a licensee in Israel that sells ice cream in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.

📲 Venmo is rolling out a drastic redesign in the coming weeks, notably getting rid of the global social feed that's been the subject of privacy concerns.

🔊 Clubhouse, the buzzy audio-only social app, will no longer be invite-only or operate a waitlist to join the app. (But if you got an invite before, you're allowed to continue flexing for another six months or so before we all stop caring.)