• digger@lemmy.ca
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    7 months 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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    7 months ago

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

  • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml
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    7 months 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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      7 months 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.

  • z500@startrek.website
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    7 months ago

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

      • bleph@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Hey! No spoiler tag!? Some of us are still getting caught up on the last two seasons of reality

    • TheRealKuni@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

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

      “Bed, Bath, and BEGONE!”

  • kool_newt@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    I wonder if there are some good practical reasons though. Like if they were to do this with real towels it could potentially be heavy and dangerous. If a bunch of towels did fall, it would be significant work to put them back, and now they’d be dirty from the floor the public has been walking all over.

    Also, the fluorescent lights fade stuff pretty quick so if they didn’t cycle inventory fast enough you’d see fading, and they’d fade at different rates due to being exposed for different lengths of time and look weird.

    • Num10ck@lemmy.world
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      7 months 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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        7 months ago

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

      • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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        7 months 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.

      • kool_newt@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        they would have done better with just a gigantic poster of ferris bueller in a towel.

        You are a marketing genius!

        But also, I think it’s just a trend in the U.S. For a while there, and kinda still, warehouse stores are in style; I think because of the reputation for good deals from places like Costco and Ikea, I think other companies thought if they pretend to be a bit of a warehouse people will think they’re getting low prices because money was saved on decor. 'Muricans are easy to fool this way.

    • hinterlufer@lemmy.world
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      7 months 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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    7 months 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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    7 months 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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        7 months ago

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

          • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            I agree, but see my reply to FluorideMind above on how this is the lesser evil of what they’re gonna do anyway

        • FluorideMind@lemmy.world
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          7 months 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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            7 months 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.