Forensic Analysis · Retail / Consumer Discretionary · as of Aug 12, 2026
Bed Bath & Beyond, Inc. (BBBY)
A forensic read on Bed Bath & Beyond, Inc. built from its complete SEC filings — financial-health screens, earnings quality, red flags and a price-aware rating. Reproducible math, not opinion.
D · Weak — demands caution
Forensic grade
Distress
Financial health
-4.6
Distress distance
Clean
Earnings quality
5
Forensic signals
-4.1
P / E (ttm)
-38.9%
ROE
$407M
Market cap
0.00%
Dividend yield
-25.1%
Revenue growth
This free snapshot doesn't read filing or proxy text, so the auditor-quality and governance checks that can lower a grade were not evaluated (red flags, auditor quality, say on pay, board independence). Those checks only ever lower a grade, so the full analysis can land below the grade above but never above it — treat it as the most favourable reading, not the settled one.
Bed Bath & Beyond, Inc. earns a D (Weak — demands caution) forensic quality grade, and its balance-sheet distress test reads -4.6, placing it in the Distress zone. 5 forensic signals were flagged in its latest SEC filings, led by accruals ratio (% of noa).
What the filings flag
+68.6%
FY2024→FY2025
Accruals ratio (% of NOA).Net operating assets grew +68.6% relative to their own average in FY2025 — scaled by NOA itself, not total assets (see the Forensic Screens card's differently-scaled Sloan Accrual Ratio for that read). Accruals are building sharply — a large slice of profit sits in operating assets, not cash; Richardson/Sloan link high accruals to weaker future returns as they reverse. The build is led by receivables up +31% against revenue -25%. The cash-flow cross-check is more mixed: reported earnings ran behind operating cash by 64% of net operating assets, diverging from the balance-sheet accrual read.
-65.8%
FY2025
Return on invested capital.Return on invested capital is -65.8% in the latest fiscal year and slipping from 7% — well below its ~9% cost of capital, so reinvested dollars may be destroying value, not building it.
+10.7%/yr
FY2022–FY2025
Share-count dilution.Diluted share count changed +36% over the last 3 years to FY2025 (+10.7%/yr). The count is growing: more stock was issued than repurchased over this window, so aggregate results grew faster than their per-share equivalents. That's ~10.7% shaved off per-share growth every year — total profit has to grow that much just to keep earnings-per-share flat, and a stake held since FY2022 has been diluted ~26%.
1.0% of rev
FY2025
Stock-based comp load.Stock-based compensation ran 1.0% of revenue in FY2025 — about $0.18 per diluted share. The cost of it is not in the cash flow — no cash left the business — it is in the count: holders gave up about 11.4% of the company a year, and that rate is not falling. That is the figure to weigh, not the share of free cash flow.
Key fundamentals
Latest Revenue$1.04B
Revenue Growth YoY-25.1%
Net Margin-8.1%
Free Cash Flow-$64.1M
Return on Equity-38.9%
Debt / Equity0.11x
The forensic grade and screens above are free — no account needed. Want the AI investment read on top — the 0–100 rating, thesis, bull-vs-bear, red flags and the 12-month scenario, written from Bed Bath & Beyond, Inc.'s actual 10-K/10-Q/8-K filings?
Data from SEC EDGAR public filings · metrics as of Aug 12, 2026. Forensic signals flag probability, not certainty.
Bed Bath & Beyond, Inc. (BBBY) Stock — Forensic Analysis, Red Flags & Rating | Stockonomy · Stockonomy
FCF ($64M)
FY2025
Shareholder returns.Returned $6M to shareholders (buybacks + dividends) in FY2025, but free cash flow was ($64M) after capex — there was no free cash flow to fund the payout from at all, and operating cash flow itself was negative or zero that year too. The entire return is coming from debt or cash reserves, not cash the business itself generated — a harder case than returns merely running ahead of free cash flow, since here there was none to run ahead of.