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.
My understanding was that overstock.com bought them for their brand only, and then changed their own name to Bed Bath & Beyond. So the old BB&B is now extinct, and overstock.com is now masquerading as BB&B.
If you go to overstock.com or o.co, both actually redirect to Bed Bath & Beyond now (which is presumably just a re-skinned version of the old overstock.com?)
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.
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.
I have seen a doc about Home Depot (not the pictured store) some time ago. Apparently the overstocked facade was a big deal because those big stores want you to think they have everything that can possibly exist in their inventory so you only always go there and make no further stops.
Of course, it's smoke and mirror and a lot of stores adopted the big warehouse style for the same reasons. Some stores have legit empty boxes filled with crap all over. If you ever went into one of those store looking for something very specific tho, it is pretty apparent that they only overstock a few profitable items and the rest is no better, or worse than smaller locally-owned shops inventory-wise. Only exception around here would be Costco, which is a.legit warehouse.
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.
It's probably just marketing, the super high stack is visible from far away and advertisers many available colors. If one catches your eye, you then have to walk through a bunch of other aisles to actually get to the towels. It's like putting the milk at the back of the grocery store.
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.