I wonder why anyone's surprised. Today Pier 1 (NYSE:PIR) announced yet another sales slowdown, warning the Street to expect sales and earnings for Q2 that will be below previous guidance. Comparable-store sales for August are going to be down 13% to 15%, they say, yielding an 8% to 9% drop for the whole quarter. That, in turn, will bring a loss of $0.12 to $0.14 per share.

The stock dropped a modest 6% today. That's less than I expected, given that this is yet another confirmation of my belief that Pier 1 is in big trouble. Perhaps it's still buoyed by the oft-repeated reassurance that value investors are buying into the as-yet-unseen Pier 1 turnaround story. After all, the headlines have been saying stuff like "Buffett's buying Pier 1," although all it really means is that someone at Berkshire (NYSE:BRKa) (NYSE:BRKb) has been buying Pier 1.

Honestly, my first thought was that it might be the janitor, but then I realized that's unfair to janitors. A janitor would probably know better.

He would realize that the stuff you used to only find at Pier 1 can now be found just about anywhere -- Target (NYSE:TGT), Cost Plus' (NASDAQ:CPWM) World Market, Bed Bath & Beyond (NASDAQ:BBBY), or Williams-Sonoma's (NYSE:WSM) Pottery Barn.

He might ask himself, as I have, whether the world would really care if Pier 1 disappeared forever, vanishing along with spokes-personalities Kirstie "Fat Actress" Alley and Thom "My 15 Minutes Are Up" Filicia.

Being a regular Joe who doesn't like to keep his cash tied up in unmoved goods on some storeroom shelf, he would likely take a bleak view of inventory turns that have been steadily declining for the past three years while inventory growth has outpaced sales growth. And finally, he might bypass the decent-looking balance sheet to see that free cash flow has never really been all that great.

Although my accomplished comrade in dumpster-diving, Philip Durell, has suggested that his Motley Fool Inside Value newsletter subscribers keep Pier 1 on their watch lists, that's as much energy as I'd spend on it. This thing just keeps sinking, and I'm not sure it will get above water any time soon.

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Seth Jayson hasn't set foot in a Pier 1 store for at least a decade. At the time of publication, he had positions in no company mentioned here. View his stock holdings and Fool profile here. Fool rules are here.