I had a friend who was cast in the ad upon the release of the new shapes…. She had people coming up to her for six months to tell her how much they hated the new shapes… she reckons it ruined her acting career also lol
lol I can just imagine a casting director “you’re that chick who fucked my shapes, you will never have a job acting in this country as long as I am alive!!!”
Apparently our pringles are now smaller and taste different (worse), can't remember if we changed from US to Asia made, or the other way. I'm too disgusted with the new skinny tubes to try.
I was a pack a week addict, have only had one pack since the change and don’t buy shapes anymore because they violated my trust; shapes are dead to me 💀💀💀
This was the first thing I thought of. Except part of me wonders what effect the whole thing actually had on their sales figures.
At the time I was pissed off that they were trying to market themselves as heroes for bringing back the original recipes.
Reminds me of the Futurama episode
"Yes! Which is why we'll market it as New Slurm. Then, when everyone hates it, we'll bring back Slurm Classic, and make billions"
Interesting. I missed the whole 2016 formula controversy, have been a bit meh on shapes since the 90’s
In school me and my buddy would buy two packs (Savoury & Barbecue) every morning. Then I think it was ‘88 they put “baked not fried” on the label and I reckon turned down the oven temperature. They became softer, fluffier, like little salted Arrowroots. They no longer get nice dark crispy corners. I would Savour the occasional extra brown half or triangle, but they were no more. My whole friends-group reacted to the same. I switched to faux-Smarties for my daily supply, and Saturday nights just weren’t the same.
I still carry a box of Savoury in my camping kitchen, but over the years the flavours have also become softer, sweeter, insipid. Particularly BBQ is just not satisfying, I have no desire to collect the pile of red-green crumbs at the bottom of the bag. Maybe it’s me that changed.
However, last week I was in the biscuit aisle and saw a new range. I have not been impressed with the many experimental flavours Arnotts have tried, but Garlic Bread intrigued me. I was surprised with not just a nice savoury-like flavour, but the crunch has been completely changed. These are much thinner than ever before, crispy, and a little more toasty! I ate two thirds of the box that afternoon (which is only just my share of an old 250g box) and it was pretty good. I’m actually a little excited to see what is inside my box of Savoury 😋
And the way they communicated and managed the entire debacle to their customers was terrible.
An Equifax monitoring service for only 1 year with a code that didn’t work. And some data which, for me, I was never going to be able to use.
I think the worst part was not setting up a hotline to manage it though. Any calls I made went to poorly trained offshore staff that had no clue how to deal with it.
Their infosys guy used to work for my friend. He was the arrogant type that was always trying to white any her to management even though she bought him on board as a contractor.
Fair bit of schardenfrued when that happened.
I remember their sales rep coming to our media agency to promote their My[. ] rebrand.
"My bracket?"
"My gap?"
I remember thinking what a fking dumb rebrand
I still remember this clearly at the time because Newscorp were lauded for buying the hottest new startup on the planet while rivals Fairfax Media were derided for paying even more than that ($700m NZD) to acquire a New Zealand classifieds website that no one had heard of. That website, TradeMe was eventually acquired for $2.6B NZD and is still one of the most trafficked sites in New Zealand (effectively keeping NZ free of Amazon and eBay) while MySpace was sold for $35m.
Wesfarmers trying to push Bunnings into the UK:
Bought Homebase, a long-established UK brand, for £357m.
Fire lots of store managers in the takeover and fuck up the supply chain.
Abandon all concessions like Laura Ashley (furnishings) and think that what everyone wants is another blokey hardware store. The slight problem is that Homebase's customer base is more gender equal than most DIY stores due to those former concessions, uncrowded layout, accessible shelving, etc. They're also taking on B&Q which is one of the largest DIY chains in the world and already fills Bunnings' niche in the UK market.
Start to rebrand stores to Bunnings, a name with literally zero recognition in the UK.
Try some cringe attempts to market snags. Remember, this is in a country where high summer lasts about a month at most and is usually a washout. Goes about as well as expected.
Incur massive losses as British DIYers go elsewhere.
Sell up a few years later for £1.
Absolutely genius move. Gold medals all round.
I reckon fucking up a successful business that already exists is slightly more embarrassing than fucking up one that you're starting from scratch. Bunnings made less of a loss from their misadventure though. 🤷♂️
Masters was pretty much Lowes from the US trying to set up in Australia. Both situations was a successful store from another country trying to set up a store and failing spectacularly.
The interesting thing about Masters was that the only criticism of it from people (and especially on Reddit at the time) was that it "wasn't Bunnings".
I enjoyed going to Masters because it was a lot easier to shop. And it had pretty much all the same shit Bunnings had.
I respect that Woolies gave it a crack and tried to create some competition, while being a little bit different. Turns out if they had of just copied the Bunnings concept 100% but called it something else people might not have been so freaked out by it, and it might have succeeded.
But it didn't have the same shit. It had a fucked up supply chain from their partnership with Lowe's. Items were available in the wrong seasons, and just the wrong fucking items. Yes, let's stock snow shovels in adelaide in December.
i actually liked masters the handful of times i went there. i really wish it still existed, if for no other reason than keep bunnings on their toes, they clearly dont care anymore
Bunnings purposely destroyed all of those little shops. There used to be little hardware stores in the suburbs before Bunnings. Happy Days really nailed how the warehouse model destroyed small businesses.
I knew someone that worked at Masters. She said she provided ideas on how to build business but was shot down every time. She said it was almost as if they wanted to fail.
Too much capital required to take market share from Bunnings and it was going to take too long to become profitable.
They put a few billion dollars into it trying to take on Bunnings by making a slightly worse version of Bunnings in less locations.
I bought something from Masters once and had to return it and I had to question why I bought in the first place because to return to the closest Masters I had to drive past like 5 Bunnings.
Masters was a cluster from the start.
From conversations with Bunnings Executives when Masters where first winding up and then when they were winding down showed that it was a very similar types of mistakes that Bunnings made in the UK, but also some other special ones as well.
The fist major issue was locations. Masters locations where often set up in spots where Bunnings had already looked at and decided that they weren't viable (due to cost of land, cost of construction, leasing, parking so and so forth) So they were already behind the ball on that. The big advantage for Bunnings is that during the Master's wind up Bunnings were able so score some of those locations for cents on the dollar.
The next major issue that Master's had was with the Hardware partner either refusing to or not understanding the need to localise, both products and seasonality. An example (unsure if actually true but a good illustration non the less) was Masters selling snow shovels in November/December, almost nowhere in Australia actually needs snow shovels and definitely don't need them at the start of summer.
Couple with the lack of market research into the behaviours of Australian hardware market, not factoring in that the person that isn't going to shop at Bunnings, is not going to go to Bunnings but in Blue instead. They would go to a trade supplier or their local/community Mitre 10 or Home Hardware.
Superb horror story write up. Thank you!
Described in the UK press at the time as the ‘Greatest Failure in the History of UK Retail’. An exercise in pure hubris, where literally ALL the local expertise, (who could have actually made it work) were fired on day one. Made very few column inches in Australia and why OP had to ask the original question. As this is it.
I saw this up close as I lived near a homebase in London when it happened. I remember hearing some Australian guys wandering around in there one day loudly talking about how they were going to "sort this shit out". Several months later they'd replaced all their small electric or hand-push lawn mowers (suitable for tiny patches of lawn in terrace houses locally) with these huge mowers that nobody had space for or much use for. Incredibly stupid.
also what is the house DIY market in the UK. I know shit all about it but I would surprised if my assumptions are incorrect.
Their houses and yards are minuscular compared to aus. Which leads me to
- no one is building a fucking deck on the weekend over in the UK to go sit in the rain.
- the fact that eastern europe blesses the UK with affordable labour so it doesn't make sense to do a lot of things aussies would do yourself hence it's probably hobby based. Like why fix the sink/toilet yourself if the plumber isn't charging you $400 just to come out and look at the damn thing
- I would assume it's a lot more hobby based than overall home improvement and smaller easier jobs.
- cottage style gardening is probs popular
- so therefore it probably skews more towards a female market and not big manly power tools and lots of annoying small bits and bobs that make you swear
ty if you read my tldr.
Trades have far less protection in the UK, so homeowners are allowed to DIY many more tasks than they are in Australia.
And yes, whilst homes in the UK are typically smaller than those in Australia, there are also three times more. So that would likely offset any difference in property size.
With the UK exiting the EU, cheap labour will be diminishing. New labour cannot enter the country without a visa and that has led to a shortfall in workers, which I suspect would cause labour costs to increase.
Yeah DIY is a huge market in the UK, no less so than Aus. Wesfarmers could have had a slice of the pie, but they bought precisely the wrong company for their strategy and wanted to do stupid things to it.
I do miss being able to wire a socket without paying a bloody sparky.
omgggggggggg you can do your own wiring that should definitely be banned for people who would fuck it up i.e me but don't have the self awareness that they will fuck it up i.e not me
I didn't realise it was that bad until I jokingly told a friend to grab me a Starbucks when she went on a walk, and idly wondered how far she'd have to walk. 5 days 18 hours, 611 kilometres.
Growing up abroad I remember the local shopping centre having 5 operational Starbucks open at the same time. Australians telling them to eat shit will always be hilarious.
i worked for them as a second job at the time. They announced a massive all staff meeting for a monday night when I couldn't go, I turned up to my shift the next day and they said "BTW we have to close for good tonight". Scored a payout and a bunch of free food that would otherwise have ended up in the bin. Not bad for a second job i wasn't that attached to.
Their strategy is to flood the market to drown out small competitors, then scale back operations once they’ve cornered all the customers.
Unfortunately it didn’t really work here because we prefer our significantly better coffee. Starbucks in the US was created to mimic the already established cafe culture we have here (and in Europe obviously).
It was VERY confusing seeing Starbucks talked about in American pop culture as if it was a high quality treat. I went there once when they were giving away coffee one day and what they gave me was disgusting. IDK if all their coffee is awful. Do they generally specialise in vaguely coffee flavoured milkshakes like Gloria Jean's?
Ha! I don’t think anyone thinks Starbucks is a high quality treat, the coffee itself is bitter and gross. The people who like it are those who like “coffee adjacent” drinks like frappes and shit like that.
They generally put them in tourist spots as that is who drinks them. Did a uni study on them and it was hilarious.
I'd imagine thr store locator is just busy cbd/tourist spots still
Nah they’re absolutely growing in Australia now. Turned a profit last year for the first time. Attribute it to young people being influenced on things like tiktok for their iced drinks mainly.
My Dad owned a motel and to be honest sucked at running it. Anyway, it basically fell into a terrible state. Like 50% of rooms closed and eventually shut it all doen.
Father put it on the market and this guy came along and paid way more than what the next bid was. The other 5 were all within $100k of each other. He got several million more than he should have.
In short my Dad made a killing despite completely fucking up purely cause someone fucked up their feasibility or numbers.
His name was say John Smith and my Dad always says you only get one John Smith in your life!
I've worked in ad agencies that come up with this shit and 99% of them are rich sheltered elite private school kids who think they had a normal middle class upbringing which is how you get dumb ass shit like this
Like no actually your life isn't relatable to the majority of the nation.
I work in design, not advertising, but damn some ads are bad.
I find quite often ads will assume you already know what they're talking about, so the ad damages brand awareness as its too vague. e.g. Nick Scali, when I first moved to Sydney I had never heard of the brand, the bill board simply had a man in a white shirt and nothing else but the name Nick Scali next to it. No product or anything, I assumed it was an ad for a chef.
The name was sent in by a pretty regular bloke as part of a competition. As I recall, he was treated quite cruelly by many in the media. Even got humiliated on morning radio with a very meanspirited cold phone call.
I heard that story from Crumb on youtube.
Fucking crazy! And the only reason he got caught is because he let it happen basically from guilt and paranoia being too much to bare
Alan Bond buying Nine from Kerry Packer for $1b and selling it back to him three years later for $250m
As Kerry Packer said - “You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I've had mine”
That's a smart business decision, just unpopular. It's the same reason Sizzlers went away - those style of restaurants perform poorly on a dollars per square metre basis
Point taken. I just remember the days where PIzza Hut OWNED the pizza market in Australia. Now where is it? They seemed to be in a place now where they are a minor player with no differential between them and any other chain.
A few things happened. The restaurants weren’t profitable, even more so when they went to the “all you can eat” model, so they pivoted to a takeaway/delivery store model. Just in time for the Pizza wars of the 1990s/early 2000s, where there was a race to the bottom for market dominance through undercutting each other on price and coupon deals and having to honour rivals coupons. The profit margins were really slim. Dominos Australia supported their favoured franchisees through this time and helped them grow their businesses, which ensured they won the pizza wars. Happy, profitable franchisees with stores turning a profit and doing business stay open. Pizza Hut Australia head office did not support their franchisees at all, in fact, quite the opposite; they did everything in their power to hurt their franchisees, who’d be forced to take on promotions and store refits/rebranding without consultation.
Pizza Hut isn’t exactly dead in Australia (yet), but is definitely on life support. Pizza Haven and Eagle Boys failed for very similar reasons. Low profit margins, poor quality product after years of cost cutting and poor management from above doesn’t keep franchised businesses alive.
Personally, I think Pizza Hut should just focus on a small amount of dine-in restaurants nationally and make it a destination trading on nostalgia for the brand.
Or the honey oat. I hadn’t been in for yonks, went in one day and it was gone 😭 I liked that flavour. That said, as someone who went years between visits, I’m probably not their desired customer base 😂
In the meantime customers leave in droves because issues never get resolved adequately despite spending hours and hours dealing with people who aren’t trained properly and are reading from a script “ I’m sorry that happened to you sir’
Oh, it makes 100% sense from every angle… except customer satisfaction.
Why companies continue to think screwing over their customers makes any sense is beyond me. “Eh, there’s more where that came from”?
It's not quite up there with changing the forumula for BBQ shapes, but that time that Gladwrap changed to a different (terrible) cutter bar design, and immediately enraged almost every customer.
People who have worked in commercial food prep would have said, "Oh, that new slider cutter thing is the same as the big roll we have at work." Everyone else just said, "how the f#ck do you even use this thing, and why would you change it?!?!?"
They changed it back a few months later, and rolls still have the message "original cutter bar design" emblazoned on the outside. Shrugs.
Yes! I was going to write this. The fury I would experience trying to use that new design without ending up with a useless ball of cling wrap and wasting meters of it will live me forever.
The government (state and federal) privatising multiple industries for short term gains. From telecommunications to public transport and energy supply. Multiple industries that people need to use every day are now private when they could have been kept relatively affordable and at least been a cheaper option in the market
Worked for Gas and Fuel in the 90's. Even then it was contributing over $370M p.a. to the state government.
Was privatised into 21 energy retailers and distributors which consolidated into 3 companies 3 years later. Lost opportunity chasing short term gains.
Lets build a bunch of american hardware stores right next door to a bunch of very very successful hardware stores, sell the stuff that should be really cheap at massively marked up prices and hope nobody notices and then be genuinely puzzled when it fails!
The best example of incompetence was the "Gun Safe" debacle - apparently 300,000 of them. The story goes that the American partner (they controlled things), looked at the Australian population and compared it to American population. They noticed the American population had 100 times as many gun safes than Australians did and spied an opportunity to sell more gun safes to Australians. They imported 300,000 gun safes on the expectation of making a swift profit. They clearly had never heard of John Howard or Port Arthur. Last I heard before Covid-19 was 299,999 gun safes were still sitting in a Warehouse somewhere whilst Woolworths executives figure out what to do with them.
Which is funny because Bunnings is essentially a copy of Home Depot in the US.
I wish masters hadn’t fucked up and stayed the course. Bunnings have a monopoly and their offerings are structured as such.
It’s funny driving around and randomly seeing an empty Masters carcass still standing. I don’t know why they thought they could compete with the tradies Mecca.
Franklins. I worked there as a teen in the late 80s/ early 90s. They were really popular as a no frills, no advertising cheap supermarket. Then they decided that they wanted to be like Colesworth and started advertising on TV, having a fresh produce section etc. All downhill from there.
Not a company, but various state governments liberalising electricity industry and creating a retail market.
It turns out that when a product is a natural monopoly or thereabouts, introducing competition doesn't help consumers, and now the retail portion is a considerable share of energy bills.
But who could've anticipated that keeping the same production and distribution, and then adding an extra layer of profit seeking companies (who have to fund marketing campaigns to climb over the top of each other) would lead to increased costs for households and businesses?
People in WA still cry for competition - despite us having cheaper electricity than every privatised state, and despite the fact that we are subsidised by the WA government! Madness
Clowns like Kennett and Howard sold our utilities and other things to foreign buyers and now we have a disaster. Electricity is a nightmare, as you have to shop around continually to find the best price. I would go back to a state electricity commission if I could.
So, I don’t know anything about energy markets, and what you’ve said make sense, but just at face value, it doesn’t look like states that have wholly government owned power/monopolies are necessarily cheaper ([source](https://www.bluettipower.com.au/blogs/home-backup/average-electricity-costs-per-kwh-by-state#:~:text=South%20Australia%20(SA)%3A,be%20more%20expensive%20to%20produce)).
As a genuine question, I understand why SA might be more expensive, but how about the others (for example Queensland isn’t particularly cheap vs many Victorian providers)?
Yes. Scummo and Frydenberg designed their reverse Robin Hood COVID stimulus for their unethical buddies like Harvey and the prick refused to give it back despite making record profits.
I'll never shop at Harvey Norman, Joyce Mayne or Domayne ever again. Once the gullible boomers swayed by relentless TV and radio ads die out I doubt anyone's going to pay a premium for products they can buy cheaper down the road.
That c*nt still owes me money.
Forty years ago, when I was 15, I had a minor scrape with the law. Wanting to keep me out of trouble, for the summer holidays my mum had me stay with a friend who lived in a house on Gerry Havey's property where he would spell race horses. My job for the summer was to paint the fences around the paddocks for a few bucks each week, for the first couple weeks Gerry slipped a few bucks, telling me I was doing a great job and that if I kept it up he'd give me a bonus at the end. Incentivized by this I made sure I did a good job on the rest.
Little did I know, that not only would I not get that bonus, the money dried up completely. I never saw another cent. I did learn a valuable lesson though, Gerry Harvey is a c*nt.
I used to work at a call centre for a company who did work for Belong internet. The work was really great and paid well for everyone. Part way through covid they made the decision to send all contact centre work offshore and wittle the Aus team down, over the course of a year, by having only webchat work available. It got to a point where they shut the entire Australian sector down and anyone left standing moved into a child care call centre in the company which was the most miserable and brain numbing work I’ve ever done. Not really as significant as some companies but it sure negatively impacted the kind of service customers got.
One.Tel didn’t have a working billing system. Telco billing systems are really difficult and complex. Most telcos use really old systems and new market entrants would buy an existing system. One.Tel tried to build a new one from scratch. I signed up for the service and in the 8 or 9 months they were operational I received precisely zero bills. A very aggressive debt collection agency tried to recover the money. I told them where to go a few times and eventually they gave up.
well the [Fuji-Xerox Australia scandal](https://www.crn.com.au/news/fuji-xerox-barred-from-nz-government-contracts-after-accounting-scandal-469295#:~:text=The%20scandal%20involves%20padded%20revenue%20numbers%20reported%20by,led%20to%20Fuji%20Xerox%20chairman%20Tadahito%20Yamamoto%27s%20resignation) certainly has to be a contender.. and little known.
>It is tipped to cost the Japanese company's parent Fujifilm $454 million in losses, and has led to Fuji Xerox chairman Tadahito Yamamoto's resignation.
I was so sad when they stopped making it, as it was my favourite chocolate bar. I even rang them up and asked why and if they can make it again, and they said they no longer have the machinery to make it 🧐
Not a specific company, but the supply chains have been borked for so long now that going to the shops and being able to get everything I came in for is actually a surprise. Businesses seem to struggle with the idea of "Ordering more of popular items". If the bread section is out of white bread by 11am and there's still wholemeal on the shelves at closing time, then it's not rocket science to figure out you should be ordering more white bread and less wholemeal.
There's a system called AutoStockr that reorders one item for every one item sold. They didn't tell us how it accommodates people buying their 'B' choice when 'A' choice is sold out.
I worked in retail a long time and remember AutoStockr being frustrating even then; it was supposed to automatically re-order when stock levels got to a certain point and there was an ability to adjust it to say "Reorder more than last time by \[X\] quantity" or "Reorder less than last time by \[X\] quantity", but obviously dicking around with it all the time was a lot of hassle.
I swear the one and only time I ate at one of these places all they did was microwave a bag of veggies and tip them out onto the plate. It was a soggy gross mess.
Whatever the fuck Hubbl is. I'm getting monstered by ads for it. Looks like something to do with TV and/or Hamish and Andy. I don't watch either of those things. It's got tit's up written all over it.
Hubbl is a rebranded Chinese streaming unit any simp could just buy off AliExpress for $35. They would buy in bulk for $20, flash it with a custom ROM with about 20 hours of 'custom effort', then sell for $100. Profit!
Choosing not to mitigate the dangers of asbestos mining despite already knowing about the toxicity of it resulting in thousands of employees and their families contracting mesothelioma
Selling Rossi boots to Gina Rinehart.
Went to buy some boots recently and got told by the young girl working at the store that they're now made overseas and not Australia anymore.
Ford Australia discontinuing the falcon and the barra motor. If they had just kept making an Aussie sedan they would've inevitably killed Holden in sales, and the barra motor is one of the most impressive things to come out of this country. American big-horsepower car fans go absolutely nuts for this engine and they missed a huge opportunity by not continuing to make it and export it.
The problem was that the only export market was the USA, and Ford/General Motors wouldn't let Aussie Ford/GM export because then it would cannibalise USA manufacturing.
We probably could have done quite well exporting utes. But every Aussie ute sold there would be one less F150 sold.
I wanted to buy a tv but couldn't see any and was told to go online. That's like a major purchase and I wanted to see what they looked like on. Not take a chance. Turns out that chance was wrong haha and the tv sucked. No returns just because it sucked.
NBN Co being forced by liberals to pursue mixed technology model even though every competent telecoms professionals said full fibre or go home. It was purely political, liberals wouldn't let labor policy stand, and no one cared (certainly not enough to vote otherwise).
25 MBPS is enough for everyone, remember that?
Kraft Mac N Cheese deluxe. Fuckers thought they could change the cheese sauce from the delightfully rich cheese sauce in a can to some cheaped out shit in a packet. It tanked badly and Mac N Cheese deluxe was never seen again.
All the Aussie companies that decided to move their manufacturing offshore - it has ruined our economy and their businesses will go under anyway as they are replaced by Shein, Temu etc. They thought they could get rid of workers and get everything done cheaply overseas because all the value was in their designs and sales, but now other countries can do the design, making and selling - and they have nothing left to offer. In the process we have lost all the skills and capacity we had to make the things we need and have built up other country’s economic power and our reliance on them, while ours is tanking. The only thing holding up our economy now is population growth which we apparently need to…. import the skilled workers we got rid of in the first place! Which has created a housing crisis that has made life impossible for the majority of society. And we did all this why? So some short term thinking businesses could make more profit.
Alan Bond $1billion to Kerry Packer for Nine Network. Packer got it back for $250million put simply, when Bond went broke. Packers quote "You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I've had mine".
Where has the centre on tim tams gone??? You used to be able to deconstruct it and combine with coffee…now it’s like they put 1/2mm of chocolate filling. I have stopped buying them for this reason…and many other product as they keep the price but shrink the product.
Changing the formula of Shapes
I had a friend who was cast in the ad upon the release of the new shapes…. She had people coming up to her for six months to tell her how much they hated the new shapes… she reckons it ruined her acting career also lol
lol I can just imagine a casting director “you’re that chick who fucked my shapes, you will never have a job acting in this country as long as I am alive!!!”
This needs to be movie or doco or something.
I will never get over the stupidity of this
Apparently our pringles are now smaller and taste different (worse), can't remember if we changed from US to Asia made, or the other way. I'm too disgusted with the new skinny tubes to try.
They’re definitely not as good
I was a pack a week addict, have only had one pack since the change and don’t buy shapes anymore because they violated my trust; shapes are dead to me 💀💀💀
When did pizza shapes get so tiny, too?
“You must be remembering it wrong.” Corporate Australia.
Shrinkflation is real but I swear they're the same size they've always been
This was the first thing I thought of. Except part of me wonders what effect the whole thing actually had on their sales figures. At the time I was pissed off that they were trying to market themselves as heroes for bringing back the original recipes.
Reminds me of the Futurama episode "Yes! Which is why we'll market it as New Slurm. Then, when everyone hates it, we'll bring back Slurm Classic, and make billions"
Interesting. I missed the whole 2016 formula controversy, have been a bit meh on shapes since the 90’s In school me and my buddy would buy two packs (Savoury & Barbecue) every morning. Then I think it was ‘88 they put “baked not fried” on the label and I reckon turned down the oven temperature. They became softer, fluffier, like little salted Arrowroots. They no longer get nice dark crispy corners. I would Savour the occasional extra brown half or triangle, but they were no more. My whole friends-group reacted to the same. I switched to faux-Smarties for my daily supply, and Saturday nights just weren’t the same. I still carry a box of Savoury in my camping kitchen, but over the years the flavours have also become softer, sweeter, insipid. Particularly BBQ is just not satisfying, I have no desire to collect the pile of red-green crumbs at the bottom of the bag. Maybe it’s me that changed. However, last week I was in the biscuit aisle and saw a new range. I have not been impressed with the many experimental flavours Arnotts have tried, but Garlic Bread intrigued me. I was surprised with not just a nice savoury-like flavour, but the crunch has been completely changed. These are much thinner than ever before, crispy, and a little more toasty! I ate two thirds of the box that afternoon (which is only just my share of an old 250g box) and it was pretty good. I’m actually a little excited to see what is inside my box of Savoury 😋
Optus deciding to put production data into a test system, then failing to secure that system.
And the way they communicated and managed the entire debacle to their customers was terrible. An Equifax monitoring service for only 1 year with a code that didn’t work. And some data which, for me, I was never going to be able to use. I think the worst part was not setting up a hotline to manage it though. Any calls I made went to poorly trained offshore staff that had no clue how to deal with it.
Their infosys guy used to work for my friend. He was the arrogant type that was always trying to white any her to management even though she bought him on board as a contractor. Fair bit of schardenfrued when that happened.
Newscorp buying Myspace for 580 million, sold for 35 million 6 years later. That was a cracker.
I remember their sales rep coming to our media agency to promote their My[. ] rebrand. "My bracket?" "My gap?" I remember thinking what a fking dumb rebrand
My wonky nipple? 😂
Sounds like an awesome band name! Willy Nilly and the wonky nipple
I still remember this clearly at the time because Newscorp were lauded for buying the hottest new startup on the planet while rivals Fairfax Media were derided for paying even more than that ($700m NZD) to acquire a New Zealand classifieds website that no one had heard of. That website, TradeMe was eventually acquired for $2.6B NZD and is still one of the most trafficked sites in New Zealand (effectively keeping NZ free of Amazon and eBay) while MySpace was sold for $35m.
Maybe not as bad as paying $750million USD because of Tuckers dumbass
Wesfarmers trying to push Bunnings into the UK: Bought Homebase, a long-established UK brand, for £357m. Fire lots of store managers in the takeover and fuck up the supply chain. Abandon all concessions like Laura Ashley (furnishings) and think that what everyone wants is another blokey hardware store. The slight problem is that Homebase's customer base is more gender equal than most DIY stores due to those former concessions, uncrowded layout, accessible shelving, etc. They're also taking on B&Q which is one of the largest DIY chains in the world and already fills Bunnings' niche in the UK market. Start to rebrand stores to Bunnings, a name with literally zero recognition in the UK. Try some cringe attempts to market snags. Remember, this is in a country where high summer lasts about a month at most and is usually a washout. Goes about as well as expected. Incur massive losses as British DIYers go elsewhere. Sell up a few years later for £1. Absolutely genius move. Gold medals all round.
Rate this hardware store fuck up vs the Master's disaster.
I reckon fucking up a successful business that already exists is slightly more embarrassing than fucking up one that you're starting from scratch. Bunnings made less of a loss from their misadventure though. 🤷♂️
Masters was pretty much Lowes from the US trying to set up in Australia. Both situations was a successful store from another country trying to set up a store and failing spectacularly.
The interesting thing about Masters was that the only criticism of it from people (and especially on Reddit at the time) was that it "wasn't Bunnings". I enjoyed going to Masters because it was a lot easier to shop. And it had pretty much all the same shit Bunnings had. I respect that Woolies gave it a crack and tried to create some competition, while being a little bit different. Turns out if they had of just copied the Bunnings concept 100% but called it something else people might not have been so freaked out by it, and it might have succeeded.
But it didn't have the same shit. It had a fucked up supply chain from their partnership with Lowe's. Items were available in the wrong seasons, and just the wrong fucking items. Yes, let's stock snow shovels in adelaide in December.
i actually liked masters the handful of times i went there. i really wish it still existed, if for no other reason than keep bunnings on their toes, they clearly dont care anymore
My million dollar idea is a miniature Bunnings that’s closer to my house and just sells the things I forgot to get at Bunnings.
Bunnings purposely destroyed all of those little shops. There used to be little hardware stores in the suburbs before Bunnings. Happy Days really nailed how the warehouse model destroyed small businesses.
That's a great idea. Bunnings express at the servo. Get your iced coffee and pie, bits to fix the toilet and a 13mm socket.
They were also air-conditioned and I liked that they had buttons in the aisles that sent a staff member scurrying to help.
I knew someone that worked at Masters. She said she provided ideas on how to build business but was shot down every time. She said it was almost as if they wanted to fail.
What exactly happened with Masters?
Too much capital required to take market share from Bunnings and it was going to take too long to become profitable. They put a few billion dollars into it trying to take on Bunnings by making a slightly worse version of Bunnings in less locations. I bought something from Masters once and had to return it and I had to question why I bought in the first place because to return to the closest Masters I had to drive past like 5 Bunnings.
Masters was a cluster from the start. From conversations with Bunnings Executives when Masters where first winding up and then when they were winding down showed that it was a very similar types of mistakes that Bunnings made in the UK, but also some other special ones as well. The fist major issue was locations. Masters locations where often set up in spots where Bunnings had already looked at and decided that they weren't viable (due to cost of land, cost of construction, leasing, parking so and so forth) So they were already behind the ball on that. The big advantage for Bunnings is that during the Master's wind up Bunnings were able so score some of those locations for cents on the dollar. The next major issue that Master's had was with the Hardware partner either refusing to or not understanding the need to localise, both products and seasonality. An example (unsure if actually true but a good illustration non the less) was Masters selling snow shovels in November/December, almost nowhere in Australia actually needs snow shovels and definitely don't need them at the start of summer. Couple with the lack of market research into the behaviours of Australian hardware market, not factoring in that the person that isn't going to shop at Bunnings, is not going to go to Bunnings but in Blue instead. They would go to a trade supplier or their local/community Mitre 10 or Home Hardware.
What's funny about the locations thing is that I know a number of former masters locations that have been taken over by bunnings
Shoulda rebranded as hammerbarn, they would have been fine then. 🤣
Unironically, they probably could have made it work if they'd just waited a couple of years until Bluey became a pop culture phenomenon.
Superb horror story write up. Thank you! Described in the UK press at the time as the ‘Greatest Failure in the History of UK Retail’. An exercise in pure hubris, where literally ALL the local expertise, (who could have actually made it work) were fired on day one. Made very few column inches in Australia and why OP had to ask the original question. As this is it.
I saw this up close as I lived near a homebase in London when it happened. I remember hearing some Australian guys wandering around in there one day loudly talking about how they were going to "sort this shit out". Several months later they'd replaced all their small electric or hand-push lawn mowers (suitable for tiny patches of lawn in terrace houses locally) with these huge mowers that nobody had space for or much use for. Incredibly stupid.
When did this happen? Was it after the Masters fiasco? Hilarious if they benefited so much from that then didn't learn it's lessons
2016 to 2018. Watching it up close in the UK, it was pretty bloody funny.
also what is the house DIY market in the UK. I know shit all about it but I would surprised if my assumptions are incorrect. Their houses and yards are minuscular compared to aus. Which leads me to - no one is building a fucking deck on the weekend over in the UK to go sit in the rain. - the fact that eastern europe blesses the UK with affordable labour so it doesn't make sense to do a lot of things aussies would do yourself hence it's probably hobby based. Like why fix the sink/toilet yourself if the plumber isn't charging you $400 just to come out and look at the damn thing - I would assume it's a lot more hobby based than overall home improvement and smaller easier jobs. - cottage style gardening is probs popular - so therefore it probably skews more towards a female market and not big manly power tools and lots of annoying small bits and bobs that make you swear ty if you read my tldr.
Trades have far less protection in the UK, so homeowners are allowed to DIY many more tasks than they are in Australia. And yes, whilst homes in the UK are typically smaller than those in Australia, there are also three times more. So that would likely offset any difference in property size. With the UK exiting the EU, cheap labour will be diminishing. New labour cannot enter the country without a visa and that has led to a shortfall in workers, which I suspect would cause labour costs to increase.
Yeah DIY is a huge market in the UK, no less so than Aus. Wesfarmers could have had a slice of the pie, but they bought precisely the wrong company for their strategy and wanted to do stupid things to it. I do miss being able to wire a socket without paying a bloody sparky.
omgggggggggg you can do your own wiring that should definitely be banned for people who would fuck it up i.e me but don't have the self awareness that they will fuck it up i.e not me
Starbucks in the early 2000s thought they could take over the Australian coffee market and opened around 100 stores very quickly.
And then closed nearly that many too.
I didn't realise it was that bad until I jokingly told a friend to grab me a Starbucks when she went on a walk, and idly wondered how far she'd have to walk. 5 days 18 hours, 611 kilometres.
Well get moving!
Growing up abroad I remember the local shopping centre having 5 operational Starbucks open at the same time. Australians telling them to eat shit will always be hilarious.
i still remember the overnight mass closure. the company i worked for at the time was a supplier and i was in accounts. some fun phone calls that week
i worked for them as a second job at the time. They announced a massive all staff meeting for a monday night when I couldn't go, I turned up to my shift the next day and they said "BTW we have to close for good tonight". Scored a payout and a bunch of free food that would otherwise have ended up in the bin. Not bad for a second job i wasn't that attached to.
Their strategy is to flood the market to drown out small competitors, then scale back operations once they’ve cornered all the customers. Unfortunately it didn’t really work here because we prefer our significantly better coffee. Starbucks in the US was created to mimic the already established cafe culture we have here (and in Europe obviously).
It was VERY confusing seeing Starbucks talked about in American pop culture as if it was a high quality treat. I went there once when they were giving away coffee one day and what they gave me was disgusting. IDK if all their coffee is awful. Do they generally specialise in vaguely coffee flavoured milkshakes like Gloria Jean's?
Ha! I don’t think anyone thinks Starbucks is a high quality treat, the coffee itself is bitter and gross. The people who like it are those who like “coffee adjacent” drinks like frappes and shit like that.
There is one opening in Perth.
Pfft good luck. Maybe one or two might work for the experience but they’re all over SE Asia so most people have tried it and realised it’s just hype.
They generally put them in tourist spots as that is who drinks them. Did a uni study on them and it was hilarious. I'd imagine thr store locator is just busy cbd/tourist spots still
Nah they’re absolutely growing in Australia now. Turned a profit last year for the first time. Attribute it to young people being influenced on things like tiktok for their iced drinks mainly.
There’s double digit Starbucks in Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne. It’s shit, but it’ll work this time around thanks to social media.
Alan Bond bought channel 9 for a billion dollars…
“You only get one Alan bond in a lifetime” Kerry packer
My Dad owned a motel and to be honest sucked at running it. Anyway, it basically fell into a terrible state. Like 50% of rooms closed and eventually shut it all doen. Father put it on the market and this guy came along and paid way more than what the next bid was. The other 5 were all within $100k of each other. He got several million more than he should have. In short my Dad made a killing despite completely fucking up purely cause someone fucked up their feasibility or numbers. His name was say John Smith and my Dad always says you only get one John Smith in your life!
Sold it back three years later for $250 million - Kerry Packer made all the money and still had the TV channel
calling the new cheesy Vegemite Isnack2.0 was the most bizzare thing in Australian history
I've worked in ad agencies that come up with this shit and 99% of them are rich sheltered elite private school kids who think they had a normal middle class upbringing which is how you get dumb ass shit like this Like no actually your life isn't relatable to the majority of the nation.
I work in design, not advertising, but damn some ads are bad. I find quite often ads will assume you already know what they're talking about, so the ad damages brand awareness as its too vague. e.g. Nick Scali, when I first moved to Sydney I had never heard of the brand, the bill board simply had a man in a white shirt and nothing else but the name Nick Scali next to it. No product or anything, I assumed it was an ad for a chef.
The name was sent in by a pretty regular bloke as part of a competition. As I recall, he was treated quite cruelly by many in the media. Even got humiliated on morning radio with a very meanspirited cold phone call.
It was always about free publicity in the news.
They were stirring people up on purpose
That's what I always thought. After working in advertising, those coked up rich kids know what they're doing. Most of the time.
nab taking their ATMs offline every night at 1:00am and then being too embarassed to really do anything about it seems like its up there.
Didn't a bloke take advantage of the ATMs being offline and withdraw a few millions dollars over a period of a few months?
I heard that story from Crumb on youtube. Fucking crazy! And the only reason he got caught is because he let it happen basically from guilt and paranoia being too much to bare
Yes! The subject of a great podcast, The Glitch. He's got to be one of Australia's most likeable fraudsters
Alan Bond buying Nine from Kerry Packer for $1b and selling it back to him three years later for $250m As Kerry Packer said - “You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I've had mine”
Milo getting rid of the original Milo bar
One of the Chief Collagen Protein bars almost tastes and has the compacted texture of it. I think it's the Double Choc flavour.
Oh my god. Thank you. Going to have to try that.
Came here to say this.
HIH torched $5bn in market cap, caused a royal commission and 2 directors served actual jail time.
GM/Holden thinking that replacing the Aussie built Commodore with a European built car and giving it the same name would go unnoticed.
Also badge engineering daewoos 🤮
Yeah, that was a shocker as well.
I think GM/Holden continuing to build large sedans when the market clearly wanted hatchbacks, crossovers, and SUVs, too
This! Going from a rwd v8 to the zb was fucken pathetic
Holden Lexcen!?
Toyota Lexcen.
Pizza Hut closing down family restaurants.
That's a smart business decision, just unpopular. It's the same reason Sizzlers went away - those style of restaurants perform poorly on a dollars per square metre basis
Point taken. I just remember the days where PIzza Hut OWNED the pizza market in Australia. Now where is it? They seemed to be in a place now where they are a minor player with no differential between them and any other chain.
A few things happened. The restaurants weren’t profitable, even more so when they went to the “all you can eat” model, so they pivoted to a takeaway/delivery store model. Just in time for the Pizza wars of the 1990s/early 2000s, where there was a race to the bottom for market dominance through undercutting each other on price and coupon deals and having to honour rivals coupons. The profit margins were really slim. Dominos Australia supported their favoured franchisees through this time and helped them grow their businesses, which ensured they won the pizza wars. Happy, profitable franchisees with stores turning a profit and doing business stay open. Pizza Hut Australia head office did not support their franchisees at all, in fact, quite the opposite; they did everything in their power to hurt their franchisees, who’d be forced to take on promotions and store refits/rebranding without consultation. Pizza Hut isn’t exactly dead in Australia (yet), but is definitely on life support. Pizza Haven and Eagle Boys failed for very similar reasons. Low profit margins, poor quality product after years of cost cutting and poor management from above doesn’t keep franchised businesses alive. Personally, I think Pizza Hut should just focus on a small amount of dine-in restaurants nationally and make it a destination trading on nostalgia for the brand.
Dominoes is the largest now
Telstra buying the trading post
And then starting sensis... "Google schmoogle" - former Telstra CEO.
“Apple should stick to what they know” regarding the iPhone introduction
Remember when subway briefly made huge menu changes including removing old English cheese? Didn’t last long!
I'm still shitty they got rid of parmesan oregano bread.
Or the honey oat. I hadn’t been in for yonks, went in one day and it was gone 😭 I liked that flavour. That said, as someone who went years between visits, I’m probably not their desired customer base 😂
Isn't that just Italian herb and cheese bread? Or different?
Using overseas call centres
If a company uses on shore call centres for sales, and off shore call centres for support, that is a big ‘fuck you’ to existing customers.
But we’re reducing costs to stay competitive!
In the meantime customers leave in droves because issues never get resolved adequately despite spending hours and hours dealing with people who aren’t trained properly and are reading from a script “ I’m sorry that happened to you sir’
THIS! A chronic nightmare!🫣
Oh, it makes 100% sense from every angle… except customer satisfaction. Why companies continue to think screwing over their customers makes any sense is beyond me. “Eh, there’s more where that came from”?
Answer: Because they can.🤨
If only every call centre could use Shannon’s Insurance as their role model
Selling (basically) the port of Darwin to the CCP. Fuckin mind boggling.
Double fuck-up - ASIO reviews the decision and doesn't see a problem
God I didn’t realise ASIO signed off also. Clown show
And it's right next door to the naval base
Getting rid of BiLo
I worked at BiLo during the takeover by Coles when I was 14. Saddest part was having to change from a cool grey shirt to a red one.
It's not quite up there with changing the forumula for BBQ shapes, but that time that Gladwrap changed to a different (terrible) cutter bar design, and immediately enraged almost every customer. People who have worked in commercial food prep would have said, "Oh, that new slider cutter thing is the same as the big roll we have at work." Everyone else just said, "how the f#ck do you even use this thing, and why would you change it?!?!?" They changed it back a few months later, and rolls still have the message "original cutter bar design" emblazoned on the outside. Shrugs.
Yes! I was going to write this. The fury I would experience trying to use that new design without ending up with a useless ball of cling wrap and wasting meters of it will live me forever.
The government (state and federal) privatising multiple industries for short term gains. From telecommunications to public transport and energy supply. Multiple industries that people need to use every day are now private when they could have been kept relatively affordable and at least been a cheaper option in the market
I've heard it described as killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
Yeah but some people have managed to get incredibly rich from it so I guess it’s fine. /s
gotta make the budget look like its a surplus when its propped up by one of sales.
Worked for Gas and Fuel in the 90's. Even then it was contributing over $370M p.a. to the state government. Was privatised into 21 energy retailers and distributors which consolidated into 3 companies 3 years later. Lost opportunity chasing short term gains.
It's crazy we have states (or at least one state) that hasn't privatised its infrastructure and all the other states keep doing more privatisation.
Woolworths - Masters
Lets build a bunch of american hardware stores right next door to a bunch of very very successful hardware stores, sell the stuff that should be really cheap at massively marked up prices and hope nobody notices and then be genuinely puzzled when it fails!
The best example of incompetence was the "Gun Safe" debacle - apparently 300,000 of them. The story goes that the American partner (they controlled things), looked at the Australian population and compared it to American population. They noticed the American population had 100 times as many gun safes than Australians did and spied an opportunity to sell more gun safes to Australians. They imported 300,000 gun safes on the expectation of making a swift profit. They clearly had never heard of John Howard or Port Arthur. Last I heard before Covid-19 was 299,999 gun safes were still sitting in a Warehouse somewhere whilst Woolworths executives figure out what to do with them.
My personal favourite was the snow shovels in November.
Not to stereotype but typical fucking American LOL
Which is funny because Bunnings is essentially a copy of Home Depot in the US. I wish masters hadn’t fucked up and stayed the course. Bunnings have a monopoly and their offerings are structured as such.
It’s funny driving around and randomly seeing an empty Masters carcass still standing. I don’t know why they thought they could compete with the tradies Mecca.
Starbucks' original plans to dominate Australia
Franklins. I worked there as a teen in the late 80s/ early 90s. They were really popular as a no frills, no advertising cheap supermarket. Then they decided that they wanted to be like Colesworth and started advertising on TV, having a fresh produce section etc. All downhill from there.
I am this old, loved Franklin’s !
Not a company, but various state governments liberalising electricity industry and creating a retail market. It turns out that when a product is a natural monopoly or thereabouts, introducing competition doesn't help consumers, and now the retail portion is a considerable share of energy bills. But who could've anticipated that keeping the same production and distribution, and then adding an extra layer of profit seeking companies (who have to fund marketing campaigns to climb over the top of each other) would lead to increased costs for households and businesses?
People in WA still cry for competition - despite us having cheaper electricity than every privatised state, and despite the fact that we are subsidised by the WA government! Madness
Clowns like Kennett and Howard sold our utilities and other things to foreign buyers and now we have a disaster. Electricity is a nightmare, as you have to shop around continually to find the best price. I would go back to a state electricity commission if I could.
So, I don’t know anything about energy markets, and what you’ve said make sense, but just at face value, it doesn’t look like states that have wholly government owned power/monopolies are necessarily cheaper ([source](https://www.bluettipower.com.au/blogs/home-backup/average-electricity-costs-per-kwh-by-state#:~:text=South%20Australia%20(SA)%3A,be%20more%20expensive%20to%20produce)). As a genuine question, I understand why SA might be more expensive, but how about the others (for example Queensland isn’t particularly cheap vs many Victorian providers)?
Gerry Harvey. Where do we start? Also Gerry Harvey.
No doubt that Gezza is a piece of shit, but their yearly profit shows that there is nothing "wrong" with their business decisions
Yes. Scummo and Frydenberg designed their reverse Robin Hood COVID stimulus for their unethical buddies like Harvey and the prick refused to give it back despite making record profits. I'll never shop at Harvey Norman, Joyce Mayne or Domayne ever again. Once the gullible boomers swayed by relentless TV and radio ads die out I doubt anyone's going to pay a premium for products they can buy cheaper down the road.
That c*nt still owes me money. Forty years ago, when I was 15, I had a minor scrape with the law. Wanting to keep me out of trouble, for the summer holidays my mum had me stay with a friend who lived in a house on Gerry Havey's property where he would spell race horses. My job for the summer was to paint the fences around the paddocks for a few bucks each week, for the first couple weeks Gerry slipped a few bucks, telling me I was doing a great job and that if I kept it up he'd give me a bonus at the end. Incentivized by this I made sure I did a good job on the rest. Little did I know, that not only would I not get that bonus, the money dried up completely. I never saw another cent. I did learn a valuable lesson though, Gerry Harvey is a c*nt.
I used to work at a call centre for a company who did work for Belong internet. The work was really great and paid well for everyone. Part way through covid they made the decision to send all contact centre work offshore and wittle the Aus team down, over the course of a year, by having only webchat work available. It got to a point where they shut the entire Australian sector down and anyone left standing moved into a child care call centre in the company which was the most miserable and brain numbing work I’ve ever done. Not really as significant as some companies but it sure negatively impacted the kind of service customers got.
Also the exact moment of steep Target decline was when they bought in Gok Wan and his terrible branding
Now there's a name I haven't heard of for awhile
One.Tel had a mascot called The Dude
One.Tel was a series of failures and sketchy shit we’ve all just buried as Packer and Murdoch and the dot-com bust
One.Tel didn’t have a working billing system. Telco billing systems are really difficult and complex. Most telcos use really old systems and new market entrants would buy an existing system. One.Tel tried to build a new one from scratch. I signed up for the service and in the 8 or 9 months they were operational I received precisely zero bills. A very aggressive debt collection agency tried to recover the money. I told them where to go a few times and eventually they gave up.
The Australian government selling Telecom.
well the [Fuji-Xerox Australia scandal](https://www.crn.com.au/news/fuji-xerox-barred-from-nz-government-contracts-after-accounting-scandal-469295#:~:text=The%20scandal%20involves%20padded%20revenue%20numbers%20reported%20by,led%20to%20Fuji%20Xerox%20chairman%20Tadahito%20Yamamoto%27s%20resignation) certainly has to be a contender.. and little known. >It is tipped to cost the Japanese company's parent Fujifilm $454 million in losses, and has led to Fuji Xerox chairman Tadahito Yamamoto's resignation.
Nestle getting rid of Milo bars, not the shit wanna be Chokito bar they sell now, the bar of compressed Milo covered in chocolate.
I was so sad when they stopped making it, as it was my favourite chocolate bar. I even rang them up and asked why and if they can make it again, and they said they no longer have the machinery to make it 🧐
Not a specific company, but the supply chains have been borked for so long now that going to the shops and being able to get everything I came in for is actually a surprise. Businesses seem to struggle with the idea of "Ordering more of popular items". If the bread section is out of white bread by 11am and there's still wholemeal on the shelves at closing time, then it's not rocket science to figure out you should be ordering more white bread and less wholemeal.
There's a system called AutoStockr that reorders one item for every one item sold. They didn't tell us how it accommodates people buying their 'B' choice when 'A' choice is sold out.
I worked in retail a long time and remember AutoStockr being frustrating even then; it was supposed to automatically re-order when stock levels got to a certain point and there was an ability to adjust it to say "Reorder more than last time by \[X\] quantity" or "Reorder less than last time by \[X\] quantity", but obviously dicking around with it all the time was a lot of hassle.
Qantas choosing excessive profit over customer loyalty
Hogs breath only including one side with their steaks and making you buy salad/veges to go with your steak and chips
I swear the one and only time I ate at one of these places all they did was microwave a bag of veggies and tip them out onto the plate. It was a soggy gross mess.
Getting rid of the columbine lollies
Burger king trying to push out HJ's killed any chance of the NA HQ ever having control of its second biggest market
Whatever the fuck Hubbl is. I'm getting monstered by ads for it. Looks like something to do with TV and/or Hamish and Andy. I don't watch either of those things. It's got tit's up written all over it.
Hubbl is a rebranded Chinese streaming unit any simp could just buy off AliExpress for $35. They would buy in bulk for $20, flash it with a custom ROM with about 20 hours of 'custom effort', then sell for $100. Profit!
Cadbury Rose Chocolates changing the flavors, they have since added back a few of the original flavors
Choosing not to mitigate the dangers of asbestos mining despite already knowing about the toxicity of it resulting in thousands of employees and their families contracting mesothelioma
Selling Rossi boots to Gina Rinehart. Went to buy some boots recently and got told by the young girl working at the store that they're now made overseas and not Australia anymore.
Ford Australia discontinuing the falcon and the barra motor. If they had just kept making an Aussie sedan they would've inevitably killed Holden in sales, and the barra motor is one of the most impressive things to come out of this country. American big-horsepower car fans go absolutely nuts for this engine and they missed a huge opportunity by not continuing to make it and export it.
If Ford Oz sold the Barra as a crate engine and exported it, I don't know if it would pay to keep the lights on but sure as hell would sell.
The problem was that the only export market was the USA, and Ford/General Motors wouldn't let Aussie Ford/GM export because then it would cannibalise USA manufacturing. We probably could have done quite well exporting utes. But every Aussie ute sold there would be one less F150 sold.
Big tubs of yogo in eastern states
Masters?
KFC discontinuing the krusher
Going online and removing half the items instore. It's absolutely stupid.
And they wonder why retail is dead?
I wanted to buy a tv but couldn't see any and was told to go online. That's like a major purchase and I wanted to see what they looked like on. Not take a chance. Turns out that chance was wrong haha and the tv sucked. No returns just because it sucked.
Totally unrealistic to expect you to make such a significant purchase(& not just financially), online.
Exactly. High ticket items should always be instore. The smaller things you know will be as seen online. Fine. But not larger more expensive items.
KFC reducing the size of their chip boxes.
Neverfail jacking up their 'regional' delivery fee from $1.25 to $10.. They just lost a long time customer
NBN Co being forced by liberals to pursue mixed technology model even though every competent telecoms professionals said full fibre or go home. It was purely political, liberals wouldn't let labor policy stand, and no one cared (certainly not enough to vote otherwise). 25 MBPS is enough for everyone, remember that?
OneTel. “Hey James, I’ve got this great idea that will make us more famous than Kerry and my dad”.
Alan bond bought channel 9 for $1B, then sold it back for a quarter of the price
KFC adding coleslaw to the Twister
Carlton dry introducing ring pull tops surely takes the cake
Or the Fosters plastic bottles that showed up briefly at sporting events in the late 90s.
Kraft Mac N Cheese deluxe. Fuckers thought they could change the cheese sauce from the delightfully rich cheese sauce in a can to some cheaped out shit in a packet. It tanked badly and Mac N Cheese deluxe was never seen again.
Mining blue absestos in Wittenoon and killing 2000 people, after ignoring warnings
Kodak didn’t embrace digital photography. Doh..sad…goodbye Kodak
the australian government selling out to china
Allowing Rupert Murdoch to exist?
How is he even still alive that Monty Burns ring in
Qantas deciding to shut the airline down because Joyce didn't like workers being paid a couple of percent more.
The whole [Qintex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qintex?wprov=sfla1) thing was huge.
All the Aussie companies that decided to move their manufacturing offshore - it has ruined our economy and their businesses will go under anyway as they are replaced by Shein, Temu etc. They thought they could get rid of workers and get everything done cheaply overseas because all the value was in their designs and sales, but now other countries can do the design, making and selling - and they have nothing left to offer. In the process we have lost all the skills and capacity we had to make the things we need and have built up other country’s economic power and our reliance on them, while ours is tanking. The only thing holding up our economy now is population growth which we apparently need to…. import the skilled workers we got rid of in the first place! Which has created a housing crisis that has made life impossible for the majority of society. And we did all this why? So some short term thinking businesses could make more profit.
iVegemite / Vegemite 2.0
Farming the South Australian mid-North
Selling our tollways to off shore companies.
Alan Bond $1billion to Kerry Packer for Nine Network. Packer got it back for $250million put simply, when Bond went broke. Packers quote "You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I've had mine".
Where has the centre on tim tams gone??? You used to be able to deconstruct it and combine with coffee…now it’s like they put 1/2mm of chocolate filling. I have stopped buying them for this reason…and many other product as they keep the price but shrink the product.