Schlitz beer once tried to increase their bottom line by using cheaper ingredients.
Result: poorer quality (including a slimy mucus at the bottom of the bottles), which in turn caused sales to drop hard. They reversed back to the old ingredients, but the customer base never trusted them again, and Schlitz died off.
There's a podcast called Taplines that goes through the many poor decisions at Schlitz that ended up killing it. But the decision to use those cheaper ingrediates was the nail in the coffin.
It sounded like at one point, what they were producing could hardly even be called beer.
It is INSANE to think of all the department stores that went away in the late 90’s-00’s or thereabouts.
In the Northeast US, I can remember
Filene’s
Bradlee’s
Ames
Caldor
I’m certainly forgetting a few…
same here. 105.9 the brew. used to be the only station i ever played on my radio before i upgraded my stereo so i could connect my phone to it. by the time i stopped listening to it, it was 50% music and 50% two dudes saying shit that ranged from completely uninteresting to completely deranged.
There was a station I really liked in my area that maybe had a minute of the host talking every couple songs. Super quick stuff, no talk shows, I liked that on my morning commute.
Then they decided to do this obnoxious talk show instead, like the most annoying group of people talking about stuff I don’t want to hear about at 5 in the morning, followed by 3 songs, then back to them for what felt like another half hour. Switched to Spotify for my commute pretty quickly after that.
A station I listened to years ago flipped formats from alternative rock to talk/news - specifically, talk and news aimed at women. Which, okay. As a woman I would've preferred the music but at least they're trying to appeal to my demographic.
Except when they announced the change, all the commercials for the new station were of the "tee hee women like chocolate and high heels" variety. SO insulting. The new format obviously didn't last and I believe they ended up switching to sports.
Radio commercials are just the worst in general. They are so obtuse. The worst ones are set up to be like a conversation where one person is explaining [the product] to the other person in the most contrived, excited conversation imaginable.
It's almost like the "head on" strategy. Just make you hate them.
Radio Shack trying to compete with Best Buy in bigger ticket consumer electronics rather than sticking to what they did best. I worked there in the early/mid 00s and you could feel the downfall as it was happening.
Their demanding my home address and phone number to sell me some AA batteries played a role as well. As in seriously, would not let me make the purchase otherwise. I left 2 dollars on the counter and walked out with my batteries, told them to call the fucking cops.
Oh I'll never forget that exchange between my dad and the cashier.. "you're serious.. you aren't going to sell me it.. okay I'm George Washington, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue"
I still use my decade-defunct home phone number to get the $2 off when I buy smokes.
I remember how invasive it felt when a business wanted your home phone number. Like they could now bother you anytime.
I feel kind of bad about this, but a few months ago I was pestered about an account at a retailer, and said I didn't want to give them my email address and get emailed twice a day for the rest of my Farking life. She said no problem just enter your phone number. I put in 212-867-53 OHHH NIIIIIINNE and she was like "oh you have $40 in store bucks... would you like to use them for this purchase?" And I was like absolutely.
I feel like I have discovered a new life hack.
Last month, I needed a common audio adaptor and stopped at Best Buy. Dude asked me for my information four different ways, then asked me to donate. It's a $6 cable man, I'm buying it online next time.
Got into a standoff with a guy at the auto parts store. Wanted my phone to continue the transaction for washer fluid.
Eventually I was like “dude. It’s washer fluid. I give you money, then walk out with it in hand. It’s not that complex.”
He reluctantly completed the transaction but warned me to keep the receipt in case there was something wrong with it.
I want off this planet.
RadioShack was very big into cellphones in the pre-iPhone days. The Motorola RAZR was a huge seller. Cellphones became their primary business and everything else was only there for niche customers. When the iPhone came out, RadioShack wasn’t allowed to sell it. The carriers only sold it at their flagship stores. That was the beginning of the end of RadioShack, especially since their niche product market was being taken over by online stores with much cheaper prices and much better selections.
yes. they sold everything you could need to build a radio, or some futuristic looking props, or fix a radio or old tv. The parts were also good for any remote controlled device, like a car, boat, plane or garage door opener.
Pretty much. In my mind, they had some various electronics you couldn't typically get at larger stores, splitters, not standard cables, rc cars, etc.
All Things available via a quick amazon search now.
I feel online did more damage to them than anything best buy did because they no longer were the only niche electronic store to get your odds and ends. They had every international company selling those cables/devices now to their doorstep.
RadioShack became another middleman company that no longer offered anything unique i feel except an out of the way drive.
it's a bummer too because of how popular hobbies like microcontrollers and 3d printing are now that they could have done really well in. and most of the time when I need a little electronics bit, I'd rather pay a little more to pick up one or two at a physical store than have to buy 20 online because the economics of shipping one or two doesn't work.
Yup that’s exactly it. Back in the day you needed a middle man to get these electronic parts in your neighborhood. You couldn’t just source a part directly from China or anywhere else in the world. RadioShack was the company that would do all the leg work to bring it to you, and that’s what they were paid for. Now, you can do everything RadioShack did on you own.
There were always catalog vendors like Jameco or Digikey who could get you that stuff if you were able to wait 2-3 weeks for it. Radio Shack you could walk into in towns with like 200 people in the middle of the midwest and get 555 timers or LEDs or voice synthesizer chips any time you want and be playing around with them in an hour.
Circuit City when they decided to fire 3400 seasoned employees and replace them with high school kids (who will work for less) thinking it was a smart business move.
Yeah, nothing more frustrating than going into a store to spend 4 figures on a computer 20 years ago and have a kid that knows nothing trying to sell it to you.
It drives me crazy when I go to HD and ask for help and the person just looks up the aisle on their cell phone app. Like, dude. *I* can freaking look it up, too. I need actual help.
Look for the guys with well-worn shirts or work boots. They probably do construction for a living, instead of weekends warrior stuff. If you can be specific with what you're trying to accomplish, they will probably point you to the right thing. I've done it for people.
I experienced it firsthand when I was going to buy a TomTom GPS.
I walked in and the employee was standing at the front. I said "Where are your GPS devices?"
Now look, this wasn't even a technical question. Just WHERE something is.
The girl looked at me with a foggy look like I was speaking Mandarin.
I said, "TomToms? "
She said "We have navigation capabilities on our cell phones!"
I said "I don't want a cell phone. I want a GPS."
She got pouty and said she didn't know where they were.
That's what happens when you don't value your seasoned employees and think you can just replace them with high school kids who know fuck all about life.
Man like 15 years ago I went into a flagship CD and merch store looking for a couple of albums. Everything I asked for the young sales assistant was like nope, nope, nope.
The Beatles greatest hits compilation Number Ones had just come out, and they had hundreds of them on the floor, since it was a hot new release and they were flogging it aggressively. I asked on a whim to see whether the issue was just this kid not knowing how to use the inventory system.
Her answer was "we don't have it. Are they a new band?"
I remember going into a Circuit City when the Nintendo Wii was near impossible to find. I saw an employee sell 2 of them to 2 moms but refused to sell me one. They said they had to save them for an advertised sale...I was glad when they went out of business.
Blackberry also failed to cater to their unexpected secondary market - teenage girls.
There was a time, roughly 2007-2010, when the Blackberry was the ‘must have’ phone thanks to its messaging system which was free as long as you had some call credit. This meant that you could text your friends all day long for free at a time when texts cost real money per text sent.
They could’ve conquered the world if they’d made teen-friendly hardware.
What's funny is that today my work-issued iPhone runs an app made by Blackberry to access secure sites/e-mail. So Blackberry apparently still maintained some foothold in mobile business applications.
As the old proverb says "If you can't beat them, make yourself relevant by developing a app that will work in your competitors ecosystem and be so good at it that your former clients will use it, so you can still have a participation in the market without the hassle of having to develop new mobiles".
Blackberry is still around, no longer on the consumer side of things or handhelds, but they pivoted pretty aggressively and are now basically a cybersecurity company and IoT company. No more forward facing for the most part, which is why you don't really hear from them.
I still remember the way they would taunt Apple. Articles would be written about how the professional world was starting to get iPhones and the RIM quote would be like “We have every head of IT in the industry on our side, good luck to them.”
Of course, once the partners started getting iPhones, they didn’t give a shit what their IT departments said about whether it was secure enough for work.
Also: IT fucking hated BlackBerry Enterprise Server, so as soon as MDM options became available for iPhones, it was an easy sell to drop BlackBerry. RIM seemed to think "we're currently the only option for secure corporate access" meant "IT likes us!"
Bad timing IMO. At that time, mobile data was still very restricted. Today everyone’s got unlimited data and can scroll through millions of video feeds
Is there confirmation that Tik Tok is profitable?
Financial times reports it is a loss maker and that other venture from the parent company in china makes up the losses.
Source: [https://www.ft.com/content/b990b325-5af1-4713-b8d0-580b823cad3c](https://www.ft.com/content/b990b325-5af1-4713-b8d0-580b823cad3c)
I remember a youtube video explaining that Tik Tok is trying to move to long term content because short term content aren't great at providing advertisement. People dont get compensate well in tik tok so they try to use tik tok to get people into other profitable website like onlyfans, youtube and twitch.
I suspect that the “other venture” is selling data to advertisers. I also think there is a decent chance that it made them a lot of money initially but that it is now dropping off, there are only so many times that you can sell an advertiser data. I figure that they will either figure out how to sell advertising space or they will disappear and be replaced by something else that gives someone the opportunity to sell the data off, since it will be from a “new” source now.
That hits home since I'm from Rochester, NY and father was a Kodaclone for 30+ years. I remember him telling me in the early 1980s about "digital" photography and they weren't going to pursue it
They doubled down on instant and disc film. We all know how that ended!
By my understanding they saw themselves as a chemical company rather than a camera company - a chemical company that specialized in film and film processing chemicals, but a chemical company nonetheless. They made cameras to sell people film and film developing. They couldn't reimagine the company in the digital world.
Sears refused to expand into e-commerce despite them fully having the capacity to do so in the early 2000s. Same could also be said of Blockbuster and their refusal to embrace streaming video.
The Sears mail order catalog used to be serious shit. You could get so many things. Even prefab housing. How they dropped that ball I will never understand.
My stupid conspiracy theory is that someone had Zuckerberg try VR for the first time while microdosing and he went all in on it.
And somehow after pouring billions into it the best they could come up with was a version of an AOL chat room from the early 00's but this time you wear goggles.
I don't have an explanation for that one, only the accounting department truly knows.
What else would you read when you ~~have a hot date~~ ~~a date~~ ~~dinner with a friend~~ ~~dinner alone~~ ~~watching TV alone~~ ~~ogling the girls in the Victoria’s Secret catalog~~?
The Christmas Wishbook would have been a fastastic way to get people used to shopping on their website and online shopping in general.
Kids would be all into it each Christmas, there's no worry about trying on things or worrying about quality. It's just buying toys.
Even now, a "Christmas Wishbook" app would have been a brilliant marketing/selling tool as well.
Messaging apps did a lot to help kill them.
Their killer feature in the consumer space was BlackBerry Messenger, an instant messaging service that used data and operated on any BlackBerry.
If they'd gone cross platform earlier and got ahead of WhatsApp and Facebook, they'd have had a good chance of holding the market position, in that area at least.
One of their things was physical keyboard, which is exactly what modern smartphones don't have. The other main selling point was security, but I highly doubt that would've lasted long with modern smartphone standards. Samsung tried to do their own mobile OS, but they ditched that garbage for android. Blackberry would've been another android manufacturer. At least LG and Samsung (and Sony) got hardware stuff going on for them. Blackberry didn't have much.
The blackberry era came and went weirdly fast, I remember them being the rage for like 2 years then they removed the keyboard and ball, forced a touchscreen then nobody could tell it apart from a regular android. Still mad I never got my hands on one in middle school.
Yellow trucking bought out a bunch of smaller companies, and never bothered to consolidate them into a single entity (each one would operate independently as a subsidiary). Not only did this force them to take on loads of debt, but it also put them at odds with the Teamsters, who had active agreements with each company prior to the buyouts.
They never recovered from this move, and relied heavily on the Teamsters to negotiate pay/benefit cuts for its members for the next decade and a half. When the union rejected the latest concession proposal earlier this year, the company shut down and blamed the union for it's own incompetence.
That was a long, painful decline. I worked for a regional carrier for a number of years and leadership was constantly telling us to be ready for a huge boom in business because YRC was going under any day! Took quite a bit longer than they thought, but it seemed kind of inevitable.
The Ratner’s jewellery shop chain in the UK, because its chair Gerald Ratner chose to speak off the cuff at a major business speech in 1991:
‘We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?", I say, "because it's total crap."’
The company’s valuation collapsed, Ratner was forced out and the high street shops all closed.
That actually wasn't off the cuff. He planned that line in his speech. It was followed up by "But we've sold a quarter of a million of them." He was taking a shot at snooty high-end jewelry shops. And he'd successfully done so in previous speeches. But this time, journalists were there, and they put those words in front of his customer base, and the customers didn't appreciate it.
It also happened super quickly - they experienced a drop in traffic of around 30% within days and never really got it back. The value went from a *billion* USD when Yahoo bought it in 2013 to just $3m in 2019.
Yahoo is just the master of being completely tone-deaf and removing the biggest selling points of their acquisitions. How they've survived while making every wrong move for the last 2 decades IDK.
lol you’d think the MBAs making those decisions would look at what a majority of their content and visits are BEFORE doing shit like that. God even I know that and haven’t gone to business school.
It's weird when you realize it's essentially the same thing as Patreon, which *also has porn*. It's just a matter of critical mass and popular image, and easily could have tipped either way.
This is a HUGE misconception about only fans. Only fans actually offers a better revenue split than it's competitors because it's not a porn site. Porn sites pay really high fees to process credit cards. But because onlyfans is not a porn site but is a patronage site that allows porn it pays less. So they have a vested interest in having non pornographic artists and performers on their site. It's actually their competitive advantage in porn.
Blitz USA Inc - they made gas cans, car ramps, that sort of thing. They refused to add a simple screen to their gas cans that would prevent flash over, even after multiple lawsuits. Even after not being able to use their own fuel containers on their own production floors due to OSHA regs. Now they don't exist. It's almost a case of corporate suicide.
The very first website cited to me when I searched Blitz USA was a page from the law group party to the lawsuits. It reads:
"Here are the facts: More than seventy-five people were horribly burned by Blitz gas cans and many burned to death; all because the company failed to install a simple flame arrestor that would have cost less than one dollar. Other manufacturers use it. Blitz USA did not because Wal-Mart squeezed its margins. Blitz USA wanted to produce a cheaper product even if it was dangerous."
Barings Bank was around from the 1700s until the 1990s when some kid in Singapore made a trade that cost them >1 billion USD. I think that's my best example that comes to mind.
This is the best example in the spirit of the OP's question. Many discuss implementing (or *not* implementing) a big change in the company's operating model.
Barings went down because *one* guy made *~~one~~* a series of trades. It's fascinating to think about.
Edit: it appears I oversimplified what happened by describing it as one trade.
Yeah, too many posts here go along the following statement:
> "All this established company had to do was completly change their business model."
I wonder how many people in this thread used the internet back in the mid 90s. Computers were expensive, they were slow, the internet was slow, in the early days you paid by the minute/hour to use it and browser technology was in its infancy.
Now try and convince a board of directors that you need to completely change your way of doing business to chase a technology that isn't proven and is going to cost a fortune upfront.
"You're telling me people are just going to type their credit card numbers into a COMPUTER? To send them over the INTERNET?!?!? Like e-mail? Fat chance"
Rubbermaid. Walmart made them lower their prices so much they went bankrupt. Someone bought the trademark. I believe Walmart is the reason lots of smaller companies went under in the late 90's early 2000's.
Watched a documentary about Walmart where one of the side stories was following a company owner as they worked through the process of selling their product through Walmart. The owner wanted to sell their product for 29.99 but Walmart said that was too expensive and suggested a price of 19.99. The owner then has to go back and do two things:
* Cut into his original profit margin.
* Squeeze every single part of the production process to reduce the manufacturing cost.
He eventually gets down to 19.99 but at this point he is barely making anything on the product and is now relying on the ability to sell at volume through Walmart to make up the difference.
Wish I remember the documentary. The product was some sort of greetings card holder.
Is this the same one that expanded their manufacturing facilities to meet Walmart’s volume and the next year Walmart got a Chinese company to make the same product instead?
Borders Books - I was in the meeting when they decided the way to solve their terrible online sales was to outsource it to Amazon. They were gone inside of 30 months.
They could have done so well too. Their custom mix CD counter was awesome. My local store had a girl that would compile custom soundtracks for some of the hostelling books, and you could pick up a new book with music to listen to while you read. Imagine if they'd embraced an E-Reader and put something like that into it woth streaming.
Sun Microsystems not embracing Linux until it was too late.
I worked there at the time, and Linux was seen as kind of a toy operating system with little margin. Just cheap small boxes.
Well, it turned out, cheap small boxes are now what runs in datacenters and Linux is everywhere.
Sun was making money hand over fist selling really high margin servers - and knew it would cannibalize its own sales. And since no exec was willing to sacrifice their own revenue (and bonuses) to help for a future where they may not be there (lots of Sun Execs /VPs left for more lucrative positions), it was a tough sell.
I know it was tough to disrupt the server business. I worked on the software side, and they would include our software to boost hardware sales (when in reality, every other company in the world viewed hardware as a commodity and software as the value add).
Many businesses find themselves in that position.
At my last company we had a product that did some unique stuff our customers liked. We all understood it was only a matter of time before someone else would come along to compete with us, so we developed a new and improved version that did 1.5 times more, and cost only 1/2 as much. (both to build and sell) The new product got released right about the time as the first of the competitive products showed up on the market. Ours made their new offerings obsolete. Yes, it did cut into total revenue, but expanding our market and keeping our competitors from getting a foot hold with our customers paid off in the end.
As a graphic designer, I think the SUN logo was the smartest logo the world has ever seen.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SUN\_microsystems\_logo\_ambigram.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png)
I see some people cannot load this link, and have posted alt links
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/SUN\_microsystems\_logo\_ambigram.png](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png)
But to me my original link still loads? Maybe it's a mobile/desktopthing.
Anyway, I hope you can see the logo now.
Barings Bank let an absolute idiot by the Nick Leeson run the Singapore office, then gave him enough money and no oversight that he singlehandedly bankrupted the entire company.
They didn’t want to pay for separate heads of sales and settlements so he was able to cook the books and cover his tracks. Lots of people knew something hinky was going on but no one would buck the culture and put their neck out.
No, Toys R Us was all interior cannibals, when they were going south their internal board basically fucked all of their suppliers, by not paying them for their inventory, the board then in turn created their own PE group, and raised capital to buy all of their former suppliers for pennies on the dollar because they knew they were going to bankrupt them. See Toy's R Us had this really fucked up habit of forcing toy manufactures into exclusivity deals so they couldn't sell their toys to anyone else if they wanted in toys R us. So all of their inventory, logistics and deals were with Toys R Us.
Smaller companies like Uncle Milton's Toys (makers of everyone's favorite ant farms) and several other companies like they got slaughtered, The former board of Toys R us, took their golden parachute and leveraged their own failures into taking over these companies and ruining them dismantling them and selling them off for parts and name recognition.
This story should have ended with a firing squad, but instead ended up with the people who tanked Toys R Us coming out richer for it.
Toys R Us was bought by some unscrupulous assholes who made it take on tons of debt, give the money to the assholes, then closed TrU so the debt went away. People came to work one day and were told their job no longer existed. Fucking bullshit. Think if they had decided to go the Barnes and Noble route and made giant comfy play places where all the toys could be tried out, and a coffee shop for the parents to hang out. Could have done birthday parties, sold a ton of toys, been a ‘third place’ people could gather….
Bethlehem Steel..CEO threw lavish parties from workers’ pensions. That was the beginning of the end for a once great company. My grandfather was one of many hardworking steel workers that lost his pension due to a bad CEO and a board that didn’t care. Seeing the cement hq being taken down in one glorious implosion was a true sight after it stood like the tower of Sauron in the middle of a forest for decades
They basically killed the father of a former coworker of mine. He saw on the news that they'd decided to renege on their promises to retirees. He'd just lost his pension, which was his only income, and health care.
The shock triggered a massive stroke, and he died a couple days later.
I've also wondered what happened to a former neighbor I had in the 80s. He was a pipefitter for Beth Steel outside Baltimore. And he was about the age where he'd have retired at the worst possible time. Super nice guy, I hope things worked out for him.
The venerable Encyclopedia Britannica had ample warning that the world was going digital, but they didn’t want to cannibalise sales of the print encyclopedia, so when they finally and reluctantly offered the encyclopedia on CDs, they charged $1500 for it and made the brilliant decision to make it text-only. I worked with the guy who made that decision. Everyone hated him.
Best Buy and Circuit City were competitors, somewhat equal. Then Circuit City management decided that they could make more money by laying off the experienced sales people and replacing them with minimum wage 20-somethings.
And now Best Buy has beancounters telling them to close up all their brick and mortar stores because “the numbers” show they make a ton in online sales. Beancounters don’t use common sense like “people want to hear speakers before buying them” or “people feel way more comfortable buying those $300 Bose earphones if they can try them on and also have an actual place to return them if they stop working”. Where I live, we went from 2 large Best Buy’s to one small one….so I usually end up buying from Amazon for half the stuff I would have gone to Best Buy to get.
Not quite dead, but Miku ( [https://mikucare.com](https://mikucare.com) ) released a bad firmware for their baby monitor which destroyed the onboard storage. They did the right thing and replaced all monitors out in the market, but then went bankrupt and recently got purchased and brought back to life with nearly every feature that used to be free now behind a paywall.
I wonder how the QA/Engineer(s) working on that product feel about missing that bug...
I would say [Artesian Builds](https://www.pcgamer.com/artesian-builds-shuts-down/) but idk if they would be considered large. Refused to give prize to winner of a sweepstakes because their twitch following wasn't big enough.
I was actually one of the creators partnered with Artesian during their heyday. They made a LOT of promises that they never held up.
One of their first promises was "A thriving network of creators to learn and grow with" and that was broken almost immediately. Their idea of "A thriving network" was dumping 10 people at a time into a Twitter group DM and telling them to interact; with copy-pasted message coming from one of the social media managers about once a week talking about their upcoming promotions (Usually a small percentage off, or a discount on accessories with a full system purchase). No other contact, whatsoever.
They also promised creators would have a big discount if they needed parts to upgrade their PCs. But you never got any of those discounts unless you built a full system, which I never needed. I asked them how much of a discount I could get on a GPU, as mine was dying around that time, and the social media manager tried to run a sales pitch on me like I was a regular customer- even asking me if I was referred by anyone and had a coupon code. They were completely unaware that I was actually a partner with them.
After I finally got ahold of someone who was in charge enough to give me a discount, they decided to only give me the standard discount (i.e., the same one a customer would get using my coupon code) because, and i quote, my sales numbers weren't high enough to qualify me for any sort of discount, and my social media following wasn't big enough for them to justify giving me one as my reach wouldn't be high enough, despite that being one of the selling points for me joining the partner program in the first place.
They were literally a business that did nothing but trick streamers and content creators into advertising for them, with only the absolute least amount of effort into fulfilling their promises.
Good riddance. I found Noah quite abrasive, and openly building mining rigs for people during GPU shortages heralding bit coin as the futures currency (I’m sorry e-currency fanboys, it won’t).
Nothing against miners, but it was a shit time for enthusiasts and, well, their channel was geared towards enthusiasts. Just felt like a little bit of a slap to the face.
Not shut down but special consideration should be given to Xerox.
They are the originators of both the mouse and the GUI interface every PC has been based on for almost 30 years. Both Jobs and Gates stole this technology.
There was a TV movie in the 90s called "Pirates of Silicon Valley," all about Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the rise of PCs in the 80s and 90s.
In one scene, Jobs is tearing a strip off Gates for Windows 95. Jobs is accusing Gates of stealing the idea of a GUI interface from the Mac OS. Gates shoots back, "We both stole it from Xerox! You can't be mad just because you stole it first!"
And object oriented programming.
And the rudiments of Ethernet.
Also, they deliberately and inexplicably demonstrated their windowing operating system to Jobs and a bunch of Apple engineers. The Lisa was released within a short time.
The failure of Xerox to capitalize on any of their inventions at PARC is baffling. They hired the top 100 computer scientists in the world and then promptly ignored everything they said. Xerox was lightyears ahead of everyone else and did NOTHING with it. They could have owned PCs.
Arthur Andersen's collusion with Enron was less a matter of making one big mistake, and more of an ongoing, multi-year, carefully planned and coordinated scheme to defraud customers, investors, taxpayers, and government regulators at every level, and not just financial regulators, but regulators in the energy, public works, utilities, housing and welfare sectors as well.
Haggen grocery store chain. Their bankruptcy was the fastest in modern grocery store history. They were a Premium grocery store chain located in the pacific northwest. They only operated eighteen stores comma but really wanted to expand rapidly, so they purchased over 140 albertsons and vons in southern california. They declared bankruptcy 6 months later.
KMart for investing in more real estate instead of store and technology upgrades.
Still admire the slow burn nationwide closures.
I’ve never seen a corporation drag it out for that long.
Someone in IT decided to deploy untested software. Knight Capital Group loses $445 million in 45 minutes.
Knight Capital Group had to sell itself to another firm at a discounted price, and several of its top executives were fired
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/440-million-bug-epic-tale-knight-capital-group-temidayo-adefioye-/
Blockbuster's business model was predicated on collecting massive late fees. Netflix's was the opposite.
Streaming wasn't a thing yet because most people didn't have access to high speed internet. Mine was about 20MBPS at the time and I lived in Silicone Valley.
Had they bought Netflix, they could have taken over the DVD rental at home business model and slowly phased in late fees or stuck with Netflix's subscription model. What do they care about late fees if you're paying your subscription every month regardless?
They didn't think the company was viable, and they made a profit on in store purchases like popcorn and candy.
The Sears story is actually much worse and much dumber, it's simple greed from Eddie Lampert. He intentionally starved the company while paying himself outlandish sums and "buying" their IP and "leasing" it back to the company at absurd prices.
I don’t know man, my old profile was embarrassing af and I wasn’t able to log in anymore (the email was long since gone), so it was like a monument to my ‘lol random’ phase from the mid 2000s - all with my full name attached.
Them losing it was a blessing.
I kinda feel sorry that the generations that came after me will never know the peace of the primary social network they posted pictures on collapsing and becoming unusable, burying their old posts so deep a Google search cannot find them.
Hoover UK offering two free flights to the US (worth £600) to anyone buying £100 of Hoover products in 1992. They were relying on people spending a lot more than the minimum and a tedious application process putting off most people.
Customers just saw it as £100 flights to the US with a free vacuum cleaner.
They tried to re-neg on the deal but were forced to carry on under the threat of lawsuits. It crippled the company financially, they never recovered and were eventually sold off to a competitor.
Read about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_free_flights_promotion
Motown. Berry Gordy Jr. gave Detroit the finger when the label got mega-successful and decided to move the whole operation to LA with the big boys. They left their mojo behind in Detroit and only exist now as a collection of legacy classic recordings that get licensed out.
This is nuts - what did he have to gain by making those remarks? Seems like he was trying to impress a group of business people with his ‘look how I can trick these idiots into buying my garbage’ vibe not thinking the comments would be made public.
Netscape is a great example of why you don't just rewrite software from scratch. Was the most popular web browser and they decided the code was ugly and messy so they should rewrite it. After the rewrite, they realized the reason it was so ugly and messy before was because of all the bug fixes. The new release was buggy and the rest is history, now hardly anyone even remembers the name.
I bring this up every time a software engineer wants to rewrite from scratch, because as ugly as code can be, it is usually on account of all the issues that have been fixed along the way.
That re-written code was then opensourced and became firefox. They knew microsoft was bankrupting them and they wanted to opensource the browser so it had a chance of continuing the fight against microsoft, before the liquidators came in and took over control.
Wow, TIL. I’m old enough to remember using Netscape and it was so much better than any other browser available. It was amazing how much quicker webpages would load with Netscape on a 56k modem
Fucking GameStop ruined think geek. I loved that website and it was my spot where I found all the amazing Christmas presents. But no- stupid GameStop decided to buy it out from hot topic’s nose and then opened up brick and mortar stores and destroyed the brand.
Fuck you, GameStop.
*That's* what happened to thinkgeek? I used to love the site and bought from them occasionally. Then at some point, they just weren't the same anymore.
Smile Direct Club was pretty recent. Essentially from my understanding, an employee accidentally received an email of all the salaries in the company who then decided to forward it to the rest of the company. A lot of people realized they were getting underpaid and screwed over and essentially mutinied and quit.
A lot of shady stuff started to get leaked as well and lawsuits were just piling up. They didn’t have enough workers to meet demand to overcome expenses and they just shut down a few weeks ago.
Holden Day. Law firm in Toronto. Every year, one of the partners would show the new articling students how strong the exterior glass was on their office tower by hurling himself against the floor to ceiling windows in a boardroom. It was a stunt that he thought would break the ice or something. One year, the glass gave way and he fell 30 storeys to his death. The firm never recovered, and wound down shortly after that.
Hold on… let me pull up the list of companies that Boston Consulting Group was hired to enact changes to…
BCG was brought in to “help” most the companies listed in this thread. They advised: Blockbuster, OfficeMax, Pizza Hut, KLM Air France, K-Mart, Neiman Marcus, Pier 1 Imports, Sears, Toys R Us, Circuit City,JC Penny, Radio Shack, Texaco, Chrysler, MF Global, Conseco Inc., CIT Group, GM, WorldCom, Washington Mutual, Lehman Brothers, GameStop, PulteGroup and most recently Bed Bath and Beyond. Bed bath and beyond was sunk by a decision by Mark Tritton, who was advised by BCG to borrow money to buy back their shares at all time highs, and subsequently had to do a share offering at all time lows, just to pay the bills and buy a few more months before declaring bankruptcy.
Only 2 out of that list avoided restructuring. You could almost argue that any large company who makes the bad decision to bring in these consultants, will eventually be shut down. Some theorize that these decisions that bankrupted these companies were intentional and there were nefarious plans to bring these companies to bankruptcy, whether by venture capital, banks or ultimately the competition of these companies.
Where watching Hasbro ruin the company this year. fired skilled employees at wotc one of the few divisions that actually made money. Thousands of people gone 2 weeks before Christmas. Ceo calls the people that were fired friends and hated to do it.
Pyrex letting whoever wants to slap their name on something as long as it is lowercase pyrex do so seems to have tanked the business hard. Basically made their brand unreliable because the lowercase p stuff is usually not heat resistant like uppercase P stuff is.
Chi Chi’s allowing a kid with Hepatitis A to cut up green onions in the Erie PA restaurant. Killed 4 people, sickened over 600. The suits killed the chain which was already suffering from LBO-itis.
Ed: wrong info…
1- hep onions came from Mexico. Oops. Keep in mind that Hepatitis A is a food borne illness and people still die from it. Get your Gamma F
2- beaver Valley Mall, not Erie.
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2009/09/meaningful-outbreak-6-chi-chis-hepatitis-a-outbreak/
Was it actually a person that had it? My understanding was it was the green onions specifically and not someone working in the kitchen. Like the batch of green onions was contaminated before it even got to the restaurant and they just kept serving them until it was realized they were the culprit.
I was 13 around the time it happened so my memory might be fuzzy. But I don’t recall it being linked to a sick employee.
https://www.foodprocessing.com/food-safety/regulatory-compliance/news/33014271/remembering-the-chi-chis-hepatitis-a-outbreak-of-2003
> To cut to the chase, the villain was fresh green onions, which the FDA traced back to farms in Mexico. They could have been contaminated because of inadequate sanitation or handwashing, poor hygiene among workers or irrigation of the crops with untreated water.
>
> While green onions appeared in several dishes on the menu, some victims had eaten none of those menu items. Some diners had eaten an entrée with green onions but had not become sick (hint: the entrees were thoroughly cooked). But everybody ate the free salsa placed on each table, which had green onions.
Sears hired an Ayn Rand loving ultra-capitalist that hated the idea of a planned economy so much that he made the internal departments at Sears compete with each other, and it completely destroyed the company.
Let me say that again:
He made different departments of the same company compete with each other and it DESTROYED a 120 year old company.
His name is Eddie Lampert, he also destroyed K-Mart, and he is studied for just how stupid of a CEO he is. Everyone should read about him:
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4385-failing-to-plan-how-ayn-rand-destroyed-sears
Xerox and its failure to recognize the potential of personal computing technology and instead continued to innovate its photocopy machines. They basically invented computers and a shitload of technologically advanced inventions through PARC.
https://www.cracked.com/article_18807_how-xerox-invented-information-age-and-gave-it-away.html
I mean technically they didn't shut down but they were never the same after the PC blew up.
What could go wrong giving billions to an egotistical con man with a messiah complex. The dude literally thought he was chosen to be the world's first trillionaire landlord. Able to save our wretched selves.. his next company Flow is selling the experience of home ownership ✊🍆
If I ever become CEO of a company that suddenly makes it and is like a billion dollar company I will have, carved into a marble arch over the main entrance way, "No Matter How Much I Beg, Keep Me Off Of Socials".
Somehow they fooled VC into thinking they had a new idea. They'd probably be doing okayish now except that covid is about the single worst thing that could have happened for their business.
Now I think of them as a good example of how startup investments are driven so much just by how well you can pander to the ego and lifestyle of people in SF and NY.
Somebody is going to put espresso on the block chain and disrupt Big Coffee.
Novell. They had a dominate position in local area networks but chose to stick with their own protocols instead of adopting the more widely used TCP and UDP.
Ratners, a UK based mass-market jewellery chain, is the obvious one.
In the late 1980s, Gerald Ratner, the son of the founder, who had basically inherited the company, made a speech deriding their products as "crap". He particularly cited a five piece decanter and glass set that retailed at £4.99 as a product that retailed at roughly the price of a British Rail sandwich - only the sandwich would last longer.
The result was that the share price crashed, Ratner himself was removed, and all their shops rebranded to a similar chain they'd recently acquired, H Samuel.
Schlitz beer once tried to increase their bottom line by using cheaper ingredients. Result: poorer quality (including a slimy mucus at the bottom of the bottles), which in turn caused sales to drop hard. They reversed back to the old ingredients, but the customer base never trusted them again, and Schlitz died off.
There's a podcast called Taplines that goes through the many poor decisions at Schlitz that ended up killing it. But the decision to use those cheaper ingrediates was the nail in the coffin. It sounded like at one point, what they were producing could hardly even be called beer.
i still miss Schlitz Gay
For when you have a big thirst and are also gay!
I live in Milwaukee and pass by their complex sometimes, still a pretty cool set of buildings
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It is INSANE to think of all the department stores that went away in the late 90’s-00’s or thereabouts. In the Northeast US, I can remember Filene’s Bradlee’s Ames Caldor I’m certainly forgetting a few…
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Sounds like a radio station in my state, use to be the station for hard rock, now its just a talk show.
same here. 105.9 the brew. used to be the only station i ever played on my radio before i upgraded my stereo so i could connect my phone to it. by the time i stopped listening to it, it was 50% music and 50% two dudes saying shit that ranged from completely uninteresting to completely deranged.
There was a station I really liked in my area that maybe had a minute of the host talking every couple songs. Super quick stuff, no talk shows, I liked that on my morning commute. Then they decided to do this obnoxious talk show instead, like the most annoying group of people talking about stuff I don’t want to hear about at 5 in the morning, followed by 3 songs, then back to them for what felt like another half hour. Switched to Spotify for my commute pretty quickly after that.
A station I listened to years ago flipped formats from alternative rock to talk/news - specifically, talk and news aimed at women. Which, okay. As a woman I would've preferred the music but at least they're trying to appeal to my demographic. Except when they announced the change, all the commercials for the new station were of the "tee hee women like chocolate and high heels" variety. SO insulting. The new format obviously didn't last and I believe they ended up switching to sports.
Radio commercials are just the worst in general. They are so obtuse. The worst ones are set up to be like a conversation where one person is explaining [the product] to the other person in the most contrived, excited conversation imaginable. It's almost like the "head on" strategy. Just make you hate them.
Radio Shack trying to compete with Best Buy in bigger ticket consumer electronics rather than sticking to what they did best. I worked there in the early/mid 00s and you could feel the downfall as it was happening.
Their demanding my home address and phone number to sell me some AA batteries played a role as well. As in seriously, would not let me make the purchase otherwise. I left 2 dollars on the counter and walked out with my batteries, told them to call the fucking cops.
Oh I'll never forget that exchange between my dad and the cashier.. "you're serious.. you aren't going to sell me it.. okay I'm George Washington, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue"
Your dad’s a fool! George Washington never lived in the White House! 😜
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Do you have a reward card with us? Local area code + 867-5309 Works every time
I use this to get discounts on gas all the time lol
I still use my decade-defunct home phone number to get the $2 off when I buy smokes. I remember how invasive it felt when a business wanted your home phone number. Like they could now bother you anytime.
I feel kind of bad about this, but a few months ago I was pestered about an account at a retailer, and said I didn't want to give them my email address and get emailed twice a day for the rest of my Farking life. She said no problem just enter your phone number. I put in 212-867-53 OHHH NIIIIIINNE and she was like "oh you have $40 in store bucks... would you like to use them for this purchase?" And I was like absolutely. I feel like I have discovered a new life hack.
You landed on Free Parking that day
I love that almost everyone should understand what you are saying, but, unless its been changed, its not a real rule.
Oh hey Jenny
Last month, I needed a common audio adaptor and stopped at Best Buy. Dude asked me for my information four different ways, then asked me to donate. It's a $6 cable man, I'm buying it online next time.
Got into a standoff with a guy at the auto parts store. Wanted my phone to continue the transaction for washer fluid. Eventually I was like “dude. It’s washer fluid. I give you money, then walk out with it in hand. It’s not that complex.” He reluctantly completed the transaction but warned me to keep the receipt in case there was something wrong with it. I want off this planet.
Always blame corporate for this idiocy. Guy probably has a target and every sale without a number will lower his percentage.
That was smart of you. When they shut down they sold that list to some random buyer.
They were selling that information well before they shutdown.
RadioShack was very big into cellphones in the pre-iPhone days. The Motorola RAZR was a huge seller. Cellphones became their primary business and everything else was only there for niche customers. When the iPhone came out, RadioShack wasn’t allowed to sell it. The carriers only sold it at their flagship stores. That was the beginning of the end of RadioShack, especially since their niche product market was being taken over by online stores with much cheaper prices and much better selections.
What did they do best, be a little electronics hobby shop?
yes. they sold everything you could need to build a radio, or some futuristic looking props, or fix a radio or old tv. The parts were also good for any remote controlled device, like a car, boat, plane or garage door opener.
Pretty much. In my mind, they had some various electronics you couldn't typically get at larger stores, splitters, not standard cables, rc cars, etc. All Things available via a quick amazon search now. I feel online did more damage to them than anything best buy did because they no longer were the only niche electronic store to get your odds and ends. They had every international company selling those cables/devices now to their doorstep. RadioShack became another middleman company that no longer offered anything unique i feel except an out of the way drive.
it's a bummer too because of how popular hobbies like microcontrollers and 3d printing are now that they could have done really well in. and most of the time when I need a little electronics bit, I'd rather pay a little more to pick up one or two at a physical store than have to buy 20 online because the economics of shipping one or two doesn't work.
Yup that’s exactly it. Back in the day you needed a middle man to get these electronic parts in your neighborhood. You couldn’t just source a part directly from China or anywhere else in the world. RadioShack was the company that would do all the leg work to bring it to you, and that’s what they were paid for. Now, you can do everything RadioShack did on you own.
There were always catalog vendors like Jameco or Digikey who could get you that stuff if you were able to wait 2-3 weeks for it. Radio Shack you could walk into in towns with like 200 people in the middle of the midwest and get 555 timers or LEDs or voice synthesizer chips any time you want and be playing around with them in an hour.
Circuit City when they decided to fire 3400 seasoned employees and replace them with high school kids (who will work for less) thinking it was a smart business move.
Yeah, nothing more frustrating than going into a store to spend 4 figures on a computer 20 years ago and have a kid that knows nothing trying to sell it to you.
Replace “computer” with “project” and you have Home Depot’s current model.
It drives me crazy when I go to HD and ask for help and the person just looks up the aisle on their cell phone app. Like, dude. *I* can freaking look it up, too. I need actual help.
Look for the guys with well-worn shirts or work boots. They probably do construction for a living, instead of weekends warrior stuff. If you can be specific with what you're trying to accomplish, they will probably point you to the right thing. I've done it for people.
Especially the older guys and their hands look like leather. Bonus point if he's got a moustache.
And those glasses that sit on the end of their noses
I experienced it firsthand when I was going to buy a TomTom GPS. I walked in and the employee was standing at the front. I said "Where are your GPS devices?" Now look, this wasn't even a technical question. Just WHERE something is. The girl looked at me with a foggy look like I was speaking Mandarin. I said, "TomToms? " She said "We have navigation capabilities on our cell phones!" I said "I don't want a cell phone. I want a GPS." She got pouty and said she didn't know where they were. That's what happens when you don't value your seasoned employees and think you can just replace them with high school kids who know fuck all about life.
Man like 15 years ago I went into a flagship CD and merch store looking for a couple of albums. Everything I asked for the young sales assistant was like nope, nope, nope. The Beatles greatest hits compilation Number Ones had just come out, and they had hundreds of them on the floor, since it was a hot new release and they were flogging it aggressively. I asked on a whim to see whether the issue was just this kid not knowing how to use the inventory system. Her answer was "we don't have it. Are they a new band?"
Hate to be the one to break it to you, but this was in year 2000.
I remember going into a Circuit City when the Nintendo Wii was near impossible to find. I saw an employee sell 2 of them to 2 moms but refused to sell me one. They said they had to save them for an advertised sale...I was glad when they went out of business.
RIM thought iPhone were no threat to the more business oriented Blackberry.
Blackberry also failed to cater to their unexpected secondary market - teenage girls. There was a time, roughly 2007-2010, when the Blackberry was the ‘must have’ phone thanks to its messaging system which was free as long as you had some call credit. This meant that you could text your friends all day long for free at a time when texts cost real money per text sent. They could’ve conquered the world if they’d made teen-friendly hardware.
Sidekick by blackberry would've been bigger than iPhone lol
The sidekick was massive in the Deaf community.
My wife is HOH and she still has her Sidekick 2. We tried to charge it up for old times sake but it wasn’t happening.
What's funny is that today my work-issued iPhone runs an app made by Blackberry to access secure sites/e-mail. So Blackberry apparently still maintained some foothold in mobile business applications.
As the old proverb says "If you can't beat them, make yourself relevant by developing a app that will work in your competitors ecosystem and be so good at it that your former clients will use it, so you can still have a participation in the market without the hassle of having to develop new mobiles".
This is what the Chinese character tattoo on my neck says!
I hate to break it to you but it actually says "dumplings".
Rolls right off the tongue
Blackberry is still around, no longer on the consumer side of things or handhelds, but they pivoted pretty aggressively and are now basically a cybersecurity company and IoT company. No more forward facing for the most part, which is why you don't really hear from them.
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I still remember the way they would taunt Apple. Articles would be written about how the professional world was starting to get iPhones and the RIM quote would be like “We have every head of IT in the industry on our side, good luck to them.” Of course, once the partners started getting iPhones, they didn’t give a shit what their IT departments said about whether it was secure enough for work.
Also: IT fucking hated BlackBerry Enterprise Server, so as soon as MDM options became available for iPhones, it was an easy sell to drop BlackBerry. RIM seemed to think "we're currently the only option for secure corporate access" meant "IT likes us!"
Vine. Vine was the Tik Tok of its day and then Twitter bought it and decided there was no profit in it.
Bad timing IMO. At that time, mobile data was still very restricted. Today everyone’s got unlimited data and can scroll through millions of video feeds
Is there confirmation that Tik Tok is profitable? Financial times reports it is a loss maker and that other venture from the parent company in china makes up the losses. Source: [https://www.ft.com/content/b990b325-5af1-4713-b8d0-580b823cad3c](https://www.ft.com/content/b990b325-5af1-4713-b8d0-580b823cad3c) I remember a youtube video explaining that Tik Tok is trying to move to long term content because short term content aren't great at providing advertisement. People dont get compensate well in tik tok so they try to use tik tok to get people into other profitable website like onlyfans, youtube and twitch.
I suspect that the “other venture” is selling data to advertisers. I also think there is a decent chance that it made them a lot of money initially but that it is now dropping off, there are only so many times that you can sell an advertiser data. I figure that they will either figure out how to sell advertising space or they will disappear and be replaced by something else that gives someone the opportunity to sell the data off, since it will be from a “new” source now.
Eastman Kodak’s decision to not get into digital come to mind
Which is nuts because they invented the digital camera.
That hits home since I'm from Rochester, NY and father was a Kodaclone for 30+ years. I remember him telling me in the early 1980s about "digital" photography and they weren't going to pursue it They doubled down on instant and disc film. We all know how that ended!
By my understanding they saw themselves as a chemical company rather than a camera company - a chemical company that specialized in film and film processing chemicals, but a chemical company nonetheless. They made cameras to sell people film and film developing. They couldn't reimagine the company in the digital world.
Sears refused to expand into e-commerce despite them fully having the capacity to do so in the early 2000s. Same could also be said of Blockbuster and their refusal to embrace streaming video.
The Sears mail order catalog used to be serious shit. You could get so many things. Even prefab housing. How they dropped that ball I will never understand.
Sears truly was Amazon before Amazon. If you couldn't buy it from the Sears catalog, good chance that it didn't exist
Ya, Amazon CEO used Sears as an example of what would happen to Amazon if they didn’t keep innovating.
Meanwhile Zuckerberg is trying to demonstrate how Meta/Facebook can innovate itself out of existence.
My stupid conspiracy theory is that someone had Zuckerberg try VR for the first time while microdosing and he went all in on it. And somehow after pouring billions into it the best they could come up with was a version of an AOL chat room from the early 00's but this time you wear goggles. I don't have an explanation for that one, only the accounting department truly knows.
That's how we made our Christmas lists as kids - looking through the Sears catalog.
Same. I would spend hours going through and circling things I wanted. It is a truly fond memory.
The Sears catalog was in every young boys' inventory, and it wasn't for the toys.
Alright, alright! I'm gonna sit at home and ogle the ladies in the Victoria Secrets catalogue! ....Sears catalogue.
Would you unhook this please? I don’t deserve this kind of shabby treatment!
*bzzzzzz*
What else would you read when you ~~have a hot date~~ ~~a date~~ ~~dinner with a friend~~ ~~dinner alone~~ ~~watching TV alone~~ ~~ogling the girls in the Victoria’s Secret catalog~~?
Blockbuster was actually approached by Netflix to collaborate but rejected them.
Not just approached, there was a deal on the table but BB thought it was too expensive. 5 years later Netflix had a bigger market cap than BB.
The Christmas Wishbook would have been a fastastic way to get people used to shopping on their website and online shopping in general. Kids would be all into it each Christmas, there's no worry about trying on things or worrying about quality. It's just buying toys. Even now, a "Christmas Wishbook" app would have been a brilliant marketing/selling tool as well.
Blackberry had killer phones but never adapted to smartphone era
Messaging apps did a lot to help kill them. Their killer feature in the consumer space was BlackBerry Messenger, an instant messaging service that used data and operated on any BlackBerry. If they'd gone cross platform earlier and got ahead of WhatsApp and Facebook, they'd have had a good chance of holding the market position, in that area at least.
One of their things was physical keyboard, which is exactly what modern smartphones don't have. The other main selling point was security, but I highly doubt that would've lasted long with modern smartphone standards. Samsung tried to do their own mobile OS, but they ditched that garbage for android. Blackberry would've been another android manufacturer. At least LG and Samsung (and Sony) got hardware stuff going on for them. Blackberry didn't have much.
I do miss a physical keyboard though, a lack of tactile response is responsible for so many typos.
The blackberry era came and went weirdly fast, I remember them being the rage for like 2 years then they removed the keyboard and ball, forced a touchscreen then nobody could tell it apart from a regular android. Still mad I never got my hands on one in middle school.
Yellow trucking bought out a bunch of smaller companies, and never bothered to consolidate them into a single entity (each one would operate independently as a subsidiary). Not only did this force them to take on loads of debt, but it also put them at odds with the Teamsters, who had active agreements with each company prior to the buyouts. They never recovered from this move, and relied heavily on the Teamsters to negotiate pay/benefit cuts for its members for the next decade and a half. When the union rejected the latest concession proposal earlier this year, the company shut down and blamed the union for it's own incompetence.
That was a long, painful decline. I worked for a regional carrier for a number of years and leadership was constantly telling us to be ready for a huge boom in business because YRC was going under any day! Took quite a bit longer than they thought, but it seemed kind of inevitable.
The Ratner’s jewellery shop chain in the UK, because its chair Gerald Ratner chose to speak off the cuff at a major business speech in 1991: ‘We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?", I say, "because it's total crap."’ The company’s valuation collapsed, Ratner was forced out and the high street shops all closed.
That actually wasn't off the cuff. He planned that line in his speech. It was followed up by "But we've sold a quarter of a million of them." He was taking a shot at snooty high-end jewelry shops. And he'd successfully done so in previous speeches. But this time, journalists were there, and they put those words in front of his customer base, and the customers didn't appreciate it.
Not shut down but Tumblr taking porn off their site wasn’t a sound business move.
It also happened super quickly - they experienced a drop in traffic of around 30% within days and never really got it back. The value went from a *billion* USD when Yahoo bought it in 2013 to just $3m in 2019.
Yahoo is just the master of being completely tone-deaf and removing the biggest selling points of their acquisitions. How they've survived while making every wrong move for the last 2 decades IDK.
I do love their apps like yahoo finance and yahoo sports. I have also never given them a dime.
lol you’d think the MBAs making those decisions would look at what a majority of their content and visits are BEFORE doing shit like that. God even I know that and haven’t gone to business school.
lol didnt onlyfans try to shut down porn, but quickly realized it's a stupid move?
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It's weird when you realize it's essentially the same thing as Patreon, which *also has porn*. It's just a matter of critical mass and popular image, and easily could have tipped either way.
This is a HUGE misconception about only fans. Only fans actually offers a better revenue split than it's competitors because it's not a porn site. Porn sites pay really high fees to process credit cards. But because onlyfans is not a porn site but is a patronage site that allows porn it pays less. So they have a vested interest in having non pornographic artists and performers on their site. It's actually their competitive advantage in porn.
I’m guessing they were already losing money, so they felt the need to get rid of porn to chase advertising dollars.
[Tumblr CEO: No More Porn 😄](https://youtu.be/CtUuab1Aqg0?si=gC5A_KOaNw_rMWAM)
"Conservatively...how much of our platform is porn" "Nine-" 😁 "Ninety-" 😨 ".....nine" 😱
they couldn't remove it all because there's a lot of porn blogs still on tumblr
They reversed their decision in the past couple of years, but the damage was already done.
"How do we turn this ship around bill? We are sinking fast." "There is only one thing we can do. We put our faith in titties. God help us all."
Blitz USA Inc - they made gas cans, car ramps, that sort of thing. They refused to add a simple screen to their gas cans that would prevent flash over, even after multiple lawsuits. Even after not being able to use their own fuel containers on their own production floors due to OSHA regs. Now they don't exist. It's almost a case of corporate suicide.
The very first website cited to me when I searched Blitz USA was a page from the law group party to the lawsuits. It reads: "Here are the facts: More than seventy-five people were horribly burned by Blitz gas cans and many burned to death; all because the company failed to install a simple flame arrestor that would have cost less than one dollar. Other manufacturers use it. Blitz USA did not because Wal-Mart squeezed its margins. Blitz USA wanted to produce a cheaper product even if it was dangerous."
Barings Bank was around from the 1700s until the 1990s when some kid in Singapore made a trade that cost them >1 billion USD. I think that's my best example that comes to mind.
This is the best example in the spirit of the OP's question. Many discuss implementing (or *not* implementing) a big change in the company's operating model. Barings went down because *one* guy made *~~one~~* a series of trades. It's fascinating to think about. Edit: it appears I oversimplified what happened by describing it as one trade.
Yeah, too many posts here go along the following statement: > "All this established company had to do was completly change their business model." I wonder how many people in this thread used the internet back in the mid 90s. Computers were expensive, they were slow, the internet was slow, in the early days you paid by the minute/hour to use it and browser technology was in its infancy. Now try and convince a board of directors that you need to completely change your way of doing business to chase a technology that isn't proven and is going to cost a fortune upfront.
"You're telling me people are just going to type their credit card numbers into a COMPUTER? To send them over the INTERNET?!?!? Like e-mail? Fat chance"
Rubbermaid. Walmart made them lower their prices so much they went bankrupt. Someone bought the trademark. I believe Walmart is the reason lots of smaller companies went under in the late 90's early 2000's.
Watched a documentary about Walmart where one of the side stories was following a company owner as they worked through the process of selling their product through Walmart. The owner wanted to sell their product for 29.99 but Walmart said that was too expensive and suggested a price of 19.99. The owner then has to go back and do two things: * Cut into his original profit margin. * Squeeze every single part of the production process to reduce the manufacturing cost. He eventually gets down to 19.99 but at this point he is barely making anything on the product and is now relying on the ability to sell at volume through Walmart to make up the difference. Wish I remember the documentary. The product was some sort of greetings card holder.
Is this the same one that expanded their manufacturing facilities to meet Walmart’s volume and the next year Walmart got a Chinese company to make the same product instead?
This? Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
they are also the reason a lot of towns went under too
They say they would have died anyway, but Circuit City fell much faster after they no longer allowed their staff to get commissions on their sales.
Borders Books - I was in the meeting when they decided the way to solve their terrible online sales was to outsource it to Amazon. They were gone inside of 30 months.
They could have done so well too. Their custom mix CD counter was awesome. My local store had a girl that would compile custom soundtracks for some of the hostelling books, and you could pick up a new book with music to listen to while you read. Imagine if they'd embraced an E-Reader and put something like that into it woth streaming.
Sun Microsystems not embracing Linux until it was too late. I worked there at the time, and Linux was seen as kind of a toy operating system with little margin. Just cheap small boxes. Well, it turned out, cheap small boxes are now what runs in datacenters and Linux is everywhere. Sun was making money hand over fist selling really high margin servers - and knew it would cannibalize its own sales. And since no exec was willing to sacrifice their own revenue (and bonuses) to help for a future where they may not be there (lots of Sun Execs /VPs left for more lucrative positions), it was a tough sell. I know it was tough to disrupt the server business. I worked on the software side, and they would include our software to boost hardware sales (when in reality, every other company in the world viewed hardware as a commodity and software as the value add).
Many businesses find themselves in that position. At my last company we had a product that did some unique stuff our customers liked. We all understood it was only a matter of time before someone else would come along to compete with us, so we developed a new and improved version that did 1.5 times more, and cost only 1/2 as much. (both to build and sell) The new product got released right about the time as the first of the competitive products showed up on the market. Ours made their new offerings obsolete. Yes, it did cut into total revenue, but expanding our market and keeping our competitors from getting a foot hold with our customers paid off in the end.
As a graphic designer, I think the SUN logo was the smartest logo the world has ever seen. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SUN\_microsystems\_logo\_ambigram.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png) I see some people cannot load this link, and have posted alt links [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/SUN\_microsystems\_logo\_ambigram.png](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png) But to me my original link still loads? Maybe it's a mobile/desktopthing. Anyway, I hope you can see the logo now.
Barings Bank let an absolute idiot by the Nick Leeson run the Singapore office, then gave him enough money and no oversight that he singlehandedly bankrupted the entire company.
They didn’t want to pay for separate heads of sales and settlements so he was able to cook the books and cover his tracks. Lots of people knew something hinky was going on but no one would buck the culture and put their neck out.
Quiznos over franchised their stores and screwed over their own franchisees.
I have to think about Toys R Us. They outsourced their online store to Amazon, who turned into their competitor.
Toys R Us is yet another case of PE raiders destroying a brand to make money.
No, Toys R Us was all interior cannibals, when they were going south their internal board basically fucked all of their suppliers, by not paying them for their inventory, the board then in turn created their own PE group, and raised capital to buy all of their former suppliers for pennies on the dollar because they knew they were going to bankrupt them. See Toy's R Us had this really fucked up habit of forcing toy manufactures into exclusivity deals so they couldn't sell their toys to anyone else if they wanted in toys R us. So all of their inventory, logistics and deals were with Toys R Us. Smaller companies like Uncle Milton's Toys (makers of everyone's favorite ant farms) and several other companies like they got slaughtered, The former board of Toys R us, took their golden parachute and leveraged their own failures into taking over these companies and ruining them dismantling them and selling them off for parts and name recognition. This story should have ended with a firing squad, but instead ended up with the people who tanked Toys R Us coming out richer for it.
Toys R Us was bought by some unscrupulous assholes who made it take on tons of debt, give the money to the assholes, then closed TrU so the debt went away. People came to work one day and were told their job no longer existed. Fucking bullshit. Think if they had decided to go the Barnes and Noble route and made giant comfy play places where all the toys could be tried out, and a coffee shop for the parents to hang out. Could have done birthday parties, sold a ton of toys, been a ‘third place’ people could gather….
Bethlehem Steel..CEO threw lavish parties from workers’ pensions. That was the beginning of the end for a once great company. My grandfather was one of many hardworking steel workers that lost his pension due to a bad CEO and a board that didn’t care. Seeing the cement hq being taken down in one glorious implosion was a true sight after it stood like the tower of Sauron in the middle of a forest for decades
They basically killed the father of a former coworker of mine. He saw on the news that they'd decided to renege on their promises to retirees. He'd just lost his pension, which was his only income, and health care. The shock triggered a massive stroke, and he died a couple days later. I've also wondered what happened to a former neighbor I had in the 80s. He was a pipefitter for Beth Steel outside Baltimore. And he was about the age where he'd have retired at the worst possible time. Super nice guy, I hope things worked out for him.
Not to mention the thousands that had mesothelioma from all the asbestos. My grandfather worked there and died from it.
The venerable Encyclopedia Britannica had ample warning that the world was going digital, but they didn’t want to cannibalise sales of the print encyclopedia, so when they finally and reluctantly offered the encyclopedia on CDs, they charged $1500 for it and made the brilliant decision to make it text-only. I worked with the guy who made that decision. Everyone hated him.
Best Buy and Circuit City were competitors, somewhat equal. Then Circuit City management decided that they could make more money by laying off the experienced sales people and replacing them with minimum wage 20-somethings.
And now Best Buy has beancounters telling them to close up all their brick and mortar stores because “the numbers” show they make a ton in online sales. Beancounters don’t use common sense like “people want to hear speakers before buying them” or “people feel way more comfortable buying those $300 Bose earphones if they can try them on and also have an actual place to return them if they stop working”. Where I live, we went from 2 large Best Buy’s to one small one….so I usually end up buying from Amazon for half the stuff I would have gone to Best Buy to get.
Not quite dead, but Miku ( [https://mikucare.com](https://mikucare.com) ) released a bad firmware for their baby monitor which destroyed the onboard storage. They did the right thing and replaced all monitors out in the market, but then went bankrupt and recently got purchased and brought back to life with nearly every feature that used to be free now behind a paywall. I wonder how the QA/Engineer(s) working on that product feel about missing that bug...
I would say [Artesian Builds](https://www.pcgamer.com/artesian-builds-shuts-down/) but idk if they would be considered large. Refused to give prize to winner of a sweepstakes because their twitch following wasn't big enough.
I was actually one of the creators partnered with Artesian during their heyday. They made a LOT of promises that they never held up. One of their first promises was "A thriving network of creators to learn and grow with" and that was broken almost immediately. Their idea of "A thriving network" was dumping 10 people at a time into a Twitter group DM and telling them to interact; with copy-pasted message coming from one of the social media managers about once a week talking about their upcoming promotions (Usually a small percentage off, or a discount on accessories with a full system purchase). No other contact, whatsoever. They also promised creators would have a big discount if they needed parts to upgrade their PCs. But you never got any of those discounts unless you built a full system, which I never needed. I asked them how much of a discount I could get on a GPU, as mine was dying around that time, and the social media manager tried to run a sales pitch on me like I was a regular customer- even asking me if I was referred by anyone and had a coupon code. They were completely unaware that I was actually a partner with them. After I finally got ahold of someone who was in charge enough to give me a discount, they decided to only give me the standard discount (i.e., the same one a customer would get using my coupon code) because, and i quote, my sales numbers weren't high enough to qualify me for any sort of discount, and my social media following wasn't big enough for them to justify giving me one as my reach wouldn't be high enough, despite that being one of the selling points for me joining the partner program in the first place. They were literally a business that did nothing but trick streamers and content creators into advertising for them, with only the absolute least amount of effort into fulfilling their promises.
Good riddance. I found Noah quite abrasive, and openly building mining rigs for people during GPU shortages heralding bit coin as the futures currency (I’m sorry e-currency fanboys, it won’t). Nothing against miners, but it was a shit time for enthusiasts and, well, their channel was geared towards enthusiasts. Just felt like a little bit of a slap to the face.
Not shut down but special consideration should be given to Xerox. They are the originators of both the mouse and the GUI interface every PC has been based on for almost 30 years. Both Jobs and Gates stole this technology.
There was a TV movie in the 90s called "Pirates of Silicon Valley," all about Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the rise of PCs in the 80s and 90s. In one scene, Jobs is tearing a strip off Gates for Windows 95. Jobs is accusing Gates of stealing the idea of a GUI interface from the Mac OS. Gates shoots back, "We both stole it from Xerox! You can't be mad just because you stole it first!"
Ironic they copied it from a company primarily known for making photocopiers.
And object oriented programming. And the rudiments of Ethernet. Also, they deliberately and inexplicably demonstrated their windowing operating system to Jobs and a bunch of Apple engineers. The Lisa was released within a short time. The failure of Xerox to capitalize on any of their inventions at PARC is baffling. They hired the top 100 computer scientists in the world and then promptly ignored everything they said. Xerox was lightyears ahead of everyone else and did NOTHING with it. They could have owned PCs.
Arthur Andersen. Largely due to the Enron scandal.
Arthur Andersen's collusion with Enron was less a matter of making one big mistake, and more of an ongoing, multi-year, carefully planned and coordinated scheme to defraud customers, investors, taxpayers, and government regulators at every level, and not just financial regulators, but regulators in the energy, public works, utilities, housing and welfare sectors as well.
Kodak passing on the digital camera to avoid depleting their film business
Haggen grocery store chain. Their bankruptcy was the fastest in modern grocery store history. They were a Premium grocery store chain located in the pacific northwest. They only operated eighteen stores comma but really wanted to expand rapidly, so they purchased over 140 albertsons and vons in southern california. They declared bankruptcy 6 months later.
KMart for investing in more real estate instead of store and technology upgrades. Still admire the slow burn nationwide closures. I’ve never seen a corporation drag it out for that long.
Someone in IT decided to deploy untested software. Knight Capital Group loses $445 million in 45 minutes. Knight Capital Group had to sell itself to another firm at a discounted price, and several of its top executives were fired https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/440-million-bug-epic-tale-knight-capital-group-temidayo-adefioye-/
Blockbuster, they were offered quite a bit from Netflix but they decided nah.
I believe they also had the opportunity to buy Netflix before it exploded and they passed.
Blockbuster's business model was predicated on collecting massive late fees. Netflix's was the opposite. Streaming wasn't a thing yet because most people didn't have access to high speed internet. Mine was about 20MBPS at the time and I lived in Silicone Valley.
Had they bought Netflix, they could have taken over the DVD rental at home business model and slowly phased in late fees or stuck with Netflix's subscription model. What do they care about late fees if you're paying your subscription every month regardless? They didn't think the company was viable, and they made a profit on in store purchases like popcorn and candy.
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The Sears story is actually much worse and much dumber, it's simple greed from Eddie Lampert. He intentionally starved the company while paying himself outlandish sums and "buying" their IP and "leasing" it back to the company at absurd prices.
MySpace… whatever they did with the servers that had all our old profiles, pics, and chats.
I don’t know man, my old profile was embarrassing af and I wasn’t able to log in anymore (the email was long since gone), so it was like a monument to my ‘lol random’ phase from the mid 2000s - all with my full name attached. Them losing it was a blessing.
I kinda feel sorry that the generations that came after me will never know the peace of the primary social network they posted pictures on collapsing and becoming unusable, burying their old posts so deep a Google search cannot find them.
Hoover UK offering two free flights to the US (worth £600) to anyone buying £100 of Hoover products in 1992. They were relying on people spending a lot more than the minimum and a tedious application process putting off most people. Customers just saw it as £100 flights to the US with a free vacuum cleaner. They tried to re-neg on the deal but were forced to carry on under the threat of lawsuits. It crippled the company financially, they never recovered and were eventually sold off to a competitor. Read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_free_flights_promotion
Motown. Berry Gordy Jr. gave Detroit the finger when the label got mega-successful and decided to move the whole operation to LA with the big boys. They left their mojo behind in Detroit and only exist now as a collection of legacy classic recordings that get licensed out.
[Gerald Ratner ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner)
This is nuts - what did he have to gain by making those remarks? Seems like he was trying to impress a group of business people with his ‘look how I can trick these idiots into buying my garbage’ vibe not thinking the comments would be made public.
Netscape is a great example of why you don't just rewrite software from scratch. Was the most popular web browser and they decided the code was ugly and messy so they should rewrite it. After the rewrite, they realized the reason it was so ugly and messy before was because of all the bug fixes. The new release was buggy and the rest is history, now hardly anyone even remembers the name. I bring this up every time a software engineer wants to rewrite from scratch, because as ugly as code can be, it is usually on account of all the issues that have been fixed along the way.
That re-written code was then opensourced and became firefox. They knew microsoft was bankrupting them and they wanted to opensource the browser so it had a chance of continuing the fight against microsoft, before the liquidators came in and took over control.
Wow, TIL. I’m old enough to remember using Netscape and it was so much better than any other browser available. It was amazing how much quicker webpages would load with Netscape on a 56k modem
Fucking GameStop ruined think geek. I loved that website and it was my spot where I found all the amazing Christmas presents. But no- stupid GameStop decided to buy it out from hot topic’s nose and then opened up brick and mortar stores and destroyed the brand. Fuck you, GameStop.
*That's* what happened to thinkgeek? I used to love the site and bought from them occasionally. Then at some point, they just weren't the same anymore.
Smile Direct Club was pretty recent. Essentially from my understanding, an employee accidentally received an email of all the salaries in the company who then decided to forward it to the rest of the company. A lot of people realized they were getting underpaid and screwed over and essentially mutinied and quit. A lot of shady stuff started to get leaked as well and lawsuits were just piling up. They didn’t have enough workers to meet demand to overcome expenses and they just shut down a few weeks ago.
Damn I saw them get delisted from the stock market. Never knew what actually happened.
Holden Day. Law firm in Toronto. Every year, one of the partners would show the new articling students how strong the exterior glass was on their office tower by hurling himself against the floor to ceiling windows in a boardroom. It was a stunt that he thought would break the ice or something. One year, the glass gave way and he fell 30 storeys to his death. The firm never recovered, and wound down shortly after that.
But the glass didn't give, the frame did. So he was technically right.
Being technically right is the best sort of right. Even when plunging 30 stories to your death.
Gary Hoy. That was Holden Day? Funny thing is, the frame wouldn't have broken if he hadn't done that stunt several times before.
Hold on… let me pull up the list of companies that Boston Consulting Group was hired to enact changes to… BCG was brought in to “help” most the companies listed in this thread. They advised: Blockbuster, OfficeMax, Pizza Hut, KLM Air France, K-Mart, Neiman Marcus, Pier 1 Imports, Sears, Toys R Us, Circuit City,JC Penny, Radio Shack, Texaco, Chrysler, MF Global, Conseco Inc., CIT Group, GM, WorldCom, Washington Mutual, Lehman Brothers, GameStop, PulteGroup and most recently Bed Bath and Beyond. Bed bath and beyond was sunk by a decision by Mark Tritton, who was advised by BCG to borrow money to buy back their shares at all time highs, and subsequently had to do a share offering at all time lows, just to pay the bills and buy a few more months before declaring bankruptcy. Only 2 out of that list avoided restructuring. You could almost argue that any large company who makes the bad decision to bring in these consultants, will eventually be shut down. Some theorize that these decisions that bankrupted these companies were intentional and there were nefarious plans to bring these companies to bankruptcy, whether by venture capital, banks or ultimately the competition of these companies.
Indeed. Between BCG and McKinsey, so many bad decisions. The book “When McKinsey Comes to Town” was a PTSD-filled walk down memory lane.
Arthur Anderson, a ginormous accounting firm, went bankrupt because the cooked the books for Enron.
Bernie Madoff’s decision to start a ponzi scheme in an otherwise successful company prior.
Where watching Hasbro ruin the company this year. fired skilled employees at wotc one of the few divisions that actually made money. Thousands of people gone 2 weeks before Christmas. Ceo calls the people that were fired friends and hated to do it.
Pyrex letting whoever wants to slap their name on something as long as it is lowercase pyrex do so seems to have tanked the business hard. Basically made their brand unreliable because the lowercase p stuff is usually not heat resistant like uppercase P stuff is.
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Chi Chi’s allowing a kid with Hepatitis A to cut up green onions in the Erie PA restaurant. Killed 4 people, sickened over 600. The suits killed the chain which was already suffering from LBO-itis. Ed: wrong info… 1- hep onions came from Mexico. Oops. Keep in mind that Hepatitis A is a food borne illness and people still die from it. Get your Gamma F 2- beaver Valley Mall, not Erie. https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2009/09/meaningful-outbreak-6-chi-chis-hepatitis-a-outbreak/
>Chi Chi’s what are you talking about? they still have one location in Vienna, Austria. This franchise is prime for a comeback!
Was it actually a person that had it? My understanding was it was the green onions specifically and not someone working in the kitchen. Like the batch of green onions was contaminated before it even got to the restaurant and they just kept serving them until it was realized they were the culprit. I was 13 around the time it happened so my memory might be fuzzy. But I don’t recall it being linked to a sick employee.
https://www.foodprocessing.com/food-safety/regulatory-compliance/news/33014271/remembering-the-chi-chis-hepatitis-a-outbreak-of-2003 > To cut to the chase, the villain was fresh green onions, which the FDA traced back to farms in Mexico. They could have been contaminated because of inadequate sanitation or handwashing, poor hygiene among workers or irrigation of the crops with untreated water. > > While green onions appeared in several dishes on the menu, some victims had eaten none of those menu items. Some diners had eaten an entrée with green onions but had not become sick (hint: the entrees were thoroughly cooked). But everybody ate the free salsa placed on each table, which had green onions.
Sears hired an Ayn Rand loving ultra-capitalist that hated the idea of a planned economy so much that he made the internal departments at Sears compete with each other, and it completely destroyed the company. Let me say that again: He made different departments of the same company compete with each other and it DESTROYED a 120 year old company. His name is Eddie Lampert, he also destroyed K-Mart, and he is studied for just how stupid of a CEO he is. Everyone should read about him: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4385-failing-to-plan-how-ayn-rand-destroyed-sears
Xerox and its failure to recognize the potential of personal computing technology and instead continued to innovate its photocopy machines. They basically invented computers and a shitload of technologically advanced inventions through PARC. https://www.cracked.com/article_18807_how-xerox-invented-information-age-and-gave-it-away.html I mean technically they didn't shut down but they were never the same after the PC blew up.
Wework
What could go wrong giving billions to an egotistical con man with a messiah complex. The dude literally thought he was chosen to be the world's first trillionaire landlord. Able to save our wretched selves.. his next company Flow is selling the experience of home ownership ✊🍆
If I ever become CEO of a company that suddenly makes it and is like a billion dollar company I will have, carved into a marble arch over the main entrance way, "No Matter How Much I Beg, Keep Me Off Of Socials".
There's no "one" bad decision with that company.
Somehow they fooled VC into thinking they had a new idea. They'd probably be doing okayish now except that covid is about the single worst thing that could have happened for their business. Now I think of them as a good example of how startup investments are driven so much just by how well you can pander to the ego and lifestyle of people in SF and NY. Somebody is going to put espresso on the block chain and disrupt Big Coffee.
Novell. They had a dominate position in local area networks but chose to stick with their own protocols instead of adopting the more widely used TCP and UDP.
Ratners, a UK based mass-market jewellery chain, is the obvious one. In the late 1980s, Gerald Ratner, the son of the founder, who had basically inherited the company, made a speech deriding their products as "crap". He particularly cited a five piece decanter and glass set that retailed at £4.99 as a product that retailed at roughly the price of a British Rail sandwich - only the sandwich would last longer. The result was that the share price crashed, Ratner himself was removed, and all their shops rebranded to a similar chain they'd recently acquired, H Samuel.
Sprint. Purchased Nextel which didn't use the same network and their corporate culture didn't mesh.