30 Companies That Were Successful Until A Single Bad Decision Wrecked Them Completely
Sometimes, one bad decision is all it takes to turn things completely upside down. While that is true in one’s personal life, too, it’s often the case with businesses, where one bad call can bring all processes to a halt.
Members of the ‘Ask Reddit’ community have discussed such terrible decisions, after one netizen asked about what made successful businesses take a big hit or even go under. Netizens covered a bunch of different examples, pointing out exactly what led to the fall of the enterprises, so if you’re curious to learn more about the whys and hows, scroll down to find their stories on the list below.
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MTV stopped playing music.
THIS ONE HURTS! The shift from music to "reality" TV was so gradual none of us noticed until it was too late. And now old MTV is gone forever.
In reality lots of people noticed but none of them really cared. Once the internet started growing the idea of having to watch whatever video somebody else decided at an given time became more and more anachronistic.
Load More Replies...Because they turned int a reality TV channel once they released The Real World. It all went downhill from there.
MTV Europe was amazing for teenage me. I got discover so many new bands and different types of music that I would have not had been exposed to. This was in 1989/1990 when we got Sky TV. When MTV split and we got MTV UK, it became garbage, playing the same few songs over and over.
Those early days made for some gloriously wacky, experimental television. I loved it back then. Learning English as a second language became my second nature.
Load More Replies...If I want to watch music videos I can do it on YouTube, where I do the programming and decide what music gets played. I'm not going down the rabbit hole, but I suspect that continuing to play Music stopped being a viable option for major profit once YT became a viable option for viewers. The only possible advantage I see with continuing to play music is that viewers get exposed to stuff they're not familiar with, but I was listening to radio long before MTV came along and I still listen to a local radio station. Others listen to Spotify or Pandora.
Stop being do d**n sensible Bob! Romanticise dude!
Load More Replies...Does anybody else remember the Friday night metal show they had? I can't even remember what it was called.
Ages ago. I remember how I tried to watch MTV back in 2004 and 95% of their content were "reality" shows. So, when did their downfall started?
Look at every single decision the Boeing executives have made over the past 5 years lol.
As a Brit I looked at Boeing with envious eyes. I have mates who work at Airbus and at British Aerospace and they always seemed to be a step behind Boeing when it came to medium and long haul aircraft. Yep we’ve had Rolls Royce providing great engines but 737, 747, 757, 777, 767 through decades of air travel kinda overshadowed that. Then it all went Pete Tong. I’m now pleased to see Airbus products filling up the gaps left by Boeing.
There was an excellent article in The Atlantic I believe where they explained how Boeing transitioned from being run by and for the engineers to being a company run by regular business executives. That change killed their culture and the company has been in a nose dive since.
Happens every time you put pencil pusher in charge of an engineering firm
Load More Replies...Exactly. Boeing used to make excellent products. The "bad" aircraft have come since the McDonnell Douglas merger, thanks to the McDonnell Douglas executives who now run the company. Bean counters kíll.
Load More Replies...They haven't been doing well since the 777. That's pretty much the last airframe they introduced that hasn't had "problems".
Once the boardroom begins making decisions rather than the engineers that gave the company it's reputation.
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Sears discontinuing their catalog in the early 90s but not entering online sales until much later and long after Amazon took over what they gave up.
I stopped going to Sears when they turned into a garbage store with a help yourself shoe section and Walmart quality clothing. The only thing worthwhile were the tools, not even the appliances were good anymore.
I'm a die hard Craftsman fan ever since I was a kid still am but their quality went down at the end.
Load More Replies...And trying to pretend to sell upscale stuff that wasn't as good as K-mart
They also through away much of what they got from Craftsman. They used to make good tools that were reliable and fairly priced, but if a hand tool broke you get a good replacement. One day after spending 20 minutes unsuccessfully trying to get them to meet their legal obligation and honor the warranty on my tape measure I exchanged about $300 worth of hand tools between a few and 30 years old as a preventative measure.
Blockbuster’s decision not to pursue streaming services.
Netflix offered to sell themselves to Blockbuster for $50 million but they were laughed out of the room my how the turntables have turned
If a time machine existed, Blockbuster would go back and reverse their decision.
Netflix was the OG in streaming, but many other companies followed. DVDs, CDs, cassettes, 8-track , vinyl, etc. All have been replaced by better tech. Even TV's are equipped to just steam now. Bad decision at the time, but who still has something to play outdated media nowadays.
What do you mean TVs are equipped to just stream now? I watch over-the-air TV with an antenna. Maybe you've heard of those in history class?
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Haven’t seen it yet but GE making Jack Welch CEO. GE was one of the gold star companies of the US, EVERYBODY wanted to work at GE because you’d be set for life. They took care of their employees, made a ton of money, made good products, what more could you ask for? Then Jack Welch came in and started firing people left and right, eliminating product lines, getting into finance, worrying about the stock growth.
Fast forward to today where GE is now three separate companies: Healthcare, Energy, and Aviation. Jack Welch pretty much single handedly broke down a company that was started by Edison and made some of the greatest technological advancements in the last century. That man is the worst.
They call him Jack Welch because he is able to squeeze the sweetest juice from his workers' mind grapes
BlackBerry for letting their arrogance think that Apple or Google couldn't challenge their majority in the smartphone market. Also, ignoring creating a smartphone without a physical keypad until it was way too late.
I miss my BlackBerry. I have essential tremors, writing a simple text with touch screen is a pain because I always accidentally hit the wrong letter and I have to stop and correct the spelling every second. I used to spend hours texting or chatting, but now I avoid it because of that. Physical keypads need to make a comeback.
There are still a couple out there, you know. https://www.androidauthority.com/keyboard-phones-845839/
Load More Replies...I used Blackberrys for work at the time, they did the job as it was mainly for email and PIN messaging (that became Blackberry messenger). My first blackberry had keyboard shortcuts to access the various apps on it and a clickable scroll wheel. It was very easy to use it. However it did not have a mic or speakers built in so I had to use a proprietary headset for it which was very uncomfortable.
For texting I use the speech-to-text option. Sometimes have to correct a mistaken word (usually a homonym) but that tiny bit of doinking is FAR easier than tapping out an entire message.
Two obvious cases come to mind:
1) Kodak (remember the film brand?) invented the digital camera in 1979 but did not pursue that line because they thought it would hurt film sales.
2) Blockbuster Video had an opportunity to merge with Netflix to manage online streaming content, but declined. Blockbuster was sure that video rental would never end.
In Harrow, UK there used to be a massive Kodak factory. It's now houses and flats.
Rochester NY. Had family that worked there for 20 years... same...
Load More Replies...This is like Sony dropping the ball with portable music. Once the iPod came out it was all over for them. I even bought a Sony mp3 player to try and support them, but their best was only 20 gigs while the iPod was 80gigs and had a color screen.
There is still a "Land Boulevard" in Cambridge, MA. Only the old-timers know what used to be on that street.
Wasn't NASA inventing digital cameras so they could take pictures on the moon?
One of my old roommates was from Rochester. Home of Kodak. He got a firsthand view of that collapse. A lot of people in that town depended on that factory.
Rochester is a city of a quarter million people, not a small town, and both Xerox and Bausch & Lomb were larger employers at the same time than Kodak. Bausch & Lomb moved to New Jersey, Xerox collapsed. And yes, it lost 25% of its population in a 15 year period during the collapse period (more due to Xerox than Kodak), but the city today is a major center for Tech Start ups (2 top 100 Engineering schools, 1 of them in the top 50 are there, as well as quite a few universities in the region). This is on multiple Fortune 1000 companies and a Fortune 500 company HQ, and is a major center of beer production in the North East of the US.
Load More Replies...Kodak actually invented the original digital camera in 1975, not 1979. They thought that they had 10 years before there was any threat to their film based business. The were very wrong. https://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2012/01/18/how-kodak-failed/
Who do you know with a digital camera? Mine is my phone. Eastman Kodak was a chemical company, and Eastman Chemicals is still an absolute beast of a company. What they successfully did, whether by foolish luck or not, was dodge the dead-end digital-camera industry and focus on what they did well.
A phone is OK for casual snapshots, but anyone who does serious photography uses a digital camera. Yes, in 2025.
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My Pillow dude comes to mind, mixing extreme politics with business.
Mike Lindell is going to end up back where he started. Now if we could just deport Elon Musk back to South Africa after Tesla implodes and craters.
Apparently Canadian provinces have cancelled contracts with Starlink, and European countries have cancelled with SpaceX.
Load More Replies...And, as Musk is finding out, same. Couldn't happen to a more deserving guy.
I thought his net worth was a negative number at this point.
Load More Replies...Guy might be a lunatic, but I love My Pillow. It's the only one I can sleep on.
The sales people in Bed Bath and Beyond told people they were c**p.
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I still laugh about tumblr's decision to ban all adult content on their website...which was like 95% of their active user base.
Yes! They used to be considered a safe place for fanfiction writers to share their works at a time when big fanfiction websites banned adult content. Myself and everyone I knew on there quit as soon as they made the decision, I'm actually surprised they still exist.
It's actually better than it was 10 years ago, quieter but the crazy toxic isn't there so overall much more enjoyable.
Load More Replies...And yet adult content is still around, with warning tags required ofc, because for the most part it never went away. It's more accepted now, to an extent, and the site is much less toxic after the ban exodused the toxic. It's actually my preferred platform for anything that doesn't go onto my formal domain, like fanworks.
"Our office is returning to in office 5 days a week to scare off talented introverts and attract psychopaths" -lots of companies with job posts today.
Hang on, since when did working a 5 day week from an office become an indicator of psychopathy?
I'll never go back to an office. I can do my work from anywhere. I won't even apply to jobs that require it. A lot of people feel the same way. Companies are missing out on people like us. Too bad for them.
My company proved we could function just as well, if not better in many cases, fully working from home. So what is the new CEO doing? Sending people back to the office, but being a "nice guy" and making it only 4 days a week. The ONLY reason for this is to justify the real estate leases the company has on office space, which for some stupid reason they decided to renew instead of saving a LOT of money with the WFH model.
One of the reasons I quit when I did is because they were making us "return" to the office. One of the reasons I took the job is because it was said to be fully remote, which made it possible to accept the less-than-great salary.
Love the office and honestly, doubt that I'm a proper psychopath. But surely true about the introverts. Or people with kids. Or people with disabilities. Or pets. Or nasty commutes. Or.... I have a couple of colleagues who only stay because we don't have to come to the office.
I was dreading returning to the office, but it hasn't been THAT bad. Obviously there are negatives, I caught a cold the 2nd week and the commute is annoying, but one huge positive is my work is 20 minutes away and my home is all mine again. No more home office where work would stare at me all evening and all weekend.
Load More Replies...I hate going to the office. No one from my team works in the same office, so no valuable collaboration is happening. I am introvert, and most of my communications limits to hello, bye, what perfume are you wearing, we are out of coffee and similar small talk. However, people are loud on calls, loud when chatting in the breakroom and so on. Office temperature - we are sorry if you don't like it.
Delivering ‘shareholder value’. Boeing, Intel, Blizzard and Ubisoft to name a few. Companies need to deliver value for their customers instead, the shares and dividends will follow.
And their employees! Any and every company has the task, given to it by the society that created and provided the environment they can thrive in, to spread wealth, not spread bare survival. The lowest-earning ones need to be taken most care of, and shielded from more ups and downs than the top earners, who shouldn't even feel pressured, but internally obligated to ... make their company spread wealth within their employees. Shareholder value being the only, or main, target metric simply isn't sustainable, ignores the needs and realities of the world in which companies exist. And yet, a looters' mindset is the dominant shared quality of CEOs everywhere, regardless of any else. Fück that!
Thank you for keeping this word alive. I wait for the day when the exclamation mark is unnecessary.
Load More Replies...It is literally the law that they have to deliver value for their shareholders. Otherwise the whole system would fall down because buying shares would be meaningless. I'm not saying its a good thing, the law needs to be changed so that, for example, a company **has** to prove it's not harming the environment, but it is the law right now.
Another main logic lost to the mists of time. Take care of the folks who work for you, the quality, reputation, and shareholder return WILL follow.
Shareholder value and increased stock prices is ALL the new CEO of my company cares about. Hundreds of people laid off, career employees let go while he hires younger, cheaper workers to replace them. Psychopathic shark, this guy.
These companies had literally made billions BEFORE they became greedy and wanted even more. They (in gaming companies' cases) delivered less and instead began to charge over the odds for the same services, or offer pay-to-win options. This invariably happened after new CEOs were brought in to give the company a more 'business-like' approach. The people who made their games so popular were usually let go as a result. Fark them to hail, I say.
Gerald Ratner, CEO of The Ratner Group, operated a popular and successful jewelry business in the UK in the 1980s. He managed to sink his entire business enterprise in under ten seconds when he made a public TV appearance and joked that his company's products were "total c**p".
The value of his business dropped by about *half a billion pounds* in the immediate aftermath and almost went completely out of business.
He was at a conference. And said. People ask me how we can sell crystal decanters and glasses for £5; it’s because they’re c**p. And people ask what the difference between a prawn sandwich for £3.99 and our earrings at the same price. I say the earrings will last longer. However a couple of journalists were there And next day headlines in the papers Rather says his stuff is c**p
TVs in a quiet restaurant.
I can understand TVs in a sports bar, but for the love of spaghetti, leave them OUT of the restaurants!
I used to carry a [TV B Gone](https://www.tvbgone.com/cfe_tvbg_main.php) until people started getting wise and disabled the remote input.
At one restaurant, on a date, there was music and conversation, and the TV in the corner droned along as everyone tried to ignore it. Then one guy got up and unplugged it, and the whole restaurant clapped!
We’ve got several pubs to choose from in our marketplace. Pubs for football, pubs for live music, pubs that are a bit ‘lively’, pubs for food & family time but my personal favourite has no TVs, no jukebox or piped music, no pool table, mobiles must be on silent and if you wish to take a call you got out to the back of the pub. It’s just got the sound of folk chatting and drinking. Oh yeah, no Wi-Fi either 😀 🍺
I recently spent a weekend in London with my wife. In one pub, I noticed a group of four 20-somethings, all holding onto their phones the whole time. They’d take a sip of their pint, say a word or two to their friends, then go back to their screen. All four of them. In another place, a group about that age came in, sat down for about half an hour on their phones (using the Wi-Fi, as this pub was in an old railway arch), then left without buying anything. Web access has its place, but I strongly believe that pubs should be about conversation and community (as well as a nice drink/food experience, obviously).
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Changing the recipe of Schlitz Beer to cheaper ingredients. In 1970 it was the #2 Beer in the country and by 2000 it was extinct.
Love the way the Europeans that run this place have no idea what Schlitz looked like.
( Or maybe they just couldn't face the horror of actually putting up a picture of the real thing. )
Load More Replies...Not quite, the brand is owned by PBR because "How you gonna run a respectable establishment without Schlitz Malt Liquor?!?"
Radio Shack trying to compete with Best Buy in bigger ticket consumer electronics rather than sticking to what they did best.
And I've stopped going there, too. Used to go all of the time.
Load More Replies...I stopped going to Radio Shack when they started asking for personal information (phone number, IIRC) at check-out
They were selling high end stuff in the 80s. What you never heard of the Tandy TRS-80?
That was the computers I learned on in high school because they gave them to us for free.
Load More Replies...Its precisely what happened to them, that and thinking they could compete in the cellphone market while abandoning their hardcore customers all those of us that like to build electronic stuff... The profit margin on all that little stuff on the pegboard was huge, the profits on bigger and name brand stuff was practically non-existent, Their in-house brands made more money than the name brands and quite often wer same or better quality.
Nokia embarking with Windows for their smartphones
Microsoft ruining everything they touched in order to get cool: Skype, Skype for Business, Hotmail, IE6, OneDrive, aQuantive, Danger Inc., Band, Bing, Bob, Groove Music, Cortana Speakers, Zune and so many others.
MS makes a poor OS. But enough people have become accustomed to it, and to the pain, that they think this is normal.
Load More Replies...The phone wasn't the problem. They were late to the game and didn't have a good app base.
Load More Replies...I despise Microkock so hard. They force regular updates that nobody wants or needs, break existing services in order to provide 'enhanced' ones that don't work, have built-in redundancy in various products (X-box is a prime example), and keep chasing the buck instead of caring about customers. I cannot believe that in all the years they've existed, there haven't been any viable competitors. But then, there probably have, and they've been bought out by these same muppets. I will never again in my life buy another of their products.
I love Nokia, but I agree. My friend had a Windows Phone, it was actually good, Cortana was cool. But it was at the time when Pokemon Go was released, my friend was so upset about it and other gaming apps not being available that he went back to Android. (Nokia did go back to Android too, their phones are back to being awesome!)
They should have used the same drag and drop method as Windows Explorer, but my Zune HD is an excellent piece of hardware. It's the first thing I ordered from Amazon 12 or 15 years ago, and it's still the MP3 player I use while driving if I'm not listening to the radio.
I've imported mine from the us (had to pay customs on a second hand item...), zune was a great mp3 player only plagued by microsoft's stupid decision not to release it outside the US market. That and janky zune software needed to transfer files to it.
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1) Sears saying they wouldn’t take Visa or Mastercard, only Discover. Never shopped there again.
And could have offered benefits for using it while allowing other cards. Instead, they made it too difficult to shop there.
Load More Replies...Sears biggest downfall was when they stopped doing layaway sales. A lot of people are willing to pay overtime for something they can't afford to pay for up front.
Are there any people out there who EVER had a Discovery card? I'm 44yo and I worked in the service industry for years and I think I've seen a dozen maybe.
Discover was the first credit card I had. IIRC they were the first to offer 1% (or more) back as a reward, and they were willing to give credit to a young couple whose credit history was still limited to utility bills.
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Susan G Komen hired Karen Handel after her failed bid for GA gov on an anti abortion platform. Karen convinced the founder that defunding Planned Parenthood mammograms would increase donations from the right.
They didn’t realize how many of their donors were not conservatives. Massive PR debacle and wave of donors asking for refunds.
So Komen said ‘oops, that was a bad move so we’re NOT defunding Planned Parenthood mammograms.
Conservatives then asked for donation refunds and non conservatives stayed away.
The nonprofit went from the most trusted name in charities to shuttering most of its local offices and reducing its revenue close to -60%.
Nothing in this even resembles reality. What killed SKG was the realization on all sides that it was a scam: only 13% of money raised went to treatments, screenings or research. Most of the rest went to self-promoting "education" like making pro athletes wear their particular shade of pink. Planned Parenthood doesn't even do screenings; they only make referrals. Given Planned Parenthood's militant promotion and defense of birth-control medicines that are no longer available because they caused nine-fold increases in breast-cancer rates, why use a birth-control/abortion clinic operation for referrals for breast cancer? (And THAT'S even in the 13%!) All this is why SGK fell much more in subsequent years.
You can't post facts on this site.It offends everyone!
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Enron commiting fraud on a massive scale. Granted, it's also the only thing that made the company in the first place.
Yahoo had an opportunity to acquire Google for around $1M but decided not to. Since then, Yahoo, which was once a tech giant, saw a significant decline over the years and was acquired by Verizon in 2017 for about $4B. Fast forward to today, Google is now a powerhouse worth around $2T.
There were search engines all over the place back then. Nobody knew which one was going to be the true chosen one. Webcrawler, Lycos, Altavista, Excite, Ask Jeeves, Dogpile. Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. There were dozens more. Google just nailed it.
Google won out because it was ad-free. Once they drove everyone to irrelevance, BAM! More ads than you can choke down.
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Osborne Computer began showing off its next-generation computer when it wasn't ready yet. Everyone canceled orders for the in-market model in anticipation of the new one, which tanked the company.
Funny that Osborne's screw-up seems to be more famous than Commodore's. In the 1980s, Commodore had a death grip on home computers that made Apple look like chumps. They abandoned the computer their own developers had come up with and instead decided to simply mass-produce a computer designed by a Spanish company, Amiga. Amiga was a cool computer, and very powerful for its day, but it wasn't backwards compatible nor compatible with Commodore's own hardware, and Commodore buyers had bought what in today's money would be thousands of dollars worth of peripherals. Angry Commodore owners refused to invest in Amigas and went for Apples and Windows instead, and the greatest computer company that ever was became a smoldering trashheap.
It was a little more complex than that but the main complaint from the people who worked there was the new CEO - he stopped advertising. The Amiga was an amazing machine and, for a while, was the only home computer that produced amazing graphics. I kept my Amiga until 1999 - I finally built a PC from internet parts stores. (my hatred for Apple knows no bounds and is still with me from 1986) *Edit: there was just no software for the Amiga - I agree about the lack of backwards compatibility with the C=64 was a huge mistake; when I migrated to the Amiga I had a couple hundred programs for the C=64, sigh!
Load More Replies...That's pretty much the norm for everything today. It's not quite ready yet but lets sell it anyway and fix it later.
That's because they discovered we could be used as their beta testers.
Load More Replies...To be more accurate, it was somewhat the straw the broke the camel's back. Osborne was already in deep trouble because of developmental delays and cost overruns combined with bad management. I did love my O-1 though! It died in a house fire 15 years ago and I still shed the odd tear over it.
Target opening stores but not infrastructure in Canada and also doing no research on why Canadians shop at Target in the US.
Because they had things you couldn’t get in Canada at good prices. Excellent home goods. They did not offer these things when they opened in Canada.
Load More Replies...Target made many mistakes when expanded into Canada. They bought out old Zeller's department stores, some of which weren't suited to become Target and were located in areas no longer desirable for retail, IE older plazas and such. Also, they didn't have the infrastructure for warehousing and trucking built up sufficiently and the stores has bare shelves and higher prices.
Logistics and warehouses. You have to stock the stores efficiently.
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MySpace limited you to 10 photos that you had to rotate out after the limit.
Facebook let you upload unlimited photos in April 2005.
Immediately everyone I knew tried to get their college email address credentials so that they could sign up for the Facebook and post/see pictures after every party.
And then in October Facebook, to add insult to injury, let you tag people and that was the end of MySpace. Now not only was Facebook where photos from the party were posted but you would also be tagged so that created a viral incentive to connect to people and sign them up for the Facebook website which amplified the social network effect exponentially. (You don't want people tagging you in photos that you don't know about do you?! Better sign up and review those tags.)
MySpace was already beyond irritating by letting everybody play a different song in the Background causing you to want to rip your ears out of your head from 19 different Limp Biskit songs playing simultaneously but I think they could have survived long enough to disable auto-play music if they had simply not put a limit on photo count.
I met friends on MS that I still have today. You don't really meet people on FB and there's so much BS you have to scroll through. Barely use it today.
I meet people from FB quite often, but not nearly as much when MS was a thing. You could look for a date on Friday morning and have one by Noon. They were not the most stable of interactions, but any port in a storm.
Load More Replies...I signed up to FB because one of my teenage female friends who was on there kept being hit on by Christian men twice her age, she begged me to be "in a relationship" with her so that they would back off: lesbians scared them. I hated how unpersonal the whole thing looked. I loved my fully customized MS profile and actually talking with people who shared common interests rather than posting a ton of pictures of myself. I moved to FB for good because of the games. Now that they don't have games anymore, I couldn't care less about it.
Maybe not *worst* decision but generally bad business is to give the consumer too many options. Like a sandwich place with 100 sandwiches on the menu. In reality, most of them are similar with one thing subbed for another. It's confusing for consumers, servers and the kitchen, annoying for everyone, and it slows turnaround down driving down revenues.
At a low point in my life I worked at a Greek/Italian restaurant that also had bbq ribs and southwest eggrolls, among other things not anywhere near Greece or Italy.
Anything you want as long as it's chicken. And I hope you like a big noisy restaurant.
Load More Replies...I also hate those options where you have multiple steps, then add sauces and other stuff, then the sides ... if it is too complicated to express your food wish in one regular sized sentence then it is too complicated.
That's one of the issues I have with craft breweries/restaurants. Go in, look at a chalk board for a beer, all kinds of weird names. Finally told the waiter "I want a beer I can chew(dark), but not an alcohol content so high I can't legally drive home."
My local uses a chalk board, but they only have 10 taps. And the beers are labeled (besides the goofy name) as being a "kolsch" or "IPA" or whatever.
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Blizzard deciding to make every game just a c***py platform for micro transactions without focusing on making a fun game.
They haven't felt the full effect yet but after Diablo 4 and overwatch 2, I know a lot of people (including myself) who will never buy another Blizzard title. They rode on the coat tails of their early 2000s staff for as long as they could. (I know it's Activision now).
Blizzard, Bethesda, Bioware... the last decade wasn't very great for them. All of them had major fallouts with their fanbases...
And the TF2 bootleg Overwatch is a very obvious clone, with just some women characters and fifteen characters who all have the same class (ex: multiple versions of the Heavy Weapons Guy)
Atari delayed the release of the 7800 by half a year as it tried to renegotiate royalty rates paid to cartridge developers.
In the meantime NES launched and took the market.
The 7800 had comparable tech and could also play all of the old 2600 games too.
Yeah, no. The NES was a better console. And it comes down to one thing nobody talks about. The controllers. Have you ever handled a 7800 controller? They were still using JOYSTICKS! And they were spongier than the OG 2600 joysticks. The NES control pad was absolute perfection at the time. There are millions of them out there to this day that are pushing 40yo and they still keep going.
Then with the N64 (for Nintendo) joysticks came back, with D-pad. And I have used a 40yo NES, finicky, but functional
Load More Replies...It was supposed to come out in 1984, Atari was bought out by Jack Tramiel. He decided Atari should be a computer company, not a gaming console company and shelved the 7800 even though thousands were made. Atari never paid the company that developed the system for them, GCC, as Time Warner, previous Atari owner, and Jack Tramiel fought over who should pay. Eventually an agreement was reached and they decided to release the console in May 1986.
Before the 7800, I am pretty sure there was a 5600 version of Atari also.
5200 but yes. And it was way too huge... also got released in the midst of the video game crash of '83
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I always think of TWA Airlines.
TWA was a legacy airline from the earliest days of airlines. However, after deregulation in the 70's, they were struggling to compete. Desperate for cash, they allowed corporate raider Carl Icahn to purchase majority ownership of the airline, which provided some much needed cash.
Included in the takeover agreement was a small clause that required TWA to sell tickets to any of Icahn's companies at-cost, meaning zero profit. It sounded like maybe TWA would give a few seats to some corporate travelers.
Nope. One of Icahn's companies was a travel agency, and they sold huge numbers of tickets to the general public below market value and for zero profit to the airline. Flights would be 100% full and make no money. Hamstrung by the inability to adjust fares to make a profit, the airline was forced to cut costs, cut or eliminate popular services and benefits, and cease flying on some routes altogether.
Eventually TWA could not survive and it was bought by American Airlines in 2000.
They double booked us on one flight, people wanting us to move as they also had tickets for out seats. We had tickets for those seats as well. Took a while to resolve and delayed the flight. The other people had to leave the plane. Only because we got there first.
On one hand, what a bad mess. On the other hand, I absolutely loved getting free airline tickets for volunteering when they needed to bump people off of flight. As long as I wasn't on a tight schedule, of course. Now it's an even worse bad mess and I don't fly at all.
Load More Replies...I think it was on the day that TWA went bankrupt and I had to get re-routed on a cross nation flight. They put me on a TWA. The plane was empty just about. One of my best flights!
No one listed Xerox? Sticking with copiers and not those computer thingies?
For a very simplified background… In the early 70’s, Xerox PARC invented so many things that are integral to modern computing. Graphical User Interface, Ethernet, laser printing, postscript, WYSIWYG text editing/word processing, etc. They could have been THE player in the personal computing market. Xerox leadership decided that they were just a document company and did not do anything with what they invented. Cue a demo to Steve Jobs, which gave birth to Lisa and then the Mac, which in turn inspired Microsoft to copy and create Windows.
They're still around. They continue to do copiers and printers. Copiers and printers are the worst office machines ever BTW. So they're like a car company that only builds garbage trucks.
What do you make copies on and what do you print documents with then?
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Small scale. Our local pizza place did a slice meal ( big slice, fries, a dip and a drink) for 5 euro. A simple 1 euro increase absolutely k**led them. This was when cash was far more common and the psychology of just handing over a fiver was the ticket.
Showing my age here. Our local Bank’s pub used to have a 98p pint (see I told you I’m old) and you could buy 5 pints and sling the 10p in the fruit machine. When it went up they’d held it at 98p for so long it jumped to £1.04. The outrage! Now you needed £5.20 and that’s just not cricket.
Just had an American moment when I read that. I was trying to add in tip.
Intel's decision to forego purchasing ASML's EUV lithography machines until their competitors purchased all of ASML's production putting Intel years behind. To their credit Intel took delivery of one of ASML's machines about six months ago. These machines are so advanced that it will be another 18 months until Intel can manufacturer chips using these machines.
Trump wants everything manufactured at home, Intel is one of I think only two American chip manufacturers, Taiwanese mega chip producer TSMC is helping them - if it doesn't work out within the next two years, it's hopeless.
The CHIPS Act could actually fix this, but it's still going to take time. I hope the trump regime doesn't cancel any more CHIPS contracts like they did in New Mexico.
Load More Replies...ASML is one of those companies you only know if you are in the business. I am on the side that provides compressed gases to ASML. The semiconductor industry is insane when it comes to the quality they demand.
I believe it. Fab facilities need to be MUCH cleaner than an operating room.
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When Amazon was taking off, brick and mortar book stores were loosing business. Barnes and Noble made the sensible choice to downsize and closed many stores while developing an online platform. Borders, on the other hand, decided the best thing to do was build as many new stores as possible. When this didn't increase sales, they decided it was finally time to try online shopping. However, they decided to partner with Amazon and have them handle all of Border's online business, effectively handing all the extra revenue directly to their biggest competitor. Guess which store is still in business?
We badly miss the local Borders to this day. The store were so much cleaner, and better laid out.
Load More Replies...And now people are returning to proper book stores because Amazon thought it a good idea to have their boss suck the smeg-covered d**k of the orange rapist....
If I could upvote more than once, you'd get an extra one for "smeg."
Load More Replies...When tablets were first coming out I bought a POC for $100 and I've never been so disappointed. It was supposed to work with whatever software Borders was trying to push and the store was already long gone by the time I got the tablet.
I remember the first time I heard of Amazon. I was at a brick and mortar store and I was asking if they had an old book I was looking for. The lady said "I don't think so but I'll check Amazon". That's when I found out what Amazon was. That must have been around 2000, 2001.
When Circuit City lowered the pay cap and fired everyone making over the pay cap. No, wait that wasn't a single decision, they actually did it twice.
Being ridiculously stingy about coupons! I once worked at a cafe and they had a buy one get one free ice cream advertisement in the local paper (which you can pick up for free anywhere around town). People were coming in all day with it and the place was packed. One girl couldn't find it in her wallet and was getting really upset so I told her it was fine and gave her the deal anyway. Later on I got screamed at for that. I can't imagine that the alternative-- refusing to give her the free ice cream-- would have been good customer service. I would have felt so awkward and horrible about doing that.
Another time my mom and I went to a wrap place, each with our own buy one get one free coupon. They refused to give us each a free wrap because "we clearly came in together" even though we were paying separately and each had our own coupon. Never went back there again.
Artesian Builds. Company CEO, Noah Katz, gets on their normal PC building live stream where they are going to give away a PC to one of their affiliates. Name gets drawn. Katz looks up the affiliate, reads out the metadata for the affiliate, decides this person isn't important enough, and rescinds the offer. All proudly live on stream.
This happened on March 1, 2022. The company announced they were shutting down eight days later.
THQ, once a respected game publisher, banked it's entire company on a drawing tablet accessory for consoles
Didn't work out too well.
Gary Kildall deciding to not accept IBM licensing terms for the OS for their next computer. Later launched as IBM PC. A small company accepted IBMs conditions and put together a small OS they bought from another company.
The small company was Microsoft, and the rest is history. As areDigital Research and CP/M.
yeah but cpm was an 8-bit os not 16-bit. cpm was pretty nice on an 8-bit 8080 or z80 machine. I miss cpm. but i like my intel i5 16 gb ram linux much better
Load More Replies...Surprised I had to scroll this far to see IBM. When I was at university, they had a firm stranglehold on what was developing into the internet. But all it took was one person to say there was and would never be an appetite for a computer in the home. Nowadays, we carry devices with more computing power than IBM perceptually provided with their dumb terminals.
GM abandoning the EV-1 instead of continuing to develop it.
That's a painful oversimplification. GM created the EV-1 strictly as a development and test platform. Once it had served that purpose it was shut off and they used what they learned to develop market-driven cars. It was never going to be developed farther and it wasn't practical to do so. Large-scale manufacturing is very different from a limited run of semi-custom vehicles.
You could get a 3-sries BMW for cheaper, even after scale manufactuering by GM's own estimates, and gas was around $1.40 a gallon, national average. EV-1 was just ahead of its time.
Load More Replies...The tech just wasn't there yet. The EV-1 was still using lead acid batteries. LEAD ACID batteries are a centuries old technology now. Battery tech needed another couple decades to develop.
The basic problem with the EV-1 (and GM's subsequent electric cars which absolutely were a continuation of developing the EV-1) is that no-one wants to pay thousands of extra dollars for range anxiety and crappy power. The most hated man in the universe figured out that there was something about an electric car that very wealthy people would LOVE: instant torque. So he made insanely expensive, insanely high-performance sports car and used the profits from those sports cars to fund the infrastructure needed to make EVs work.
Kmart not owning the buildings they operated in. Yeah there was a lot of other factors for why Kmart is gone, but one of them was because they practically never owned a building they operated in.
But when they DID file, those same properties were SO well placed they got top dollar for them.
A friend of my husband's owns a sports bar. A few months ago he offered $1 beers. The place QUICKLY became overloaded with homeless people and the regulars didn't like it and stopped going. Special didn't last long.
The company that makes the game Ark spent all their money on a failed electric car company.
Any time a popular local restaurant changes their hours every other week, people don't know even you are open and they just stop coming.
Or when a spot starts cutting hours suddenly. I kid you not, I saw a sign on a place once: "We apologise to our regular customers but will no longer be open Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday." So how are you going to pay your lease when you are only open 3 out of 7 days a week?
There are certain "restaurants" who don't really need customers as part of their business model. Capisce?
Load More Replies...There’s a restaurant near me that does that. They don’t even follow the hours posted on the door. You kind of just need to walk by and see if they’re open every single time. (Can’t call, they never answer their phone). And they close at 2:30pm every day. If it wasn’t some of the best fish and chips in the whole world i wouldn’t even bother 😂
There was a newer coffeeshop near my office who weren't opened on friday mornings... it wasn't a residential area so Friday is probably going to be the best day for traffic. Oh well. They closed not long after.
So this didn’t wreck the company completely per se, but did do a lot of damage - Merck rushed Vioxx to market because it was a first-in-class/blockbuster medicine, which is the Holy Grail of Big Pharma. If you have the one and only type of medicine on the market and it works, that’s basically a money-printing machine, and they got that with Vioxx. They chose to ignore FDA regulations and marketed it for something that it was not intended to be used for when applying for a license (Rheumatoid Arthritis) and the d**g reps were lying about safety data for cardiac risks. It ended up costing the company ~$5 billion in criminal and civil trials and FDA fines.
I started working there at the end of the Vioxx payouts and the cuts to MANY benefits was staggering lol. Every time something else would go (including jobs) people would blame Vioxx.
Also look up Fen-Phen. Weight loss combo d**g that caused heart value problems and pulmonary hypertension which will kíll you if untreated.The Fen-Phen settlement amounted to $3.75 billion.
One of the casualties of that was a certain cold reliever called Saleto-D. Take one if you had a cold, it would blow your head clean for a work shift. Stuff was amazing, but, as a person in their 20's/30's it had no noticeable health effect. And to think I would chase it with a coffee.
Load More Replies...The fine is just the cost of doing business in the US. I couldn't find what the profits from the d**g were, but sales were in the billions. It is an interesting story. They fudged the data just a little bit to make it look less risky and made an hilarious assumption about Naproxen (the d**g it was compared to). They hid 3 heart attacks from the study because they happened after a made up cut off date. They assumed Naproxen acted like aspirin and reduced cardio vascular episodes. That means the lower cardio rate in the Naproxen study is a decrease in risk not that Vioxx is an increase in risk. Fun fact, both increase the risk. The funny part is both the US and Canada have okayed the d**g after it was taken off market, because it was deemed worth the risk. If Merck had just been honest...
Aroma Cafe in LA charges a mandatory 15% "management fee" to every single bill. This is not gratuity for large parties, etc. 15% not including tax and tip! So shady and despicable.
The price of goods and services should be the price they list on the menu. You don't pay extra for management, every company has management.
Are you informed of this up front or is it added to the bill without you knowing?
Microsoft focusing on television and sports instead of games when unveiling the Xbox One. The Xbox brand hasn’t recovered since.
Say what you will, but personally I'll take Xbox over PlayStation any day
Playstation controllers set of my carpal tunnel like nothing else.
Load More Replies...The original Bed, Bath, and Beyond focusing on in-person brick-and-mortar store sales instead of an easy-to-use website for online sales.
Me too, for the browsing experience. I've never visited their website.
Load More Replies...They stopped offering those cutely packaged variety packs for us clueless husbands to buy for our wives.
There was a mongolian bbq chain in my town that offered $1 beer every evening starting at 5pm. The idea was you would come in, have a couple beers and then buy dinner. Nope. We sat there and just threw back beers for a few hours. That promo didn't last long and now the business is closed.
That's really strange. Who drinks without pairing it with the pleasure of eating?
A local delivery company where I live. They had amazing wages and benefits. Every driver was clamoring to get a job there. The crew so big the only reason there were other delivery companies was so they didn't run foul of anti monopoly.
Then they decided to review their payment structure and reduced the amount you got paid per haul across the board.
Another big delivery company looking to get established in the area then offered the exact same wages they had previously offered. They lost 80% of their employees in the first month and even though they went back on the pay reduction they slowly died out over the next year.
If you don't deliver for your drivers, they won't deliver for you.
American car companies declaring they will go all electric by a set date. Now I realize they have all pivoted, but they did this without vetting what the consumer truly wanted vs. being pretty much forced to go that route because of the government.
They have all pivoted, as have all companies globally, except Toyota) to offer more hybrids (what it appears the consumer wants) with some ice and electric offerings. It is very interesting how all along Toyota kept saying hybrids were the answer for today.
Only because they are cheap Chinese c**p..
Load More Replies...Toyota is a good company. A little timid when it comes to change, but their caution seems to pay off. Plus their manufacturing management is second to none.
They are sadly crumbling. In five years the "reliability" title will belong to Honda, mark me.
Load More Replies... THQ was one of the bigger publishers in video games. They held Darksiders, Saints Row, Destroy All Humans, and had deals with Disney, Dreamworks, Nickelodeon and the WWE.
They developed the uDraw Game Tablet. A $70 drawing tablet accessory for the Wii, PS3 and 360. This tablet was a sales diester and single handedly killed THQ.
The company went bankrupt and Nordic Games purchased big swaths of their IP. Today they make games under the name THQ Nordic, but original THQ died at the hands of the tablets.
What is funny is obviously Nintendo went on to make the Wii U, another sales flub but obviously they must have taken some inspo from the uDraw.
Nintendo, out of everyone, has dddeeeeeeppp pockets. So deep, it should have been them to buy Star Wars, not that stupid mouse company.
They don't have Disney deep pockets and they wouldn't have had a clue what to do with it. They might have even tried to do something truly boneheaded like make the Thrawn trilogy. The Rey-Finn-Poe trilogy has some problems(Canto Bite, wtf? Why k**l the pacing of your movie for that?) but the Thrawn trilogy at best would have been Exposition: A Star War Tale. And there's no way Nintendo would have given us Rogue One or Andor. Maybe we would have gotten The Mandolorian, but it would have likely been closer to the Boba Fett show(what a wasted opportunity that was) than the Mando we got. And no Galaxy's Edge? That would be awful.
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Bayer acquiring Monsanto, completely underestimating the USA's willingness and ability to completely legally annihilate the same company they were protecting once it turned from US-owned to non-US-owned.
Hiring Ron Johnson at JCPenny. He first decided to never have sales or coupons that fair pricing with no makeups just to make them down, didn’t work. People never got coupons or sales flyers so they never went in. It made sense logically but shoppers like to think they are getting discounts. He also thought he would make it cool place. It’s JCPenny. In a mall. It’s not going to be cool in the 2010s.
He did great with Apple Stores but Apple customers, especially Apple Store customers aren’t JCPenny customers.
A JC Penney in a mall wasn't even cool in 1985, let alone the 2010s.
Company called Sandvine recently decided they would take their network traffic inspection and prioritization software and repurpose it to allow foreign governments to spy on their citizens.
Got themselves sanctioned by the US government, they were then unable to buy the hardware their software was custom tailored for. They therefore couldn't sell their product anymore and torpedoed their revenue source.
Laid everyone off and the C-Suite that pushed the decision got golden parachutes.
Yay capitalism.
Sonos rushing an app release for a pair of s****y headphones. While not completely ‘wrecked,’ the damage has been impressive for such a short timeframe.
This new trend of NFL teams going all in on someone and it's pretty much never worked out. First it was the Raiders for Gruden, then the Browns for Watson, and very likely the Jets for Rodgers.
Granted, these places weren't exactly "successful" before, but none of them have even remotely moved the needle and they'll all take years to recover from.
Bud Light for putting someone's picture on a can of beer.
Wait, was that the photo of a trans person? Oh no! How will the poor beer drinkers survive? Your kids get gunned down in school, your president is a rapist, but trans people on beer cans as a one-off marketing thing? The horror! Transphobes are such snowflakes...
It wasn't so much bc they're Trans, it was the commercial where they stated "im getting my period" that threw people off - this beer is marketed towards men. Men don't want beer associated with menstrual cycles
Load More Replies..."No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." - conservative writer, H.L. Mencken
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When Rainforest Cafe got rid of the live parrots. That was the only interesting thing about it.
I liked the rain showers and giant animal animatronics :) that was cool
Dráčik is Slovak toy store chain. It's CEO is homophobic and transphobic and didn't have any better idea than to write his "opinions" on the official website. As a result, some companies that supplied toys for his stores terminated the contract. Serves him right.
With the exception of Philips, it appears that non-USA companies do a much better job. As evidenced by their lack of inclusion on this list.
The Hudson's Bay Company, a company that started off as a fur trading company over 300 years ago that became one of Canada's most iconic department stores. It used to be Canadian until it got brought out by an American investment firm in 2008. The Bay is now in the process in liquidation as they prepare to close all but six of its stores. They are still looking for a buyer for its six remaining stores. Most of its stores are in rough shape, their escalators and elevators are out of service and haven't been fixed in a while, as they don't have the money to repair them. And they owe their vendors and wholesalers thousands of dollars on top of the out of service escalators and elevators.
Selling Banana Republic to the Gap Corp. B.P.'s founders had a great Idea: sell durable clothing that you'd wear while going on two day hike with you closest friends. Not selling clothing that people want to appear to be "cool" wearing.
Dráčik is Slovak toy store chain. It's CEO is homophobic and transphobic and didn't have any better idea than to write his "opinions" on the official website. As a result, some companies that supplied toys for his stores terminated the contract. Serves him right.
With the exception of Philips, it appears that non-USA companies do a much better job. As evidenced by their lack of inclusion on this list.
The Hudson's Bay Company, a company that started off as a fur trading company over 300 years ago that became one of Canada's most iconic department stores. It used to be Canadian until it got brought out by an American investment firm in 2008. The Bay is now in the process in liquidation as they prepare to close all but six of its stores. They are still looking for a buyer for its six remaining stores. Most of its stores are in rough shape, their escalators and elevators are out of service and haven't been fixed in a while, as they don't have the money to repair them. And they owe their vendors and wholesalers thousands of dollars on top of the out of service escalators and elevators.
Selling Banana Republic to the Gap Corp. B.P.'s founders had a great Idea: sell durable clothing that you'd wear while going on two day hike with you closest friends. Not selling clothing that people want to appear to be "cool" wearing.
