Running a massive corporation certainly isn’t easy, and just because someone has a large paycheck and many years of experience doesn’t mean they’re immune to making mistakes. But when you’re running a company that the whole world has their eyes on, any misstep is going to live on forever in history.
Redditors have recently been discussing some of the biggest corporate blunders they can recall, so we’ve gathered their most popular responses below. Enjoy reading through and cringing at these decisions that were horrible in hindsight, and be sure to upvote the situations companies probably hope we’ll forget!
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Sears was practically built on catalog sales and shipping items to customers. They had the infrastructure in place yet somehow missed out on internet shopping.
I worked for Kodak (Qualex) and I will never forget the meeting we had talking about 35mm film. A person said he’s noticing an influx of people looking to print digital photos.
This was a senior Vice President of Kodak saying, and I quote “this whole digital think is just a fad, it will blow over soon”
Twitter.
*points furiously everywhere*
We are getting to see it fail in real-time. Personally, I'm a bit sad because I liked Twitter but its failure is the entirely predictable result of really really really bad management.
I don't know if this counts as failure, but Skype had a 10-15 year head start only for zoom to swipe in during the pandemic.
I personally got my company to switch from Skype to Zoom (for the video calls) and Slack (for the chat). Skype had both in one in addition to its 10-15 year advantage so it should have won out easily, but it was so un-user-friendly that we were all sick of it and I’m not surprised others were too.
My favorite is when A&W promoted a 1/3lb burger to compete with the quarter pounder. It failed because most people thought 1/3lb was less meat than a quarter pounder
I read a recipe review yesterday where it called for 1/4 cup of sugar and the woman wrote "I only added 1/3 of a cup of sugar as my husband doesn't like things too sweet and this amount was perfect for both of us and worked fine in the recipe" I think I literally face palmed at the stupidity of her comment and the others underneath saying they would try and same thing, being completely serious and not being sarcastic. Is basic maths not taught in schools in the USA?! My cousin when he 6-7 years old knew that 1/3 is bigger than 1/4!
Australian DIY chain Bunnings acquisition of UK-based chain Homebase. They came in guns blazing, fired the entire management team, and tried to remake Homebase in their image. Got rid of the Habitat and Laura Ashley franchises, the cycle service shops, cut down the plants and garden sections, and replaced all of this with a load of grim, cut-rate power tools.
Most critically of all, they brought in a huge - GINORMOUS - selection of barbecues and outdoor kitchens and the like. In a country where no one has a garden bigger than a bin store and it's too rainy to barbecue nine months of the year. They devoted literally a quarter of the (very large) shop floor space to these items which absolutely nobody wanted.
It lasted three years before they sold the chain for £1 to a retail recovery specialist and walked off from a £230 million loss.
Absolutely epic fail.
My dad hates how they destroyed Homebase. I worked for them as my first job in school in 2005/2006 and they were always so busy. People booked in for kitchen design services, bathroom design services (and paying a small fortune for the products and installation. People buying furniture, mattresses (we sold so many of those it always shocked me!) soft furnishing, all the DIY stuff like wood, doors, paint, nails, tools etc and then the garden centre. It was so busy we had a garden centre manager and then 4-5 staff under him. Lawn mowers and leaf blowers, bags of compost, plants (both indoor and outdoor), bags of stones, fence panels etc. The British love making their house a home and love spending time and money on their gardens too. Most many only have a small front and back garden, but they will spend a fortune on making them nice. The company made easy money and then they ruined it with seemingly zero market research
George Lucas offered to sell his computer animation company to Disney for $8 Million in the 1980s. Disney balked so he sold it to Steve Jobs instead and it became Pixar.
Adidas and Puma focusing on a sibling rivalry so much that they failed to notice when a relatively small newcomer called Nike overtook them to become #1 in the world
The story behind Adidas & Puma and the rivalry between the Dassler brothers is fascinating.
The Walmart expansion into Germany was a total disaster. They blindly tried to force their way onto an extremely competitive market with a completely different work and shopping culture. Most Germans don't even know that Walmart ever existed in Germany and they have since completely left the country at a massive financial loss.
I heard that they tried to treat German workers the same way they treat American workers. The results were delicious.
It's my "Favourite" in that it's the worst one I can think of and an excellent example about how a profit motive unrestrained by safety regulations is a ticking time bomb: The Bhopal Disaster. A pesticide plant in Bhopal, India owned by a subsidiary of Union Carbide Corporation, an American company, was expected to close in the near future due to anticipated unprofitability. To squeeze every last penny out of it possible, the company all but stopped training their employees and performing preventative maintenance, with the knowledge and approval of the American owners. On the night of 2 December 1984 the plant suffered a massive (preventable) gas leak, enveleoping the surrounding area with ethyl isocyanate, a highly toxic gas. The plant was situated in a highly populated urban area, leading to the immediate deaths of over 2000 people and the eventual deaths of nearly another 2000, and over 500,000 injuries which resulted in tens of thousands of people being permanently disabled. The company was forced to pay a fine to the Indian government. Seven Indian employees who were at the plant and survived received two years in jail, but the owners, specifically The CEO at the time Warren Anderson despite it being documented that he was aware of the risk of a disaster and ordered the procedural changes, never faced punishment.
American car manufacturers in the 80s. I was buying my first family car and it was between a Ford Taurus wagon and a Toyota camry wagon. The Ford sales guy said "Yeah, the Japs have to learn they can't make cars that last 15 years!" and then laughed. We got the Camry. No wonder the American car manufacturers all had to be bailed out.
Circuit City “cutting costs” by firing their most experienced salespeople.
The chain was bankrupt in less than two years.
Probably Blackberry, they're an interesting case study in a company being sniped off of what ten years ago had been an undisputed market-leading position by failing to account for changing technology.
I think they assumed it was just boomer business men who bought their phones and they would want the same phone and not move with the times in terms of what smart phones like Apple could do where they merged business apps with apps for everything else. I knew people, inc my dad, who loved their blackberry for work and then had a different phone for pleasure. Soon realised the pleasure phone (an apple in most cases like my dad) could do just the same, if not more as the blackberry for business and so went to that
Toys R Us expansion into Sweden in the mid 90s. They refused to follow Swedish labour market practice by not signing a collectiva bargainaing agreement (cba) with the storeworkers union (Handels). The union took its memebers out on strike while non-union members continued to work. Eventually more unions joined in sympathy strikes which stopped deliveries, cleaning, mail and finally even financial transactions for Toys R Us in Sweden. It is briefly described in this article: https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/what-canada-can-learn-from-swedens-unionized-retail-workers_n_6888328 It's one of the most famous labour market actions in Sweden in modern time, where there are extremely few strikes otherwise. However the exact same scenario is happening right now with Tesla this time. I should also note that unions work very differently in Sweden compared to the U.S. In Sweden workplaces do not vote on "unionization", the union membership is personal and no one is forced to join a union. If a workplace is big enough and have enough union members the union, which is industry wide, will negotiate a standard industry wide cba with the company. The cba covers all workers even those not in a union. The cba only sets a floor with regards to wages, wage increases, insurances, pension pay etc. There are no fees to the union from non members or the company.
Even the post office has joined the Tesla fight, refusing to deliver mail 😄
Yahoo was offered Google for a million dollars , three times and they turned them down.
NOKIA
They were not that big in the US but they dominated the mobile phone market in most of the rest of the world at one point.
When the first iPhone came out they were very dismissive of it, we all know how that turned out.
Pre-2007Q3, Nokia had a 46% market share in the USA, 49% globally. In several quarters, they climbed above 50% both USA & globally. I think the initial statement regarding their lack of popularity in the USA and that they dominated elsewhere is false.
M and M’s declining to be the candy of choice for E.T. I remember watching the movie in the theaters thinking, “Oh, Reece’s Pieces, that’s cute.” Huge mistake.
Well M&Ms still have a dominate share of the market but it did put Reese's Pieces on the map.
One of my favorite examples of a massive corporate failure is the bankruptcy of Blockbuster, which failed to adapt to the digital revolution led by competitors like Netflix.
*lol* Blockbuster actually had an opportunity to buy Netflix, but they refused.
Pepsi ran a lottery in the Philippines but when there were more winners than expected they refused to pay out the cash prizes. There were actual riots, a few people died.
Pepsi, Where's My Jet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi%2C_Where%27s_My_Jet%3F Pepsi2C_wh...poster.jpg 
Ratner's Jewellers was a big chain in the UK. They sold jewellery at the cheaper end of the market (still gold/real gems), and since a lot of people like cheap things, they sold a lot of it. Until the CEO made a speech at a corporate event containing the following - >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 c**p." and also >He compounded this by going on to remark that one of the sets of earrings was "cheaper than a prawn sandwich from Marks and Spencer’s, but I have to say the sandwich will probably last longer than the earrings" details of the speech leaked to the press, the press ran with it BIG time, and within a very short space of time, Ratner's was out of business. people like cheap bling, but most of the stuff was for gifts, and I guess nobody want's to give or receive a gift that has been well publicised as "c**p" for the last month!
Olestra. The company spent $5B developing an oil that couldn't be absorbed by the body. The only problem was that the undigested oil had to go somewhere. The FDA made them put a warning label on their products that said "may cause a**l leakage." It didn't sell...
I worked on some of the studies when we were getting it (not under that name) licenced as a diabetes treatment. Yes, it did exactly what it said on the box: if you eat fat when you're on this drug you will get explosive diarrhoea. Most people struggling with their weight and eating habits would occasionally relapse, and for most of them once was enough.
World War II was over. Germany was a bombed-out smoking ruin. The victors saw that communism was taking hold in countries with collapsed economies, so they wanted to resurrect the economies of Europe. They were desperate to just get people working again. They'd try anything that had a ghost of a chance at working.
The U.S. essentially told Ford that they'd give them the Volkswagenwerk, the factory that made VWs. If Ford were to take over, just run this factory and make some cars, get people back to work, they could have it for free.
Henry Ford II told his board of directors: "Gentlemen, what we're being offered here isn't worth a damn." And declined the offer.
It was the British who had control of Volkswagen, not the Americans, as it’s factory was in the British sector. It took a British Major, Major Ivan Hirst five years to get the factory repaired, running and producing cars. He offered Volkswagen for sale to Ford, Renault and Rover a amongst various Allied car companies but no one was interested. So he then gave it to the city of Wolfsburg. It’s now the second largest car manufacturer in the world.
Target's expansion to Canada was a disaster.
They spent billions purchasing existing Zellers (Canadian department store) locations from Hudsons Bay Company (HBC). Then they spent 100s of millions more renovating them. They leased more locations to open stores. 133 in total. Due to a variety of issues, mainly distribution problems -they tanked, Target Canada declared bankruptcy and had to pay more millions to get out of leases and sell their owned real estate. This all happened in about 5 years.
My favourite part of the story is the HBC took some of the proceeds from the sale of Zellers and bought Saks Fifth Avenue with it. They're recently begun re-opening Zellers
While Hudson Bay bombed in The Netherlands with their purchase of the V&D stores. Bankrupt in three years.
Hasbro laying off all their staff at wizards of the coast in their DND and Magic The Gathering divisions. You don't gut the only departments responsible for your only reason for profit and growth. Like WTF are they thinking unless the CEO is planning on shorting his own company stock?
The Metaverse
It's the groundwork of what will come... the mistake was assuming people would be willing to accept Nintendo Wii graphics, worse 'gameplay' at bleeding edge PC costs, when the world wants what the book/film 'ready player one' imagines.
Lenovo shipping laptops loaded with the Superfish malware.
IBM. They let Microsoft retain the rights to the PC operating system they put on the IBM PC.
A lost market for sure, but the final outcome separating hardware and software was probably inevitable.
The entire Penn Central disaster. The railroad was massive but terribly managed and lasted less than 3 years before becoming the biggest bankruptcy in US history at the time
Southwest airlines last Christmas
Yes. A customer service disaster of epic proportions fueled by management errors of equal size.
Boeing. Bought their biggest US competitor after they watched it torch itself with Jack Welch MBA cultists. Just ended up eating the MBA cancer too and now it's terminal. 777 - last 100% old B aircraft. Smooth rollout to unanimous praise. The last Great Boeing plane. 787 - amazing generational leap design, but some major problems with production and some typical teething problems with such a new & advanced design. MBA cultists start injecting their poison and production optimized to ~~crush their experienced union workforce~~ allow it to be "assembled like Legos" anywhere. All production moved to SC after 2021 despite continued production quality problems that won't go away at SC. Also f**k you WA taxpayers who gave B a huge tax break if 787 production stayed in WA, but holding B accountable would make B have a sad and politically hard and we can't have that now can we? MBA cultists are clearly now in control. Delays and problems cost B ~$6B as of Q1 23. Those extra costs mean less gas in the tank for new projects. Maybe. 737 Max - Old B engineers completely pushed out of all strategic decision making and after Airbus spooked management with the NEO in the 10's, decided to go with a quick slapped together new engine option plus some updating version of the 737 and abandoning project Yellowstone. This is despite old guard B engineers feelings that 737 NG was supposed to be "the last 737." Major hoops jumped through (including jumping through their own a*****e) to keep on same 737 type rating at all costs. So much outsourcing. Avionics design flaw makes it through certification due to said outsourcing, corporate malfecense, and FAA regulatory capture and get their pee pee slammed in the car door. Yellowstone aircraft would have cost $10B. Max was supposed to cost $4-5B. Total costs for Max f**k up now north of $20B. Between 787 and Max f**k ups, B now behind $25ish billion. Sure would be nice to have that money for the new aircraft they need to bring to market in the 2030's now wouldn't it? Don't forget closing down Long Acres campus in 2021. Old B is now dead. SLS - What a complete disaster of a program. Over budget, behind schedule, and very nearly a PR disaster with the Artemis 1 launch. Test vehicles still can't even do what they are supposed to do. The worst example of govt pork barrel/make work program and corporate ineptitude. Boeing is mostly staying afloat by virtue of being the sole large heavy aircraft production company left in USA and is "too big to fail." I dream that Boeing Commercial Aircraft is spun off and they can get back to their roots of designing amazing commercial aircraft.
Xbox as a brand over the course of one generation went from a serious player compared to its closest corporate competitor to an afterthought. Although technically the PS3 outsold the 360 by the end of the generation, I'd argue that the 360 was still the more recognizable face during the time.
Then the PS4 vs Xbox One generation occurred and through a series of incredibly dumb and baffling decisions, Xbox lost substantial market share. During the FTC trials against Microsoft trying to acquire ABK, MS said that they lost the most important generation, and while a lot of wild claims were made during the trials, this wasn't one of them.
The PS4 era is when a lot of people established large digital libraries of games and made a lot of friends and really locked people into a platform.
Even if Xbox suddenly turned things around and started pumping out incredible, exclusive games and made a new console that was all-around more technically capable than Sony's, I still think they'd lose a follow up generation simply because it's so hard to migrate from one platform to another without losing friends and money sunk into digital games.
They're actually doing better this generation. It's all about consumer-friendly moves. While xbox has Gamepass, which has day 1 drops of AAA games and a fairly good catalog compared to PS, and continues to grow its subsidiaries to offer even more, Playstation's CEO pretty much refuses to compete in this arena. Hubby and I used to be diehard PS fans. The PS5 was bought day one, but it now collects dust and is only touched for the rare exclusive he's interested in.
The Global Financial Crisis in 2008. The banks knew they would be bailed out by government funds and the poorest people in society have been paying for it since then in the form of the various austerity drives. And that same austerity has been used as an excuse to bring massive corporations onto the government payroll despite overwhelming evidence that the privatisation of monopoly services is a complete, unmitigated disaster.
No one mentioned how terribly Starbucks failed in Australia? They didn't do any research and failed to recognise two important things: Australians love cafe culture, and Australians are MASSIVE coffee snobs. Overpriced, sugary dirtwater meant to be drunk on the go is not our jam. Now, most major cities have 1, maybe 2 Starbucks stores - usually in the CBD and/or airport.
Taco Bell is failing too. No, we're not interested in paying extortionate amounts of money for some garbage tier quality mexican food that gives you the green apple splatters.
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Not quite the same but Coca Cola underestimated Scottish people's love of ginger and have tried and failed many times to topple Irn Bru as the number 1 soft drink.
Still haven't even after irn bru reduced their sugar for the sugar tax and coke didn't
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The Global Financial Crisis in 2008. The banks knew they would be bailed out by government funds and the poorest people in society have been paying for it since then in the form of the various austerity drives. And that same austerity has been used as an excuse to bring massive corporations onto the government payroll despite overwhelming evidence that the privatisation of monopoly services is a complete, unmitigated disaster.
No one mentioned how terribly Starbucks failed in Australia? They didn't do any research and failed to recognise two important things: Australians love cafe culture, and Australians are MASSIVE coffee snobs. Overpriced, sugary dirtwater meant to be drunk on the go is not our jam. Now, most major cities have 1, maybe 2 Starbucks stores - usually in the CBD and/or airport.
Taco Bell is failing too. No, we're not interested in paying extortionate amounts of money for some garbage tier quality mexican food that gives you the green apple splatters.
Load More Replies... Not quite the same but Coca Cola underestimated Scottish people's love of ginger and have tried and failed many times to topple Irn Bru as the number 1 soft drink.
Still haven't even after irn bru reduced their sugar for the sugar tax and coke didn't
Load More Replies...