23 Stupid Decisions Made By Companies.

These were some huge mistakes.

Published 4 years ago

These were some huge mistakes.

1
I got a fun one. You know how on shark tank they always introduce Kevin O’Leary as having made his fortune selling an educational games company? He single-handedly killed the learning games industry (those Carmen san Diego type games that were real popular in the early 00’s) by forcing the devs to churn them out faster and cheaper at the cost of quality, slowly killing the market, and he also nearly bankrupted Mattel when they acquired his company.

2
JCPenney tried to stop bullshitting customers and it backfired. They said no more sales, they’re just going to price everything low, because pretty much all sales at department stores are lies anyway. So yeah JCPenney’s heart was in the right place but ultimately it failed because customers are really that dumb and would rather be lied to.

3
In 1998 Yahoo refused to buy Google for $1 million. In 2002 Yahoo offered to buy Google for $3 billion, but Google wanted $5 billion. Yahoo refused the offer. In 2006 Yahoo was to buy Facebook for $1.1 billion, but Yahoo’s Ceo lowered it to $800 million and Facebook backed out. In 2008 Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion, but Yahoo refused. In 2016 Verizon bought Yahoo for $4.6 billion.

4
One time Red Lobster offered an unlimited king crab leg deal, cause they brought the servings out slowly and were like ‘nobody is gonna sit there for 6 hours and just eat king crab legs’. Actually, lots of people did. So many they lost millions.

5
I don’t know if they’re gone but SKYPE shit their pants during the race they had market lead and ten years of practice in. Then covid hit and everyone was stuck indoors but wanted to still talk face to face zoom popped up while Skype was cleaning up in the bathroom.

6
My hometowns shopping mall and movie theater made a rule that no one under 18 could enter after 3pm without a parent present. This included the week and weekend. You know how malls survive without teenagers with disposable income? They don’t.

7
I used to work at a Kmart. They never bothered to update any of the store layouts, and they were more concerned with signing people up for their rewards card and/or credit cards, which led to longer lines, which led to more complaints…you get the idea. Also, the merger with Sears was the final nail in the coffin. Now, all the Kmarts in the area are closed.

8
Circuit City. Major retail chain in the 1980s that collapsed under mismanagement. It’s arguably biggest blunder was firing all of their experienced, better paid workers for cheaper inexperienced ones. Apparently selling merchandise and keeping customers happy is important in the retail business. Who knew?

9
Quibi when it decided that 10-minute clips watched in portrait on a commuter train are the future of home entertainment.

10
This reminds me of A&W Who created the 1/3 pounder. Focus groups and Market research shown the meat was better than McDonald’s 1/4 pounder. It tasted better and it was in many cases cheaper and if not cheaper it was the same price as McDonald’s And it bombed massively When they tried to find out why it was discovered the American people thought they were being cheated because 3 is a smaller number than 4. A&W realizing they can’t explain grade school fractions to fully grown adults without coming across as condescending assholes, quietly took the burger off the menu

11
Can we get an honorable mention for Staples and its multiple attempts to merge with Office Depot despite the fact that they’re both on track to die within the decade?

12
It did not bankrupt them by any stretch, but 30 years ago McDonalds started selling pizza. They invested millions and it crashed and burned spectacularly. The reason McDonalds started selling fresh-baked muffins is they had to do something with the pizza ovens.

13
Sears ended their catalog/mail order business in 1993. For over 100 years they had sold everything from hubcaps to houses via mail order and shipped them all over the country. Amazon was founded in 1994.

14
Steve Ballmer nearly killed Microsoft. He thought smartphones were stupid. Thought the cloud was dumb. And did a few more things that were just egregiously stupid and took on a lot of debt. Their new CEO is doing a great job though. He also launched office 365 as a subscription service when Google Docs was free.

15
There was a donut shop by my high school. Opened at 6am and closed at 5pm so students would be there every day before school started at 7:30 and after school ended at 2:15. They changed their hours to 8am-3pm and couldn’t make anymore money. They shut down a few months after the change.

16
Ayds diet candy. They didn’t change their name after the emergence of the AIDS virus.

17
Borders Books. It had to chance to be Amazon, from Amazon, before Amazon, and turned it down.

18
Netflix almost did as they made the transition from dvds. They had a period where they dropped to dangerously low subscribers.

19
Kodak completely went under when they chose not to adopt digital photography. They eventually came back several years later, somehow.

20
RadioShack. Those guys just couldn’t make their niche happen and never attempted to evolve.

21
Quiznos. Corporate office decided to buy the vendors, and then contract all of the franchises to only buy materials from Corporate with a price hike. The margins got way too high and all of the stores went out of business. They shot themselves straight in the foot.

22
Digg was bigger than Reddit until they decided to force changes on the site. The changes were immensely unpopular, to the point that users began posting Reddit links as a way of rebellion. Digg stuck to their new ways and collapsed.

23
MoviePass was a weird one. Their model was too good to be true. They lost money on every subscriber who was seeing more than 2 movies a month which, IIRC, was almost all of their subscribers.