The US National Park Service struggled for years to find a locking trash can that would be able to keep bears out. People couldn't figure them out so they wouldn't lock it back up, or litter, rendering them useless. One park ranger was quoted as saying there was considerable overlap between the dumbest people and the smartest bears.

The 1/3lb burger because people thought it was smaller than the 1/4lb one.

Removable batteries on smartphones. People couldn't handle the "cheap Plastic" on a phone they were putting a case on anyway. As a result, we can't change the batteries in smartphones anymore.

Initially? The idea of washing your hands was resisted to the point that the man pushing the idea of hand washing was driven to a mental breakdown from the ridicule of his peers.

My dad once told me about how they tried to sell crumpets in a new country and they did really poorly because no one realized that they were supposed to be toasted. I think once they updated the packaging to tell everyone they were supposed to be toasted they did a lot better.

The Wii U. People didn't know it was a new console and thought it was just a regular Wii, an add on to the Wii or who knows what else. A different name would have solved this entire problem. People still don't know how to distinguish Wii U games from regular Wii games, even though Wii U games will not play on a Wii console. Marketing Geniuses take note, if you have a new product give it a different name than a slight variant on its predecessor.

In Sweden we had twopacks of sugarcubes at cafés. They were really simple to open, just hold it with the weld up, pinch each half and break it in half. The weld would open in an elegant way and expose the sweetness inside, ready to be taken out and consumed. Just like opening a book. Very few understood this. People would rip, tear, scratch, bite and do all sorts of f**kery to open the innocent packs of sweet reward. And they complained, oh they complained. Story goes the inventor were depressed for life because just a few brilliant people could understand the beauty of his brilliant little treasure chests of sugary heaven. F*****s.

They put out instant cake mix in the 50's. You only needed to add water, but no one would buy it. I think they couldn't believe you could make a cake with just powder and water. They discontinued it. cen-texan replied: There was a story when I was in school that the marketing guys figured out that if you take out the powdered egg and had the end user add eggs it would sell. They figured that as women were going into the workforce and weren't able to cook a full meal, the felt guilty about buying a complete mix. Having the end user add real eggs gave them the feeling that they were really baking and not just pouring powder out of a box.

There was a lottery ticket scratch off that had a temperature listed on it. You would scratch off to reveal your own temperature, and if it was colder than the listed one, you win. Pretty simple, right? It failed because people don’t understand negative numbers. People called in claiming that they “won” because -6 is “colder” than -8. It is not. The ticket was ultimately discontinued.

Those little shopping carts at grocery stores for kids. A bunch of dumb a*s parents refused to parent their kids and they would just let them jam the carts into displays, peoples legs, other carts etc, so almost all grocery stores in our area got rid of them. They were made so kids could put their own choices into the cart and be mindful of what they choose, not babysitter bumper cars.

About 15 years ago Arm & Hammer came out with a series of environmentally safe cleaning products for bath, kitchen, and glass. They worked well, smelled good, and I really liked them. The drawback for dummies was the reusability of the spray bottle. Refills came in a cartridge the size of a five hour energy shot. You filled the bottle up to the fill line with water then screwed the cartridge into the bottle which had special inner threads to open the cartridge. The spray bottle was sold empty with a cartridge attached. The checker at the store paused when ringing me up to ask if I really wanted to pay six bucks for an empty bottle. When I bought the glass cleaner I got the same question. Nobody bought it because they didn't realize how it was packaged.

Off the wall one but: Soap that doesn't sud. A chemical needs to be added to soap in order for it to sud, and it was added so people would know that they were scrubbing enough. Now, people all expect soap to sud, so if someone puts out soap that doesn't have that chemical, people say the soap is broken.

Nearly 50% of HDTV’s in the early era were returned because people plugged in their RCA cables as the main video source. They not only didn’t understand what HD was, they thought the picture looked worse, as it was distorted on a 16:9 screen.

We had a guy come talk to us at my college about his experience in marketing. He mentioned that when he used to work for Campbell's (I think) they had trouble breaking into the Chinese market with their instant soup. They had just assumed that it would sell just as well there as anywhere else but apparently it was the same kind of issue as you mentioned where I guess culturally it was seen as "cheap" to just heat up some instant soup. So they rebranded and repackaged it as a dry mix that you had to actually add to boiling water and lo and behold it started selling

In 1979, Clairol rolled out their touch-of-yogurt shampoo, which they hoped would help people with oily hair. Unfortunately for them, oily-haired consumers didn’t like the idea of washing their hair with yogurt. The few who did buy the shampoo thought it was edible, only to be disappointed after getting sick as a result.

Police Squad!, made by the guys who did Airplane! and widely considered pound for pound one of the funniest TV shows that's ever aired. But it failed because it required audiences to actually pay close attention to the quickfire gags and fast dialogue. Led to ABC's president memorably saying it was cancelled because "the viewer had to watch it in order to appreciate it." Later it was adapted into the Naked Gun movies, which were smash successes, probably because people in theaters are locked down into the movie.

Those chip bags that would decompose in the ground. Too noisy, they said. But I kind of feel all chip bags are noisy to some degree. That being said, we should've either poured the contents into a washable bowl or plate or something like that or just used the noise as a deterrent to prevent over-eating

COVID symptom checking websites. People don’t want to comply with these as a preventive measure to determine potential outbreaks before they occur because “they’re tracking my personal information.” The COVID symptom checking programs track only your responses and if it’s through your employer or school, only your school or employee ID number. They don’t understand that their phones track much more information than the COVID symptom checkers.

Golden Rice. In many countries in southeast Asia White rice is the main food. But white rice lacks Provitamin A, which is essential for lots of stuff in the eyes and immune system. So some scientists developed a new species of rice which has been genetically engineered to produce golden rice. Studies have shown that the rice could be a serious help in those countries and it grows just as good as normal rice. But because it is evil generic engineering lots of organizations give their best to slow the approval process down with (in most cases) b******t and some idiots keep destroying test fields.

The Zune. Mayyybe a stretch but you could pay a monthly subscription ($10 if memory serves) for unlimited downloads. As long as you had the subscription, you could download anything you wanted to your device. On top of that you got 10 song credits a month you could use to buy songs to keep forever. As a music lover, I thought this was a better option than paying a buck a song from Apple for your iPod, plus I recall it being a cheaper device with more storage. All you can eat music for $10 plus I get 10 songs a month to keep forever? Not bad. People still think I’m crazy when I bring it up. Granted, the stuff you didn’t own would go away of you ever canceled the subscription, but still, it’s not that different a concept from streaming platforms like Spotify.

The metric system in the United States

Representative Democracy.

Netbooks. There is a market nowadays for pocket-sized computers with an actual keyboard and a desktop OS, sadly people saw them only in their infancy when they were slow and sluggish. Manufacturers stopped making them just when technology became small enough to really fit a proper processor inside a little bugger not bigger than 7". Now we got games you can stream from a bigger rig, some office jobs are actually made outside the office, we consume a lot more digital medias, just think about how many people buy Bluetooth keyboard for their tablet! If we made netbooks today again, and made them good, and cheap, they would be common sight.

Sega Dreamcast?

I'd have to say freedom. Too many people strip it down to "doing whatever the hell you want", and do all kinds of stupid and destructive things and give a bad name to the concept. Then people who know what freedom really is, but don't want people to be free, use it as a pretext for taking away our freedoms.

Most drugs, such as morphine and LSD. They started as perfectly legal drug, that could have positive effects if used correctly. But people started abusing them and they ended up outlawed in most countries.

HE clothes washers. Worked at Lowes in appliances and people just couldn’t wrap their heads around the lack of an agitator

The Printing Press. Or rather what some accept as the earliest example of movable type that we have evidence for the Minoan Phaistos Disc “An early clear incidence for the realization of the typographic principle is the notorious Phaistos Disc (ca. 1800–1600 B.C.). If the disc is, as assumed, a textual representation, we are really dealing with a "printed" text, which fulfills all definitional criteria of the typographic principle. The spiral sequencing of the graphematical units, the fact that they are impressed in a clay disc (blind printing!) and not imprinted are merely possible technological variants of textual representation. The decisive factor is that the material "types" are proven to be repeatedly instantiated on the clay disc.”