People Reveal Worst Corporate Decisions That Completely Ruined Their Companies Business r/AskReddit
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ส.ค. 2019
- r/AskReddit What has been the best corporate Darwin Award? A decision made by a company that basically killed the business.
LET'S TAKE OUR BEST SELLING PRODUCT OFF THE MARKET. I'M SURE IT WILL BE ALRIGHT.
Marco Paschetta WE SHOULD TAKE OUT BESTSELLING PRODUCT ON THE MENU AND PUSH IT SOMEWHERE ELSE
Coca Cola: we have the best selling product in the world, how can we improve sales?
some guy: Lets change the flavor.
Coca Cola: Great idea, im sure nothing will go wrong.
Let's stop serving the chicken our customers buy in droves so we do not slow up the kitchen. Yeah, let's make sure the stuff people seldom buy is plentiful and ready to be cooked immediately. This was the only happy ending because the idiots woke up.
I seriously have had bosses whose thought process went just like that.
They were a burden on the business and hurting sales.
If they had started a business it would fail. But hey lets hire them to ruin this existing one.
*Cough* NES Classic *Cough*
Heres what ruins businesses
1 greed
2 unnecessary change
3 cutting costs to "save money" instead of lowering over paid bloated salaries of executives
From what I've heard the CEO of Sears knows exactly what he's doing. Sears has been struggling for years, and when he came on board he recognized that the value of the company wasn't in the stores, but the locations. He has a holding company that is acquiring the property the stores sit on, and when they go belly up his company takes over the property. He's made millions by screwing over the company he's supposed to be saving. Sears is dead meat at this point.
Once I saw he is a hedge fund guy I just knew he is a vulture and not a saviour
That kind of thing needs to be illegal. Super-illegal. The kind of illegal that balances out the many, many damaged and ruined lives.
What. The actual. Fuck? 😧
Doesn't surprise me that he's a devout Randroid either, seems like the kind of guy that would espouse her nonsense to justify how shit of a person he really is. Hell his yacht is named "Fountainhead."
I'm pretty sure that is hilariously illegal. CEOs have a fiduciary duty to the corporations they work for and this kind of shit would expose him to a mountain of liability. Certainly civil, maybe criminal. Obviously the issue would be proving such liability but I can't imagine the U.S. has particularly stringent requirements for proving a breach of fiduciary duty in the context of corporate law.
"Let's add a gambling system with loot boxes"
"If you don't like it, don't play it"
- Electronic Arts (ruining two awesome video game series simultaneously)
with the company itself sadly still running thanx to the idiotic casuals buying their shit every year
I call it Battlefail EA before it was even released, I realized that Battlefront EA would be garbage, and that its successor, Battlebox GREED would be an even worse game
I also called that the same thing would happen to Anthem
If it has an 'EA' listed as Publisher, odds are that it's going to suck.
Resurgence Of The Shadow Dragons you realize they nixxed the whole buying crates thing with BF2 before it ever launched, right? And that there is legitimately nothing you can buy in BF2 (aside from some cosmetic bullshit) in the game now with real money?
I get the edgecred-seeking with names and all because the publisher is shit, but Dice has put up a remarkably good game with BF2 since it’s launch, with all free content and updates.
So. Yeah. Maybe find a better example?
They are the most profitable game company in the world last time I checked, but I think justice will be served
Parents should stop giving children their credit cards and adults should take some responsibility for themselves instead of blaming gambling for their problems. We're not criminalizing casinos because they have age restrictions but we're also not parenting our kids. There's gambling in every game with an RNG system; you shelling out real money and not getting what you want is your own fault. We have to take back personal accountability and self-preservation.
I work for the largest EMS service in Georgia. They recently told us that "due to Coronavirus, people are afraid to go to the hospitals and so our call volume is much lower than it has been. In response to this, we have decided to begin billing for calls that end in the patient refusing transport." I have never seen such galling stupidity in my life. If people hadn't been discouraged in calling 911 before, learning that they will be charged for a refusal definitely will. And I'd love to see my company try to defend itself in court for charging the public for services NOT rendered. Seriously, wtf.
tiogah If they billed for the cost of turning up, not for the full amount (out of pocket expenses) they would get it through court. Of course, here in the UK it is "free at the point of provision" even the helicopter ambulances largely supported through sponsorship and charity
It also incentivizes the EMS people to demand transport even when it's not needed in order to get paid.
So Sears won a Darwin Award by implementing Darwinism.
Emperor Palpatine: Ironic....
TheY2AProblem
Third Reich literally tried that and failed miserably. They never had an Aircraft Carrier finished because Goering was petty and didn’t want to share air power.
Long story short, trying to force only the best to survive is a terrible strategy when what you need is 1,000 good people, not 10 perfect ones
spindash64 There was no point in the Graf Zeppelins.
iiLeRoss
And there was no point in them even trying to win the war in the first place, but they still tried, and an aircraft carrier still would have been more effective at causing damage
spindash64 They designed it as a commerce raider. Yes a carrier solo operation commerce raider. I’m still not sure what they wanted to do with the aircraft. It would’ve been better to make more Admiral Hippers if they wanted a surface raider.
"It's survival of the fittest, baby! If you fail then you deserve it for being STUPID!"
[fails]
"Wait, no, no, shit."
A company I worked for laid off almost everyone in an extremely profitable division and put the money they "saved" in a division which was losing more than twice, if not thrice, what the profitable division made.
Long ago I worked for a competitor of Microsoft. One day, the lead engineer called a meeting and ranted for a half hour how Microsoft were losers because their software was easier to use. No, I'm not kidding.
Linux?
@@royce536 No (though listening to Linus sometimes sounds the same.)
_Microsoft were losers because their software was easier to use._
What does that even mean? I can't make any sense of it.
@@royce536 Sun Microsystems maybe because they're gone
@@valhar2000 I guess it was a pretty arrogant guy who scoffs at nice UI/UX.
"It takes me 6 hours to get work started on this software. You think someone using Windows could do that? "
The History channel, I remember when it was actually historical content and it was very interesting, then they changed to shit like Ice Toad Truckers, logging show, other reality shows and Ancient Aliens, I’m still pissed off
No history on the history channel.
No god on the god channel.
And as for BBCs on the BBC....
If no one's watching, make shit up
I can't really blame them. Regular people aren't that much interested on historical content as much as pawn stars.
They actually made the right decision.
Almost no one was watching anymore, so they resorted to reality TV, which sold.
I think they revised the name to just History 😏. The "Military" channel in the 1990s, 2000s became "American Heroes Channel" 🤔. TNN went to Spike. Sci Fi to SyFy so they could slide into non sci fi 🛸🚀🛰👽🤖...
To be fair, if Blockbuster’s leadership had been in charge of Netflix, they would have just run it into the ground too.
That's what people don't understand.
Finally, a fair comment
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking with a lot of these; even if someone passed up on a company that later became huge, who knows if they would have been as successful under that other company?
A good number of the BlockBuster team went on to a franchising group called Red Mango. Basically they just sold the name for like 300K per store. Not even any of their products were their own...all pre-made ingredients. Red Mango had a serious flaw in using stand alone stores. Most of the offerings were $5 -$6 and rarely possible to sell any real bundles so you need a TON of $5-$6 sales daily and that's a hard dollar even in a mall where these for the most part weren't. The new ones follow the new concept for the most part but there aren't that many new ones going up either. I don't know about their non traditional stores in air ports, student unions, metros, etc. but their traditional stand alone stores hit about 300 when they started failing. Looking at the RM website now there are a little over 20 left. I only see one non trad store on the list and I see no reason not to include all stores. The Red Mango ownership then bought out the Souper Salad, Red Brick Pizza and Smoothie Factory franchises and changed their name to Brix Holdings. Go to the Franchise sites and look at those site numbers. Pathetic although Covid must be blamed for destroying the Souper Salad buffet concept. In the last few years they bought the Friendly's and Orange Leaf Yogurt franchises. From the numbers I can find that even if you add all the Friendly's and Orange Leaf stores they may be up to 300 stores total again but over 5 brands rather than 1. Recently I heard their major Red Mango supplier had cut them off. Not sure where that's at now either but it was rather recent. I did what I could there and I was generally liked and appreciated but it tore my heart out to see franchisee after franchisee shut down.
I'm not sure how valid this is because I'm not sure what their positions were at BB and too unmotivated to search LinkedIn but it seemed EVERYBODY came from BlockBuster. There were few good ones from BlockBuster but they got rid of them pretty fast. They were an entitled bunch though and it was a pretty weird trip. I have a lot of horror stories but I quit there rather instantly and they still treated me well so I'll just stop.
Reminds me of a Swede that wanted to live the American Dream. He did the research, got a loan, and bought/fixed up a gas station in the middle of rural Texas. Poor guy didn't realize until much later that his first day he ran off a lot business by slapping on a No Guns Allowed sticker on the front window. By then it was too late.
I guess he didn't do enough research about Texas, then.
Stupid bloody anal liberal got what he deserved. And like the other guy said, ZERO research on Texas.
@@OffGridInvestor except he was a Swede, like the OP said. That doesn't make him the kind of liberals from here (that I'm assuming you dont care for based on your comment lol) it just means the dude had a large cultural misunderstanding that ended up screwing him.
Keep in mind, we in America are gun crazy. To everyone else in the world, WE seem nuts. Food for thought.
@@Electronick7714 Spot on. A 'No Guns Allowed' sign on a premises in Europe would be right up there with 'No Big Cats, Sulphuric Acid Or Chainsaws Allowed'. It goes without saying over here, and we'd freak if we saw a civilian in public with a holstered handgun.
@@TheBotleyBoy precisely. It's a huge cultural difference between america and the rest of the "west"
"Ironically, the documentary is available on Netflix." Enron was a terrible company anyway, nobody misses it.
Except similar failings to regulate went on to cause Lehman brothers to collapse which resulted in a worldwide recession with effects that have lasted almost a decade, crippling wage growth and innovation (almost every product last 10 years is conservative, very few new ideas approved).
@@cattysplat I highly doubt it caused all that.
holy crap, I didn't even realise that mention was about Enron, but I have to agree. Although the story of their fall sounds like something out of a fairy tale
@Gap ... because of lack of regulations
Enron bought the company my mother had worked at for 30 years, and they ran it into the ground in 2 years. Fortunately she didn't have too much trouble finding work after that, but still; if I saw the CEO of Enron at the time hanging from a bridge, about to fall to his death, I would look away and keep walking.
For over thirty years the toy company, Kenner had the most lucrative licensing contract in the toy industry to make Star Wars toys and only had to pay a fairly small amount to Lucasfilms annually. They forgot to pay the amount agreed upon per the contract and lost the license.
Damn, from Kenner's end that payment should have been a "holiday" bigger than Christmas of multiple people checking the figures lol
One big OOF
I'm losing my respect for corporate lawyers.
Literally how do you fuck that up?
@@donsolos there was a Toy doc series on Netflix that explained it. Kenner was named after the 🏢 st in Cinncinatti Ohio. A exec made a prototype Jawa robe with his brown 🧦. True story! 😉
No one mentioned LEGO. I mean they came back but they could have been dead because of stupid management.
Let's reduce the parts to build and have kids play faster without the "tedious" building process....
End Duplo and rename it Explore...
Creat bigger but unmixable figures.
Ever heard of Galidor?
LEGO only survived this because of Bionicle and Star Wars.
Didn't that also result in them having to mould a load more bespoke, model-specific parts instead of generic ones?
@@michaelmartin9022 Yes but the model-specific parts were universally compatible within their own subset. After building the generic action figures, you could take them apart and build whatever. I have a shelf full of custom-made Bionicles that were super fun to play with as a kid.
I know you made this comment a long time ago, but still....as a grown ass adult, what I wouldn't give to play with LEGO Technic now.
Also i heard they had some problems because lego blocks were not patented but copy righted. So when copyright expired you could buy a lot of knockoff cheaper worse "lego" makes.
To be fair though, I think galidor was an attempt to get back on their feet
11:11 the local K-Mart in my town just shut down due to the competition from the local Walmart. Then, three days later, not kidding, contractors come in to test old systems to turn the building into a gym. the electical system sparked bigtime, and set the damn building on fire. GG CAPEX...
LMFAO
I worked for Kmart sometime in 2015, and dear god the stores were awful. It smelled like mildew as soon as you walked in and everything looked a decade old (shelves, refrigerators, even the electronics stock.) The worst part was the building being significantly hotter than nearby stores (upper 70s, sometimes 80s) because corporate wouldn't allow the air conditioning to cool the building fully. Customers complained and the store felt like a nightmare to work in. It shut down shortly after.
the kmart in my town has looked the same as it did when I moved here 14 years ago. and everyone I know that's worked there says it's one of the worst places around to work.
Our local K-Mart vanished decades ago. The building is now a Hobby Lobby, but I'd swear some of the restroom appliances have been around since K-Mart had the place.
Meanwhile half way around the world......!
Hipoint (A firearms company) nearly did this after almost refusing to name their new gun the “Yeet Cannon 9”, after a poll. Luckily they wised up
Lmao imagine if they did this and Yeet Cannon 9 becomes the most popular gun.
@Sheckie Shabang not if you're fucking poor and need a gun that works
Thought Hi point was a product line of Strassell's Machine, Inc
Reminds me of both the Dub the Dew and BoatyMcBoatface fiascos.
I mean really, _only the internet_ could come up with a name like _Yeet Cannon 9._
Sheckie Shabang I’ve heard their carbines are decent
Tumblr and pretty much every decision they make
i still miss the old reblog layout :(
With the porn ban it isn't even just that such a huge portion of the userbase was there for porn, even the aesthetic, feminist, whatever pages had artsy fartsy porn or naked imagery that was now banned. They effectively alienated 95% of their userbase.
Quite alot of porn back on tumblr these days tho. Looots of dicks and clunge.
There’s a possibility that PornHub takes them over and buys them. I’ll return only if that happens lol
Considering I was just there to support a few artists and models who are now permabanned... Yeah, Tumblr is dying a slow and painful death.
Radio Shack. Went from selling electronics in general to focusing on phones, essentially putting all their eggs in one basket. Then the phone companies opened their own stores, meaning customers no longer needed to go to Radio Shack for their phone needs. Radio Shack lost a lot of business fairly quickly, demonstrating the dangers of overspeciallizing and the benefits of selling a diversity of products. If one product doesn't do well, have a dozen others to fall back on.
They couldve hoped on arduino/rasbian , radio controlled planes and 3d printing .
As a former radio shack employee of two years I completely agree. I had a lot more fun selling the niche electronic parts than cell phones. There was no reason for anyone to come to us instead of the dedicated brand stores except for the fact that they trusted us more.
If radio shack focused on the DIY/makers crowd, they might not have gotten as much revenue as they did with the phones but they would have a dedicated and stable customer base since they own that market. there are no other stores that sell the products that radio shack sold.
And they even have a better profit margin. We made pennies on smartphones since we had to buy them from warehouse for pretty much the same price The customers would, $700-900. The only way we made any profit was when we added on cases, screen protector, warranty, etc.
on the other hand, electronic parts we got for pennies and sold at a markup which the customers still saw as a cheap price for them. This is because we source those parts ourselves.
Even charger cables made by RadioShack gave us a major markup. Here's some insider info.
Apple 3ft lightning cable
Distributor price = $15.99
Retail price = $19.99
Profit = $4
RadioShack brand 3ft lightning cable
Distributor price = $2.99
Retail price $17.99
Profit = $15
We were able to sell a product for less than Apple, and make a huge profit while offering consumers a lower price for the product. And frankly, the radio shack brand was a better quality, thicker cable less prone to bending or breaking.
Similar result for Maplin, here in the UK. Went from a few stores mostly on retail parks selling components, kits and other hobbyist electronics; to selling mobile phones and similar from expensive high street locations. Market dropped (lot of phone companies selling via franchises in supermarkets ) etc. Ended up bankrupt, closed down. Real shame - sort of place you might not need stuff from often, but if you did need it it was one of the only places to get it in retail quantities.
Eh, Amazon would have killed off that segment too, better selection, lower prices, Prime shipping, hard to compete when your physical offerings MUST make profit whereas Amazon can subsidize product sale losses with their massive profit from Amazon Web Services...
@@enthusia492 Radio Shack eventually made their stores miserable to shop at. For a while they still had components and C.B.s/ ham radios/scanners but it was obvious they were transitioning to a phone/ Direct TV store.
I would come in for electronics stuff and before I could get back to the corner they had hidden it in the sales drone would start in. "Who is your cell provider? DO you have cable or satellite? We can set you up with a new cell phone for just a penny! You can get 300 channels with Direct Tv! TiVo will change your life!! What do you mean you don't have cable or satellite?!?! WHO THE HELL DOESN'T HAVE A CELL PHONE!!!!???!!!""
Then when you went to check out with a .99 pack of resistors they would demand your full name, address and phone number. I guess they sold that info because they never mailed me an ad.
For years they were a delightfully quirky store. Who else stopped by every month for their free 9V battery?
They would run coupon for flashlight for free then give you the stink eye when you didn't buy their batteries for it. I remember beach balls or Frisbees for .39. I got a 1960 Corvette model kit there for $1.75 once. By that time models were $5 any place else. I would pick up a catalog every year. I Had a 150 in one electronics kit. Got it a present for Christmas. It was supposed to teach me electronics theory but I was impatient and skipped the reading part. I got really good at point to point wiring. If I had read all the "boring" stuff I would have had a jump start in college. I found a still sealed "Tandy Radio Shack presents... The Geniuses of Electronics jigsaw puzzle at a thrift store. Of course I bought it.
Kmart is actually booming in Australia.
It's our Walmart. Only the employees get paid decently.
razenburn K-Mart Australia separated from the K-Mart corporation and became its own thing but kept the name reason the still prosper while the mother corporation is on its way to becoming a relic from the past
honestly when walmart started out one of the things they did was pay their employees well so they would get good employees. It made the business grow tremendously, and then sam walton died and the wall street guys took over and got rid of that innovation. Honestly I expect the same thing to happen to chickfila now that their founder died.
@@abdhbfdhdfhf we keep hearing stories that KMart was founded in Australia. Starting to wonder. But strangely Daewoo from South Korea used to sell all around the world and went bankrupt. GM bought their plant and many of the worst GMs come from there. Yet Daewoo Russia still exists and makes all the old models to this day in their Russian factory.
Kmart Australia has nothing to do with Kmart USA. Kmart Australia is owned by the Wesfarmers corporation- the biggest conglomerate in Australia that owns several other retail chains in Aus. like Target, Officeworks, Bunnings Warehouse, etc. apart from cos. In other industries.
Maybe Wesfarmers can take over our KMart and Sears. 😂😂😂
I was an acquaintance with a guy who majored in photography way back. A representative from Kodak showed up and was a huge jerk to everyone in the class, telling them they didn't have a chance at Kodak as they only hired from ivy league colleges. Time wounds all heels.
And now Kodak became a small company who sell film rolls to small niche market. Oh how the mighty has fallen
The amazing thing about Eastman Kodak is at some point they split the chemical division and spun it off as Eastman Chemical. It was saddled with pretty much all of the environmental liabilities Eastman Kodak had racked up over the years. The plan was Kodak would go on to be a moneymaker and Eastman Chemical would quietly peter out. A similar plan happened when Monsanto spun off the chemical division (they started as Monsanto Chemical Company) sticking it with all the liabilities. That spun off company actually made money and was eventually bought by... Eastman Chemical.
Kodak is floundering and Monsanto doesn't even exist by that name anymore. Their new owners Bayer are having to pay out billions on Roundup cancer claims. Meanwhile Eastman Chemical keeps chugging along. They even have a plant in Sauget, IL. Know what that town's original name was?
Monsanto, IL.
@@1978garfield that's actually a pretty good news. I don't know Monsanto is dead.
Decca recording studios rejecting the Beatles because they didn’t like their sound, but that sound they made ended up making them the most popular band of all time by records sold. Ouch. Oh and that one guy selling all of his apple shares for $800 when it would be worth almost $40 billion today
I heard about Decca. Apparently their executives didn't want to sign the Beatles because, quote, "Guitar bands are on the way out."
There was a guy named Joe Meeks who turned down The Beatles, Rod Stewart, and David Bowie. I read about him in The Big Book of Losers (published by Paradox Press).
@@karaoconnoraliasraidra Ouch, that guy better give up on his career then
Arterexius Gaming He died a long time ago.
@@karaoconnoraliasraidra to be honest it can be a pretty funny idea for a movie about a guy who has horrible taste in music but still working as music producer. He keep failing until one day one of his band hit top billboard chart because people thought it's a comedy song.
I'm still salty over the Sci-Fi to Syfy thing. I watched that channel quite heavily (relatively speaking). I rarely turn Syfy on anymore.
Same
I think the only one happy about the change is the guy they bought the name SyFy from. He made a killing off that since he'd already built up the brand it drove up the price.
And don't even get me started on the SyFy Original movies they put out! The older ones were so much better~
@@alexisgrunden1556 agreed
The shows are trash
Notice how most, if not all, of these are product of lazyness/greed
Sometimes it's the opposite of laziness. Failing to proofread a contract is such a boner that no lawyer with plenty of time on his hands would make that mistake. That kind of mistake is done by a lawyer who is working hundred-hour weeks and is so busy and fatigued that he forgets the simple obvious things.
Blaming greed for a business failure is like blaming gravity for a plane crash.
@@Paul-A01 Unlike gravity, greed can be adjusted to not cause crashes.
@@joeschembrie9450 Human nature can't be adjusted.
@@Paul-A01If greed is analogous to gravity, then what do you think is analogous to the causes of plane crashes?
I don't feel bad for any of these stories.
Congrats. Heres your red star
Internet in a Nutshell it kinda makes me mad how stupid people can be
Except for the first one; poor guys just managed to forget their paperwork.
I feel bad for loyal customers and employees who had to suffer due to some stupid executive.
Ruined your 69th like.
Playboy, the classic adult magazine, decided to get rid of the nudity!
Someone eventually realized how bad an idea it was and returned to form. But the fact that it was implemented at all means that someone thought a porn mag without porn would sell.
Front Magazene
Knew a guy in high school 10 years ago that had a shirt with a playboy bunny on the front and large text almost covering it sayin “I buy it to read the articles”. Made it through most of the day before a teacher finally caught the bunny behind the text and told him not to wear it again.
It was Heff's daughter
Didn’t they put a transgender as one of their centerfold models some time ago?
I read it for the articles.
Finally a story I have experienced in real life. The Sci-fi channel thing. I remember watching and rapidly losing my favorite shows. "Everything is different. What's going on? Wtf is this?" Stopped watching after a while because the channel was so disappointing. Even the commercials were different. Why? Just why?
Not to mention "History" channel, and I think NatGeo is declining in quality too if I remember...
I noticed that the movies tend to have very violent scenes cut out (for example, the scene where the two rexes tear a guy in half in the lost world jirassic park) when they're on scifi.
Kinda like when animal planet only aired shows about building stuff. I could understand tanked, fish go in the tanks and they share info about the fish so it's animal related I guess. Explain to me how a show about a guy building pools and tree houses for rich assholes is related to animals exactly?
Me too. Sad times those were.
I miss when the History Channel was like 99% World War 2 stuff
"You aren't allowed on your phones at work." Its a call center.
Worked for an electronics retailer back in the day. Profitable at first, opened a couple of stores each year. Then thought they could go national, and tried to double the size of the company at one fell swoop. Didn't have the distribution set up to handle the business and went belly up soon after. Sad. Good time while it lasted
The word of the day is "logistics".
@@JamesiaInc and "Ego"
I'm working for a small company that is trying to go national. I see clear sailing for their expansion plans, but distribution will be key.
I think the Crazy Eddie guy in metro NY, NJ had that. He had a successful chain of stereo, tv, camera stores then wanted to grow larger, national but his $$$ ran out so he turned to scams, crimes then got busted.
HH Gregg?
The SciFi one still makes me sad. That was my favorite channel as a kid, and I remember when they made the change. I stopped watching shortly after, they took all the stuff I enjoyed away.
You mean the stuff they didn't own and other mediums bought?
Sears has since gone through bankruptcy. So much salt.
1:39 that post is really shitty.
That no where near why sears fell
Its called online shopping, sears did follow fast enough
I don't understand how anyone can live life with that kind of thinking
That ceo is an amazing person
I don't know what you mean by "So much salt"
I worked for them for too many years. No, the internet didn't kill Sears. Gross mismanagement killed Sears, starting with Eddie Lampert.
@@mickel836 Hahahahaha you keep posting that. Sears Holdings Company isn't well-managed and after working for K-Mart I can see why Sears is dying a slow death.
And Eddie Lampert is a parasite, not a genius.
Fun fact: It was Ed Lampert that practically killed off Craftsman Tools. They went from being pretty much the best tool manufacturer there is, with lifetime warranties on pretty much everything to basically Mastercraft-lite. There used to be an entire section of every Sears devoted to just Craftsman. Last time I was in a Sears before they went under, there wasn't even a toy section in their store, let alone a Craftsman section. They basically stayed open as long as they did through selling perfume and cosmetics to old ladies.
Eriksson mobile phones. One of the biggest on the planet.
"That smartphonethingie, waste of time."
Nokia mobile phones. The biggest on the planet at a time.
"That smartphone thingie, good idea, but lets invent our own operating system so we avoid paying license fees".
All western companies.
"Lets make our things in china, were sure they wont copy it"
Hey you can't slam Nokia that hard...ok you can and it will do absolutely nothing except damage the surface of whatever the phone hit.
The China one is inevitable. That's how developing countries got to be industrialized: by having people from the outside investing in tech and industry in their country. It's just how technology develops.
Nokia is back but it's not the old Nokia. They were great. Multiple members of my family had this basic model that was TINY, light, cheap, and we got 10 DAYS from a battery turning it iff at night. And here we are with smartphones charging them twice a day.....
@@OffGridInvestor You use them a lot more and they do much more too. Has an impact on the battery ^^
Erikson and Nokia used to be Scandinavian countries pride. Now Erikson struggle to survive and Nokia is now owned by a Chinese company. Also no matter how cheap Chinese smart phone is I rather buy Korean or Japanese smart phones. No way I'm getting bugged by Chinese govt.
20th Century Fox almost had one after letting George Lucas have sole merchandising rights of Star Wars.
Tho that is not a Darwin award just a single very dumb decision. The company still makes million in profit to this day, they just skipped out on billions worth of profit back in the day.
@@typie34 To be fair movie tie in toys just were not a thing back then. Star Wars created that industry pretty much.
Did you ever buy a Gone With the Wind figurine or playset?
Do you have a Citizen Kane action figure complete with Rosebud?
These really were not a thing (at least not a successful thing) until Star Wars.
@@1978garfield Yep you right. When the first Star Wars movie came out nobody knew it would grew into such a big following. George Lucas was an "unknown" at the time, so studios didnt think of paying extra for the merchandise and marketing rights to this film.
Should someone make a video about TH-cam's decline? This video? Interrupted by ads at least 5 times!
I had absolutely 0 ads. Which is surprising because on most videos ads come up at the absolute worst times for me (including the end of the video when I’m trying to read comments and it forces me back up to the top of the screen and read the ad space for some reason)
Adblock is your friend.
I had ad personalization on, but TH-cam still thinks I have it off, and as a result I get bombarded with ads for clothing meant for overweight women (Shaper Soft,) toys meant for preteen girls, lingerie ads (Infinitissimmi,) shows on OWN, and other aggressively irrelevant content.
At this point, I think that TH-cam just wants to screw with people as much as possible.
@@WakkoKakko I don't know if I've got personalization turned on but I've had ads for an Indian construction company in Hindi or Urdu (with the odd English word thrown in) & bridge support tape.
Michael Palmer
Give it a couple years.
I gotta support 'taking the money to invent something else,' moreso because it's a nice idea. Yeah someone bought your old idea but now you can come up with an even greater idea and have enough money to keep you stable to work on it as even a hobby if you wished.
Yeah, but six billion dollars? You can retire comfortably and never have to worry about money for life. Just put a fuck ton of money into your 401k and into some mutual funds and you'll essentially be set for life
Eh, not sure what Groupon is about, but I could potentially see people rejecting even that much money if they're particularly proud of the idea they made and wouldn't just want to sell it off.
@@icynomad8949
It wasn't anything special. Just pools people together to get discounts on products and services.
The bakery my mom works at changed owners and the new owner brilliantly decided to change all the recipes that sell well (has people come decent distance for some of the products) to "tested products" at the main franchise in state that people have literally thrown in the trash in the store after eating their version.
Every single educational T.V channel (History, NatGeo, Discovery, etc.) changing from educational material to reality-tv crap.
We lost our Sears here and it was in the same spot for over 40yrs. Everyone lost their jobs and got no compensation for their hard work.
Man some of the stories just snowballed from a small mistake :(
People are paid 6 figures to not make small mistakes, cant feel bad. But it does enrage me that people in business can be this stupid at business management
@@jtdrawoh4595 people are stupid, sometime they value themselves too much to realize it
Sometimes others don't value others enough to listen what they are saying
I have come to the conclusion that most of the people who "run the world" actually have very little idea of what they are doing. What sets them apart from the rest of us is that they have the opportunity to be where they are, and a nigh-superhuman confidence in their ability to make it up as they go.
That last story is sad. Imagine the owners hearing that some shitty lawyer you employed caused the death of your company.
The butterfly effect is a very real thing. The last story especially illustrates it perfectly: a single sentence was inadvertently deleted from a single document, and it led to millions of dollars being lost and hundreds of people losing their jobs. Those millions of dollars went on to fund other projects that otherwise wouldn't have seen the light of day, the people losing their jobs went on to either get new jobs and cause changes in businesses that wouldn't have otherwise happened, or they wound up unemployed, possibly on drugs, in jail, or having committed suicide, their families and friends had their lives altered...
I apologize for stating the obvious, but I really don't think a lot of people ever consider just how profound an effect that a simple mistake or decision can have. It's not like in the movies where one changed event in the past alters one person's future, and possibly the futures of the small circle of people around them. One tiny change (like, say, a man misplacing a map or neglecting to ask an associate for directions) can alter the entire course of the world (by, say, getting lost on a trip through Sarajevo, allowing an archduke to get shot, and leading to 2 global wars that killed 100 million people and shaped the entirety of modern civilization).
The video game publishing industry seems destined for this thread in the near future.
EA games
Truly. Each year we see less and less content and more and more gambling loot boxes. When was the last deep storyline in a game?
john johnny uncharted 4
john johnny God Of War was a masterpiece
john johnny idk maybe God of War
Three words.
Subway hiring jared
Eh, Sunday's still around. Still a shit place with shit food, but they aren't going out of business anytime soon.
Was he the guy who raped children?
It didn't ruin them as a company, and nobody knew he had child porn until it was discovered all those years later.
Doesn't count. To win a corporate Darwin Award, the decision would have had to have been stupid at the time, not stupid years later in hindsight.
Hindsight is 20/20
When we go downtown, we see the old brick Schlitz building wasting away. It's such an old building and I imagine how many thousands of people worked there from the 50s or 60s. So sad because this town was built around it. I remember seeing it on "Laverne and Shirley. "
Ah, I had forgotten that.
also on Eddie Lampert of SEARS he can be quoted as saying that internet shopping was a fad and that is why sears was way behind the curve on that one
Montgomery Wards, and Sears both missed that boat. Originally they both had huge catalog and warehouse systems set up.
@@garywheeler7039 and now both are out of business
But but, he's an evil dirty ayn rand loving capitalist!
@@Carnage7209 pretty much guarantee's that he is a moron
Forbes did an article that most CEOs actually lose most companies money.
This one from 2014?
www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/06/16/the-highest-paid-ceos-are-the-worst-performers-new-study-says/
I'm not surprised, it was a logically flawed strategy to begin with.
Lesson 1: Don't have a CEO. Have an Owner.
Speaking of SciFi, I miss when they’d air horror movies during the weekends, not the poorly cgi stuff, but actual good horror films and even great indie horrors, & when they did that After Dark Horrorfest! Part of what made me the horror buff I am today :’/
11:41 That probably explains why every K-Mart I EVER went inside, toward the end there, looked like "squalor" was the required decor.
And check out the vintage computerized registers from IBM.
Not really a company since it's just one guy, but this is an amusing story. My dad is an estimator for a major highway construction company in the Houston area. He told me a story about when they hired a police officer to help redirect traffic when he was off duty. The guy turned out to be a total a--hole, but he took it too far one day when he used his lights and sirens just to run red lights. My dad saw this and got him fired from the company and told him that if he ever wanted to even think about getting work with them again that they needed a written apology. As far as I know he didn't write it and the officer's supervisor was made aware of the situation and then not only did the d-bag lose his part time job, he also lost his main source of income all so he could be an a--hole. Of course, I myself am going I to law enforcement, so hopefully I don't have to work with anyone like him, but I'm just glad he got his comeuppance.
Understand that there ARE SOME COPS who ONLY entered the police force JUST SO they could excercise their narcissistic power tripping..... my brother in laws aunty is one. Most family has cut her off because she tries to rearrange everyones house her way when she stays with them for any more than 2 days...... my sister experienced it first hand.
In other countries it took 2 to 4 years police academy before someone can graduate and become full fledged police officer. Why it only took 3 months in USA?
You be careful out there. They're coming out of the damned woodwork. Peace and G-d bless you.
I was basically done with Syfy when they cancelled Farscape...I’m still cheesed off about that.
I know many loved Farscape. But it was a financial nightmare and a target for lawsuits due to makeup issues.
I don't think this robot will ever run out of ideas to come up with
Donald Trump can you ban fortnite
The archives are deep
Can you break up shitty monopolies
@@mickel836 he's part of the monopoly you dumbass
The Dan Diego parking fee story is just...
Most of the time the recipe is the same: "We have a great thing going, let's cut costs." Prime example about never listening to finance people if your company is running a profit.
Cutting costs should never mean cutting quality or maintenance.
Like a businessman my dad met once said: NEVER EVER go into partnership with a lawyer or sn accountant. Because lawyers ONLY understand the law side of things and NOTHING else; and accountants ONLY understand the tax side of things and NOTHING else. Stupid smart people I like to call them. My last accountant decided he was only going to deal with business forensic accounting and decided to GET RID of all his old basic clients. He COULD HAVE got a young guy and subcontracted him to deal with all his old more simple clients but decided to tell us all to "just go away and find someone else". The previous year he tried to get us to email EVERYTHING to him and then send us stuff in the mail to sign, extending and complicating the process so he could work from home. But the last time I saw him he STILL HAD AN OFFICE....
Yep. I am seeing that going on at a company I work for now (name withheld but it's an auto insurance carrier). We used to be known for our customer service not for low prices but we were still one of the biggest industry (and honestly we were still beating some cheaper companies for number of customers and our prices weren't too much different). What did they do? First they got rid of drive in inspections where people could go after accidents to get their cars inspected and laid off a bunch of auto damage adjusters so they can promote having people use an app to take photos of damages. That's great for some people, a lot of the younger generations or people who are busy like just taking some photos and having an estimate and payment in 24 hours but most of our customers are a little older and chose us because of "white glove service". Now we are behind in inspections we have to do in person because we don't have enough auto damage adjusters. Also they decided to increase our claim counts because "The previous limit caused people to have to wait too long before their claim was assigned to an adjuster. Oh and we laid off workers in other departments that used to help you with your claims so now you have to do more work per claim but hey its like 8-10 hours more per work per claim and we are only increasing your claim count by 20%)." Next thing people quit looking for greener pastures and the remaining staff have to pick up the slack now that we are short handed our immediate supervisors and their supervisor petition higher ups to approve overtime pay since it's not fair and reasonable to expect us to finish this increased workload in the same amount of time as before (by now I would say our work load has increased almost 40% per person). No, no overtime because we have to pay them time and a half. "Well can we increase their salaries because people are quitting to go to companies that pay more but have less of a workload. This way our adjusters are paid a fair wage for what they do and we don't keep losing more of them and not being able to service our customers." "No that will cut into the profits." I see the writing on the wall and I am looking into other companies.
Yep, this is why chick a Fila is so successful. They never cut cost
This happened to my favorite lunch place. It was a little Indian restaurant that did great, fast, and hot carryout. And it had great lunch specials, $7.99 for an item and a drink. I was a huge fan of the lamb rogan josh. The curry was always so wonderfully substantial and flavorful, and they used abundant excellent meat. Over time, they cut the meat portion and thinned the curry. I stopped going because I was essentially getting half the meat and a quarter of the flavor for the same price. They closed only a couple of months after I stopped going. A shame, it'd been really good and it was really popular. Had it been replicated, it could have been a respectable chain. It was a delicious economical homestyle alternative to fast food. RIP, Delhi Kitchen.
10:01 "take the money and invent something else"
True to word what I'd do in just about any situation.
That's basically the name of the game for most smaller inventors. If their first few companies gets offers from the big guys who wants to acquire them, they should take those offers. That'll leave them with plenty of money to start up something for good, just as well as the entire corporate market will know that the guys behind this, are very experienced, very talented and generally just great and running a business and will thus be more willing to support them if they can't acquire them. Further more it functions as a means of attracting talented employees who are looking for new experiences and the overall marketing will give the customers a clear sense of dealing with a company that knows what they're doing and thus they are guaranteed their expectations to be true. It's basically a win-win situation, if handled properly.
@@Arterexius How many industry-changing new technologies do you think a normal person can create over the course of a lifetime? Just like new advances in mathematics, most people are lucky if they can come up with one.
@@Thalanox A normal person? Not a whole lot tbh. A person with the mind, tools and materials to do it? A whole lot.
Our main problem today is that we cannot start production of a lot of our really great materials, because they're too expensive to manufacture. Most of that expense either lies in not having the right tools yet or not having enough of the raw resources required to do it, thus making the costs sky high and making even testing almost impossible.
Space has a lot of those resources. So we need to figure out how to get out there, mine them and then bring them back to Earth. Preferably in a more refined stage
I'm a woman and a feminist and it's my opinion that the Gillette ad was the absolute PITS. I'm not surprised it drove away customers!
We lost Sears in Canada a couple years ago completely. It was a good store with good prices. All the ceos got bonuses and the workers lost their pensions. Same will happen in the US.
4:41 One of the ways Netflix managed to bail themselves out of this sudden value loss was to fire every temp worker the entire company had nationwide. How do I know? I was employed through a temp agency with Netflix at the time, and was suddenly told by the temp agency "my work assignment was completed." even though my supervisor AT Netflix had me scheduled for at least 6 more weeks (Had other friends hired on as full employees there before I became a temp, found out the other bits a few weeks later. They weren't safe either, losing their jobs just a month or so down the line due to "budget cutbacks.")
I will never work through a temp agency again. Worked in silicon valley in the 80's, temp agencies there are wage slavers and nothing more. Even Tesla offered me a job,but through an agency and I told them I was only interested in actual employment. Did get two years in there, but the place was so badly managed it reminded me of everything I hated about the tech industry.
I think that initial MySpace buyout was $580 million, not just $80 million
The problem with corporate executives is that they don't know the first thing about the business they're in and they don't look at what keeps people coming in the door or how the market is changing. Then they have the gall to act surprised when everything suddenly goes to shit because they burned both their employees and their consumer base with a scheme that sounded good on paper but had no basis in reality.
my dad knew a dude who was asked to invest maybe $500, to become a partner in business. The dude decline. He would have invested in Burger King, he regrets it
Any developer that gets bought out by EA
Hold up, they made that quick cash, so not losing in the short term.
Scottyyy777 well they lost those developers they bought and screwed them over so bad to the point of having to shut down
EA stock is worth half of what it was a year ago. They've lost billions and it couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of blood-sucking vampires.
They made quick cash but selling shit and buying IPs loved by the public and fuck them up is not a long term bussiness strategy,
You mean Activision-Blizzard
The KMart taking on debt to buy back their shares story is exactly why I try to avoid companies doing this. It's foolish to think cheap debt will last forever, and that there'll be no consequences for it in the long run.
I see Walmart going going in this direction after the C.E.O completely ignored raising our pay to $15 an hour but instead interduced that we will be getting brand new work vest
I'm an EX employee ... I stopped doing all my daily job task after watching the news report in the break room 😂😂😂
Damn that's some cold bull!
"Brand new work vest". Made for 30 cents each. Having a bit of knowledge on clothing related things, there's things like underwear where the price tag and barcode, if printed in a western country, cost more than the underwear itself....
Plot twist, Janic isn't making 15/hr now.
I know a lot of people who finally quit after finding out new employees were being paid higher than ones that had been there a year or more. You simply can't get a raise and if you stick around too long they basically treat you so badly you quit. I really prefer not shopping there except for a few things I can't get cheaper elsewhere.
Walmart has a lot of problems (My wife worked there for 13 years and was fired 2 days before Christmas) but here is some harsh truth.
In many markets Walmart employees, even experienced long term ones are not worth $15 an hour.
They just do not bring in that much revenue.
One of the things my wife hated is as the minimum wage kept going up, it delayed or eliminated any raises for the people who had been there a long time.
By the time she was fired she wasn't making much more than a new hire.
If the $15 minimum wage happens nation wide expect automation and outsourcing to contractors like you have never seen.
Wage laws don't apply to independent contractors so I expect Walmart would start contracting out for shelf stockers, janitorial services, anything they could farm out.
When my wife started there, they had full time employees and decent health insurance.
Once Ocare required employers to kick in for full time workers health insurance they fired the full timers (like my wife) and replaced them with part time.
In the past part timers could get their spouse and kids on their insurance.
Not anymore.
Just a couple days ago, Elon musk tweeted saying that he thought the price of tesla stock was too high. The company's worth tanked $14 BILLION in a matter of days.
What if that's a calculated plan, with the stock price dropped he can buy them (or his partners who want said stocks)
I mean with Tesla he can say what he wants.
Probably was trying to keep the hype under control.
Look where it is now, the 14B don’t care anyone now.
Google glasses would like to know your location
Google would like to *Everything*
Yeah what happened to that?!
Stadia is next
Google has had many failed projects, and will likely have many more. But they have their claws deep into everything, it's going to take something monumental to make that company fall. Maybe they'll go the way of MySpace, but we'll see.
Google's true skill as a business is knowing to drop bad ideas immediately.
company I worked for stopped paying us salary to just commission days before they launched new website. needless to say everyone quit. now being sued for not paying us our final check
I guess they already fired their legal dept before taking that decision
I worked for a lumber mill, the owner wanted to retire and none of his children wanted to run the business, he decided to reformat ownership under "esop" essentially over time his shares would be gradually trickled to the employees, he then made the minimum wage for all the employees set at 15$ after a 3 month trial period. Over the coarse of the next 8 months they would proceed to lay off about 70% of its staff and replace them with uneducated temps and then never extend the temp to actual employees so they could continue to pay below what the owner said everyone will get paid. Real nice fellow...
What happened to it now?
"Do you guys not have phones?" probably...
Warcraft 3 Refunded was probably a worse fiasco, and probably still wont kill Blizzard. Seems they still have a bit of customer good will left to kill. Or some Chinese money left to burn.
They still leech off what was remaining of Korean starcraft fanatics, twinky dink amount of overwatch players left, hardcore Diablo fans and sadly people still flock into world of warcraft. As long dumbasses and nostalgic millenials still exist blizzard will still exist
@@kos2919 dont forget the Massive Chinese player base.
Back when IBM went looking for an operating system for their new, unreleased PC, there were two competing operating systems, MS-DOS and DR-DOS. IBM visited both. When they went to visit DR-DOS, the company president was on vacation and couldn''t be reached. When they visited MicroSoft the company president wasn't. We all know who got the contract.
Which is a pity, because I had a chance to use DR-DOS and it had all the functionality of MS-DOS but with a few advanced features which actually made it better overall.
The funny part is after that meeting Bill Gates went to Digital Research and said "Will you license your DR Dos too me"?
They worked out terms and he then sold DR DOS rebranded as MS DOS to IBM at a huge mark up.
History would have been altered if someone from Digital Research had shown up for that meeting.
Likewise if Xerox had realized what they had come up with at Palo Alto and developed the mouse and all their other ideas their selves I might be typing this on a Xerox computer.
11:20 Kristina Keene nearly went under too because it was concerned over stock price instead of the core business. Focusing on stock price over core business is done by greedy execs who refuse to believe that it always leads to disaster and even so often bankruptcy
GM when they destroyed the EV 1, didn't ruin the company, but definitely made people despise them. They were years ahead of the competition too.
Yeah, that one too. Especially stupid since people actually loved the EV1 and thus there were a quite huge market for it, although it would damage the traditional combustion engines market over time, but that wouldn't have mattered if they'd just focused on making their EVs better and better.
It killed them.. just taking awhile. Tesla is taking their customers a few hundred thousand at a time and they can't do anything to stop it.
The EV-1 was the test program to see if the public would accept electric cars, and if electric cars were practical on the road (answer Yes and Yes). They never meant to sell the EV-1, they withdrew it when the test program was over and later brought out an improved electric car called the Volt. Followed by the Bolt. But it turned out the public did not want Chevrolet electric cars after all.
Now they’re destined to die. They won’t make the EV transition. Going bankrupt before the end of the decade.
Funny thing about Blockbuster: they already saw Netflix as a threat and were planning on making their own streaming service and hired Enron to make it, but it barely worked.
Gillette losing $8billion Dollars because of the “toxic masculinity” ad
Source?
@@Blakbox92 Google "Gillette loss", choose your preferred news site. Practically everyone covered it
+Clare
Yeah, to me there is a big difference between great responsible, companies or brands doing great things for society or the environment like Tesla, FairTrade, Ethical Clothing Brands, Vegan meat substitute brands, sustainable palm oil, Hungry Jacks** having Vegan meat burger option, companies that donate to charity, etc.
They actually have a product and I can take it & enjoy that it does good things, or leave it.
Other Companies want to lecture, talk down or stereotype a large & varied group of people where it is considered cool, "woke" or fashionable in their peer groups to do that.
The comparison in Gillette's attitudes between female & men audiences was considerable. It is a bit like marketing to a black audience and telling them not to be criminals; or a Jewish audience - "don't be money obsessed"; or women - "don't be gold diggers".
The only difference that I see is in _coolness_ & _social acceptance_.
Me growing up & being raised to have feminist/"men are bastards/always the problem" attitudes.......kinda glad the rest of the population wasn't raised like that.
I also don't want to reward or enable those kinds of people. It is probably not someone that loves or respects men as equal that made the add (though I could be wrong, I only saw a bit about HER - yes, her. Imagine if the genders were reversed).
**Australian version of Burger King, for legal reasons.
Basically, I like companies that stand for things good, consistent things in their own values, products or polices rather than virtue signaling or lecture others.
And I wish they wouldn't ever be lumped together.
Same Principle, smaller scale:
I'm a vegan, but I prefer a meat eater that lets me be or invites me to a respectful conversation VS a vegan that expects or demands that others change or deliberately shames them. Not the same as simply disagreeing with claims said in one's presence.
what's wrong with pointing out toxic masculinity?
you do understand that it's not calling masculinity itself toxic, right? just the macho bullshit every rural american and many city/suburbans are brought up believing.
The cafe that forced men to pay more because "mUh wAgE GaP".
Went bankrupt.
Which company is it?
@@ismt101 it was a cafe, not a big company. They made the price for male customers higher. Even female customers refused to go there because 1. They can't bring their male friends or so and 2. The owners and her employees are toxic af.
My late step dad worked in the marketing and sales department of Kodak in the 70’s and 80’s and told me that he once held a prototype of that digital camera in his hands. He talked every chance he got about how incredible it was and how it blew all of their minds that it could hold hundreds of pictures when a roll was just 38 or whatever. Apparently he and the other people in marketing and sales were absolutely drooling over the opportunity to take it to market and were all seeing dollar signs but management refused. Because just like what that Reddit poster said, they figured it was too expensive for the average person and they didn’t think people would appreciate having to go through so many pictures to find the good ones. They sat on it for years and got beaten to market. He always said it was the worst decision he had ever seen a company make. 30-some-odd years later and he would still shake his head in frustration every time he brought it up. I miss him.
2:20
The Sears near where I live recently had a problem where sewage was coming up through the floor drains and they literally didn’t do anything about it. They didn’t even close for the day.
The Volkswagen Phaeton
Because nothing screams the “people’s car “ like a luxury sedan (basically a misprinted Audi/Bentley)
Except VW will probably never die XD
Volkswagen has luxury brands under it's ownership. Most of the luxury vehicles will have Volkswagen parts.
what does the Phaeton look like
@@jussslouch1313 basically an Audi with Volkswagen loge printed on it
swagnarok googled it and you are right.
2:20
More like he based his business model based on second hand info about free markets.
If you think free market economics is "Survival of the fittest", you really have not done your homework at all on the subject.
Lord Hawkeye What that poster said is a very misleading and overly politicized version of what’s actually happening this year. Might I sufgest company man’s video on the decline of Sears, as a better indication of what’s actually happening with the CEO. In short, it is very obvious, to anyone who actually knows business, is that the CEO is bleeding Sears dry for his own personal spending money.
Fact is that the guy has a HOLDING COMPANY that WANTS THE LOCATIONS. He's DELIBERATELY SABOTAGED SEARS for his own company to snap up all the locations for peanuts..... that's what is really going on.
I agree, the poster saying this is "free markets Ayn Rand" is fucking wrong and has never read the books... y so salty
poweraid changed its formula now people rather drink gatoraid you don't even see poweraid commercials these days
Michael Gunnels Bro powerade was always ass. i never liked it.
@@jussslouch1313 I used to like it
@ still not as good
White cherry Powerade is still the shit though.
Yeah, I always thought Powerade tasted terrible.
4:11 The "Idea Bonus" is based off of how Enron did it's business. Mark-to-market is a way of saying how much revenue a contract can make then using that potential value to inflate your company's worth. Enron would draw up a contract, figure the earnings, and then report the earnings all in one move even if the contract didn't make any money at all. A good example is when Enron originally tried to make the online streaming service with (and this will always blow my mind) Blockbuster but the technology just wasn't there. Blockbuster ended the nineteen year contract within a short period but Enron still reported full earnings from the contract.
Now compound that type of activity for years in a work environment similar to what Edward Scott Lampert did to Sears and then have investors start to question as to exactly how your company is earning money.
Boom.
CEO then sells off all of his stock AND steps down. (Any investors reading this should always consider that a red flag) Stock plummets amid all other investors asking the same questions. Bankruptcy. Lay off all of your employees. Employees have tied up[ their 401k(s) in Enron stock. Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay called to testify before Congress. Skilling and Lay go to trial. Enron goes down in flames.
Ask any Houstonian about Enron and Jeff Skilling and they spit on the ground just by saying his name.
Enron was in the process of buying our local power company when the bubble popped.
They instead got absorbed by Ameren. Our state had already passed laws in anticipation of Enron coming to town.
The same company that makes your power and transmits it can bring it in to your house. You have to pick someone else to market it to you. Yes they use Ameren's lines and if there is an outage Ameren fixes it but somehow this is supposed to save money.
What actually happens is once a month some random person shows up, rings your door bell, claims to be from "your power company" and says they need to check something on your power bill. If you show it to them you get switched to whatever company paid them to show up.
I fail to see how adding another middle man is supposed to save us money.
Ah, so that's why when I walked into a K-mart I would see toys on the shelves from 10 years ago.
If you walked into their bathrooms you would have seen they hadn't been cleaned in 10 years.
Funny thing is our Kmart had way better and much more toys than our Walmart. Which is why I was so sad when Kmart went out of business here.
Bethesda. Literally everything they've done since 2018...
my local post office
there is a bigger more efficient store nearby with lot more stuff for 2 minutes extra walk and 30 seconds extra drive
so people only went in post office because:
1. it was a post office, to buy stamps and send parcels+ letters
2. their walk went past it but not other bigger store
3. great pick n mix
so guys pull out of contract with royal mail so they can spend money on upgrading the pick n mix.
upgrade it by making it shitty.
and expensinsive.
big store nearby starts selling pick n mix using the exact same system post office (now "village shops") used to use.
0:30 Funny thing is that that also happened to one of the most popular and beloved pizzerias in Miami back in 2014. For 44 years they served excellent pizza by the university on a prime piece of real estate and actually established themselves as a Miami Landmark. But because they forgot to renew the lease, they were force to close when Chase Bank got the lease and built a bank at the location. Luckily the pizzeria reopened in 2018 at a new location literally across the street from their old location, and everyone was so happy to taste that pizza with the place’s specially made sauce.
And now Reddit is almost on Digg's level. Surprised it hasn't gone under yet.
Dead Baron As long as Reddit has gone wild and such subs it will never go away
@@theraVen27 They are trying to get rid of the controversial stuff. Bit by bit.
@@garywheeler7039 But women being naked is "empowering" and "brave" haha
@@theraVen27 Feminists really are retarded as fuck, they got rid of being mothers and respected members of the community who we would give our spots on sinking ships for, to become whores or employees....and they wonder why we won't marry them, nobody wants a non-virgin lol.
@@ketchupking9972
Same way you judge others you will be judged so I'm hoping you are advocating both male and female virginity.
The South Sea Company has to be one of the greatest, so freaking bad it made a hero out of Sir Robert Walpole to the point the man couldn't be touched politically in his lifetime.
Basically, in the late 1600s Britain was massively in debt, so the government gave a small time financier and MP called Robert Harley the job of getting Britain financially solvent again.
Harley gave the job to a mate, Jonathan Blunt (of the Hollow Sword Company). Blunt ran some scams, 1st he purchased loads of Army Debenchures (military IOUs) and got Harley to publicly offer to swap said debt for land in Ireland. Then used said land to administer a lotto in which every ticket won back at least the cost of the ticket, just paid out a lot slower than inflation.
All of this was somewhat scandalous thus aroused the attention of Warpole and his buddy (Sir John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough - a hero of the Spanish War of Succession and an ancestor to Sir Winston Churchill). So blunt and Harley had them thrown in the freaking Tower of London for some trumped up charges.
Founded the SSC with promises of lucrative South American good, pointed at the Honourable East India Company and said "stonks!"... so people ponied up, even the king and the Prince of Wales.
The SSC successfully got concessions off of Spain and Portugal (who owned South America at the time) to trade there ... 1 boat per year to Lima! This meant sailing all the way across the Atlantic before sailing around South America or sailing around Africa and Asia before crossing the Pacific.
So Harley and Blunt never sent trade fleets, just hyped the market and sold worthless shares at overly inflated prices.
At the end, Harley retired in disgrace and died a pauper, Blunt's accountant went on the run and Blunt sold-out anyone he could (as many an MP had taken a bribe to allow shenanigans to occur) - although everyone named by Blunt just happened to be a Political rival to either Warpole or Churchill!
Oh and it spawned an anti-monopoly act called the Bubble Act of 1720
Cal H Extra Credits has an excellent (and hilarious) video series about the insanity that went on with the South Sea Bubble; totally worth checking out!
There was this one Genji's restaurant that stopped taking orders over a hundred dollars over the phone, so we stopped order there and found a better place and never went back. They went out of business in like 4 or 6 months. So everyone else had the same idea.
"If you don't like the game, don't buy it... We stand up for the cause." EA's Patrick Söderlund, SJW extraordinaire, a few months before EA lost half its value because people stopped buying their games
😂😂😂😂😂
"Anthem will be the next Halo!"
*Few months later*
"Uhhhh we are trashing Anthem instead of fixing it."
If you think "SJWs" killed EA you were not paying attention to the last ten years of that company
@@Nxtl68 SJWs were the natural end point for EA, really. EA spent at least a decade creating the sort of corrupt, toxic corporate environment that SJWs thrive in. It was only natural that the company would catch an SJW infection, as so many other similarly mismanaged companies are doing.
@@valhar2000 perfectly summed up !
@@valhar2000 [Citations Needed]
That first one is a little wrong... Powder did not have the greatest lease in history... Guinness does. They pay about 1 dollar a month for their lease in their dublin factory/headquarters/original brewery and museum. Because the company that leased the property to them for like a five hundred years didnt think they would last a year... Jokes on them, Guinness is the most popular beer in the fucking world.
I think he was just exaggerating
Not exactly right according to wiki, but close enough:
"Originally leased in 1759 to Arthur Guinness at £45 per year for 9,000 years, the St. James's Gate area has been the home of Guinness ever since. It became the largest brewery in Ireland in 1838, and the largest in the world by 1886, with an annual output of 1.2 million barrels.[1] Although no longer the largest brewery in the world, it remains as the largest brewer of stout. The company has since bought out the originally leased property,[2] and during the 19th and early 20th centuries the brewery owned most of the buildings in the surrounding area, including many streets of housing for brewery employees, and offices associated with the brewery. The brewery had its own power plant"
@@uzernam303 Wonder why they bought it?
Planning on sticking around for 9300 some odd years I guess.
Reminds me of the deal Budweiser had with the original Czech Budweiser Budvar brewery.
I can't find any proof of it now but I heard AB worked out a deal with Budweiser Budvar to use the name out side of Czechoslovakia in 1900. The deal was good for 100 years. Come the mid to late 90's the Czechs were not interested in extending the deal. Around this time I started noticing Neon signs and other marketing for US Bud that just used the letter B. That is what they use in Germany. Something must have been worked out partially at least because in the US, Japan and a few other places AB's Budweiser is still Budweiser. In Germany it is B and the rest of the EU calls it Bud. I am not much of a beer drinker. I have had exactly one can of Budweiser and I can attest it was the worst beer I ever tasted. Tasted like aluminum. I don't understand how they were able to decimate so many local breweries. Were those old ads with Ed McMahon that powerful?
Just recently my home town of about 3,000 ish decided it would be fun to force the town flea market to close, basically the only thing in town that brought in new people, to the tune of several thousand over two days every week. I'm just waiting for the round of business closures to begin now.
Imagine believing that people like Eddie Lampert aren't aware of the fact that they are burning these companies to the ground, that the destruction is unintentional.
Kmart is doing quite well here in Australia because Target and Kmart was bought by another company (I think woolworths)
Your Woolworths has nothing to do anymore with the defunct US one.
Amazing how many companies start and fail in the US yet succeed in Oz.
Interesting, I didn't realize Eddie Lampert, or anyone for that matter, was dumb enough to try to introduce competition inside the workplace between departments/teams other than Steve Ballmer. Ballmer nearly destroyed Microsoft single-handedly with "management" tactics like that. They put scoreboards up on the walls so that you could see how many 'points' everybody had, and competition was fierce. So if you needed help with something? You could forget it. No one was going to waste their time doing something that would end up getting you points while costing themselves. As someone who has read everything Ayn Rand ever wrote, and who considered themselves an Objectivist (the philosophy she founded) for awhile, it always amazes me how utterly stupid the people who claim to be her fans are. Rand would be violently disgusted at executives getting paid 50x the average workers salary and would have encouraged all of the companies employees to abandon the unfair deal offered by the company. She was just as fierce about the little guy getting an even deal as she was about the government staying out of business. Her vision of capitalism was that very exchange should be done willingly and to mutual benefit. The lopsided situation of modern companies where the company gets all of the benefit and the workers are paid as little as possible is NOT something she would ever endorse.
The Osborne Effect hit AMD just recently. Everyone knew that the 3rd generation Ryzen chips were coming out, and all signs pointed to them being remarkably good. So everyone held off on buying them. Unfortunately, the new chips weren't released until AFTER they announced their earnings for the quarter. So it looked like they underperformed and their stock price has gone down. If you're smart, you'll buy it before people figure that out, because the 3rd gen Ryzen chips are better than anything Intel has by a large margin, and everywhere is completely selling out of them, and this will continue to be true for at least the next couple quarters while Intel tries to do damage control. Buy AMD and short INTC if you can.
I just scrolled down the comment section long enough to finally find someone complaining about that false equation between Ayn Rand's philosophy and simply being a prick to your employees.
You've just admitted that Rand's defence of capitalism ... isn't a defence of capitalism, but of government controlled industry. See if you can remember the word for that.
@@StefanTravis No, she would adamantly demand that the workers were responsible for leaving the companies on their own. Really, though, her whole mindset just assumed the whole scenario would be impossible because it assumed everyone would have perfect information. Communism, the government-controlled industry you alluded to, was definitely an extension of capitalism. That's how Marx presented it. He said that since it is more efficient for companies to merge, they would eventually all merge and the government running it would be the most efficient system.
@@DustinRodriguez1_0 _"Communism, the government-controlled industry you alluded to, was definitely an extension of capitalism"_
Be more careful with your terms. There are dozens of irreconcilable notions called "communism". You're probably talking about stalinism, as interpreted by Trotsky's later followers. Better known as "state capitalism".
_"That's how Marx presented it."_
Exactly false. Marx wrote that the workers could use the productivity of capitalism without capitalists, or the profit motive. Whether he was right is another issue.
_"He said that since it is more efficient for companies to merge"_
You're conflating with what Lenin wrote about "imperialism". Which was that mergers save expenditure in the short term, but decrease competitiveness. Most modern economists agree with him on this.
As to what Rand would "adamantly demand", her thinking was so confused I don't think we can predict what she'd come out with.
U.S. Fire Arms' ZiP 22 bullpup handgun (dubbed the worst handgun ever) and getting rid of all their tooling/manufacturing for Colt Single Action Army replicas .
Radioshack deciding to focus attention to smartphones instead of electronic gadgets and parts for DIY hobbyists (among other things such as poor management and price competition from other competitors)
I agree.
Damn shame, they made great SAA clones.
Reminds me of my time working at Human Arc after it was bought out by Centauri Health. They had a phone system that wasn't able to operate effectively under the burden of calls they were now receiving, so they implemented a new sub-par & cheaper phone system WITHOUT BETA TESTING FIRST. Lateral move, NO attempt to ensure a smooth transition. Literally hundreds of hours of lost productivity due to dropped calls, routinely poor call quality, etc.
The job was stressful at its most basic with a 10% annual attrition rate, but the three months after implementation saw 40%. Funny thing is, they turned down a competitor's phone system because it was too expensive but we discovered (after we were locked into our new faulty phone system) that the original price was quoted with features we didn't need. The new price quote was a fraction of what we were paying for the OVERTLY faulty system. lmao
I was told by someone who knew the book business that Borders' undoing was its decision to go international.
I was also told that the shoe company "Just For Feet" tried to save money by not having a security guard at the front of their stores, and that they were robbed out of existence by their own employees. :-(
These are old. Sears never recovered.
P&G with those Gillette ads. Apparently they had to write off $8B worth of products so far since those ads.
Elaborate on the Gillette ads?
K1naku5ana3R1ka do you one better, I’ll find the videos and edit the links in this comment in like an hour after my shift ends.
Rugal Bernstein Sure, get me the details when you have time.
And yet had record high stock price and profit.
Gillette ad
th-cam.com/video/koPmuEyP3a0/w-d-xo.html
CEO saying the net loss of billions of dollars was “worth it” despite absolutely no conceivable gain in a business sense.
summit.news/2019/08/02/gillette-ceo-says-backlash-to-toxic-masculinity-ad-a-price-worth-paying-despite-8-billion-writedown/
I really don’t understand how attacking their primary consumer audience in favor of ‘looking good’ to some minority ideology was ever considered a good idea, involving politics and controversy into your product is rarely a good thing in the long run.
Meanwhile in r/nuclearrevenge, “Refuse to pay overtime? Have fun with your company not making any profit.”
When Wal Mart was becoming a thing, one moved into a nearby town where I live. The town was mostly mom and pop stores, with a little mall that did decent business. Wal Mart opened, that little mall was shut down within a year.
Now to the story. Someone got the idea of reopening the mall. Even has spots of advertising on the radio. I went and checked it out next time I was close by.
It was already closed down! Apparently the genius(s) that reopened it rented out space to Mexican mom and pop stores. It literally looked like a ghetto flea market. Needless to say its closed down again.
Ha
reminds me of a story of a mall that got greedy and raised their rent. so businesses left. did they learn? NOPE, they raised rent again, driving MORE businesses away...a "death spiral" of stupidity.
Excite was offered the chance to buy google for $750k
I applied for and interviewed at a movie theater when I was a teenager. The interviewing manager was scowling at me the whole time. I didn’t get the job. Now, years later, that theater closes down as it wasn’t profitable enough. Their biggest mistake was not hiring an absolute unit of an employee and clearly that effected them.
this should include what youtube has been doing with ads recently. During this video they poped around 10 times...
I'm surprised No one mentioned quiznos.
What happened to them?