Too many business leaders say they have a company strategy. Heavily armed with goals and slogans, it seems like they do have everything under control. But what if they don’t? What if they still make mistakes by implementing poor decisions that could easily end in disaster?
Well, today we’re diving into such instances to see how big and small businesses are no strangers to, basically, ruining themselves. And those who survived have a decision on their record that still makes their shareholders’ hair crawl and that they regret for the rest of their lives.
“What company bankrupted itself (or nearly bankrupted itself) through poorly thought-out and/or unnecessary decisions?” Redditor WolfgangCaesor asked people. The thread was upvoted 44.3k times, so it seems like many found it interesting. Below we rolled up some of the most illuminating cases that show how one bad step can ruin a whole marathon, even for the best runners.
#1
A bakery that sold cupcakes and cookies (no full-sized cakes) across the street from a liberal arts high school. The school is known for not only being VERY arts-centric but also for being very LGBT-friendly. If I had to guess, I’d say that a full 33% of the kids there are LGBT of some type. EVERY student is supportive of LGBT rights and has had protests in support (often, with the school’s staff being supportive and helping to organize and have a safe area for them to protest in). The neighborhood is VERY artsy and LGBT-Friendly.
The kids would come in every morning before school, pop across the street at lunch, and stop by before heading home after school. The Bakery made BANK on these kids. The parents would buy from there for birthday parties and events all the time (like 6 doz. cupcakes for the birthday). So they were doing well.
Suddenly, “baker’s rights” became a thing and refusing to make a gay wedding cake was all over Fox News. The owners of the shop were Fox News watchers and thought to themselves, “Yeah, why should we bake a gay cake?” They proceeded to put a sign in their window announcing to the world that they were Christians and wouldn’t bake a gay wedding cake.
REMINDER: THEY DIDN’T DO WEDDING CAKES AT ALL!!! Furthermore, nobody had asked them to do one.
Strangely, they went under in just over four months. It’s almost like advertising your prejudices against the people you depend on for your income isn’t a good idea. Not only did the kids stop going, but they told their parents and their other friends’ parents not to go there anymore because they’re prejudiced. So their ENTIRE customer base stopped going. The houses on that street are, no joke, 50% owned by well-to-do LGBT couples. So they even lost their foot-traffic business.
By the time they figured out their mistake, it was too late. It was burned in the community’s mind that this was NOT where you wanted to shop.
Of course, they screamed and ranted about how they were being persecuted by people not spending their money at their shop, how they were being “attacked” for their beliefs by the kids going to McDonald’s instead of their shop.
IDIOTS! They had it made. But they had to open their traps and spew hate on their own customer base. They could have been in business for another 40 years! That school expanded a couple of years later to add another full building and a further 500 kids, merging with the city’s public school system, which FURTHER would have increased their customer-base.
SMH.
Image source: PollutionZero, pexels
#2
JCPenney tried to stop bullsh**ting 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. You’re not really getting 70% off, the retail price was deliberately set stupid high to convince you it was a great deal. But the discount price is the actual value of it.
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.
Image source: Phil_Drill, flickr
#3
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.
#4
An A&W burger company tried to outsell McDonald’s 1/4pounder with a 1/3pounder but Americans thought 1/3 was less than 1/4 so it failed really fast.
Image source: sadsoveryverysad
#5
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.
Image source: trainiac12, pexels
#6
in my hometown, a group of coffee shops and other small businesses didnt like the loud noise and smoke from busses coming and going all day because the bus terminal was right around the corner from them. they complained about it, they moved the terminal somewhere else. not long after, they realized (too late) that most of their business came from people waiting for the bus or just stepping out the bus. the place is a wasteland now
Image source: anonymous_guy111
#7
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.
Image source: Omniwing, flickr
#8
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.
Image source: WickedCoolUsername, flickr
#9
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?
Image source: Mount_Drew
#10
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.
Image source: hurr4drama, flickr
#11
Steve Ballmer nearly killed Microsoft. He thought smart phones 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.
Image source: Kdog122025 , wikimedia
#12
I don’t know if they’re gone but SKYPE sh*t their pants during the race they had market lead and ten years of practice in.
Then covid hit and everyone was stuck in doors but wanted to still talk face to face zoom popped up while Skype was cleaning up in the bathroom.
Image source: audio_54, flickr
#13
They didn’t bankrupt themselves but they made a major competitor…
Sony built a disk drive console prototype for Nintendo… But nintendo didn’t see the point in having disc media.. So sony created playstation, since they already invented the technology.
Image source: Skrillamane
#14
My Pillow’s CEO is quickly running his company into the ground as we speak…
Image source: Physical-Ad-3798
#15
I got a fun one. You know how on shark tank they always introduce Kevin O’Leary as having made his fortune selling a 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.
Image source: SorosBuxlaundromat
#16
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.
Image source: JoshBobJovi, flickr
#17
Nokia. Never made the transition to smartphone, now it’s as good as dead.
Image source: [deleted]
#18
Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion and sold it for $3 million 6 years later
Image source: fork_hands_mcmike, pexels
#19
Barnes and Noble. They just kept making bigger stores with less and less books.
Image source: RagnarDann3skj0ld, flickr
#20
Toys R Us. Toys R Us was actually doing fine. It was venture capitalists going in and loading TRU with debt to make it look like it was losing money. Victim of the game.
Image source: 679 points 5 months ago To
#21
Kodak completely went under when they chose not to adopt digital photography. They eventually came back several years later, somehow.
Image source: thehankinato, pexels
#22
I haven’t seen Theranos mentioned, but holy hell that was one bad decision after another.
It all stemmed from the founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes who had the honestly admirable goal of wanting to run a bunch of blood tests using a single drop of blood.
Unfortunately, reality got in the way and they learned that it turns out you need well over a drop of blood for any blood test to be accurate.
Holmes (she’s comes across as a complete narcissist) refused to budge on the requirement and basically fired anyone who told her that what she wanted was impossible.
Despite being once valued at over $1B, the company never once produced a reliable product, is now competent defunct, and the founder is facing criminal charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud as well as a class action civil suit.
Image source: cmaronchick
#23
Hoover UK free airline ticket disaster.
I remember this at the time. They tried to make it as difficult as possible to claim the flights, the idea being people would likely buy an expensive Hoover, not fulfil the criteria properly (or just never take the flight) and they’d be in profit. They underestimated how focussed British people will be to get free stuff. People would buy the cheapest thing they could to qualify, send all the forms off perfectly, then try to take legal action when the free flights didn’t happen.
Image source: sludgemonkey01, helic0n3
#24
Cracked. Basically they fired all of their writers at once. The site also became practically unusable towards the ends as well. I could barely get it to load long enough to read the article.
Image source: Duck_quacker
#25
Ayds diet candy.
They didn’t change their name after the emergence of the AIDS virus.
Image source: NoSoul2335, flickr
#26
In 2012, after a three-year hiatus in the sport, F1 team Lotus signed driver Kimi Raikkonen for the 2012 season.
His contract included a clause that stated that Raikonnen would earn 50,000 euros for every point he scored in the two seasons of his contract.
Raikonnen then went on to finish third in the 2012 championship, and 5th in the 2013 season, which was exceptionally impressive for Lotus.
In doing this, he got 390 points in two seasons, and Lotus had to pay him 50,000 euros for each point, so he earned 19.5 million euros off of that bonus alone, which lead to Lotus almost filing for bankruptcy.
Image source: Aimaan-Zakaria , wikimedia
#27
Photobucket changing its tos back in 2017 to require a yearly fee for all those images you previously posted on it for free.
#28
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.
Image source: CohibaVancouver, flickr
#29
Schlitz. Throughout the ’60s they were one of America’s biggest national beers, a tough competitor to Budweiser and Pabst. They hired a new CEO, from within, in about 1974 or so who was greatly enamored of a study which showed that about 30% or so of beer drinkers couldn’t distinguish their putatively favorite beer from other brands in taste test … so why, he asked, are we spending so much money making our beer so distinctive when it doesn’t matter to our customers? He oversaw the introduction of a slimmer brewing process that included replacing barley with corn syrup and using silica gel as a preservative during the brewing process that they would then filter out afterwards, i.e. they wouldn’t have to disclose it as an ingredient. What they got was a beer that spoiled faster, grew cloudy on racks, didn’t produce a nice frothy head when poured, was perceived as flavorless and eventually required that they recall about 10 million bottles.
Oh, and then they didn’t realize that light beer was going to become a thing, so they got their clock cleaned by Bud and Miller in that segment. And they ran an ad campaign in which some belligerent-sounding guy only half-jokingly (it seemed) threatened to kill the guy talking to him off-camera if he took his Schlitz away.
By the early 1980s they went back to how they had once brewed their beer, but the damage was done and they had to sell out to Stroh’s. I barely see much of that one around and it’s been years since I saw any Schlitz on the racks.
Image source: SniffleBot
#30
YouTube’s choice to require Google+ to comment at one point was a really bad time for them.
Image source: cringyfrick
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