Running a massive corporation certainly isn’t easy, and just because someone has a large paycheck and many years of experience doesn’t mean they’re immune to making mistakes. But when you’re running a company that the whole world has their eyes on, any misstep is going to live on forever in history.Redditors have recently beendiscussingsome of the biggest corporate blunders they can recall, so we’ve gathered their most popular responses below. Enjoy reading through and cringing at these decisions that were horrible in hindsight, and be sure to upvote the situations companies probably hope we’ll forget!This post may includeaffiliate links.
Running a massive corporation certainly isn’t easy, and just because someone has a large paycheck and many years of experience doesn’t mean they’re immune to making mistakes. But when you’re running a company that the whole world has their eyes on, any misstep is going to live on forever in history.
Redditors have recently beendiscussingsome of the biggest corporate blunders they can recall, so we’ve gathered their most popular responses below. Enjoy reading through and cringing at these decisions that were horrible in hindsight, and be sure to upvote the situations companies probably hope we’ll forget!
This post may includeaffiliate links.
Sears was practically built on catalog sales and shipping items to customers. They had the infrastructure in place yet somehow missed out on internet shopping.
I worked for Kodak (Qualex) and I will never forget the meeting we had talking about 35mm film. A person said he’s noticing an influx of people looking to print digital photos.This was a senior Vice President of Kodak saying, and I quote “this whole digital think is just a fad, it will blow over soon”
Twitter.points furiously everywhereWe are getting to see it fail in real-time. Personally, I’m a bit sad because I liked Twitter but its failure is the entirely predictable result of really really really bad management.
I don’t know if this counts as failure, but Skype had a 10-15 year head start only for zoom to swipe in during the pandemic.
My favorite is when A&W promoted a 1/3lb burger to compete with the quarter pounder. It failed because most people thought 1/3lb was less meat than a quarter pounder
Australian DIY chain Bunnings acquisition of UK-based chain Homebase. They came in guns blazing, fired the entire management team, and tried to remake Homebase in their image. Got rid of the Habitat and Laura Ashley franchises, the cycle service shops, cut down the plants and garden sections, and replaced all of this with a load of grim, cut-rate power tools.Most critically of all, they brought in a huge - GINORMOUS - selection of barbecues and outdoor kitchens and the like. In a country where no one has a garden bigger than a bin store and it’s too rainy to barbecue nine months of the year. They devoted literally a quarter of the (very large) shop floor space to these items which absolutely nobody wanted.It lasted three years before they sold the chain for £1 to a retail recovery specialist and walked off from a £230 million loss.Absolutely epic fail.
George Lucas offered to sell his computer animation company to Disney for $8 Million in the 1980s. Disney balked so he sold it to Steve Jobs instead and it became Pixar.
Adidas and Puma focusing on a sibling rivalry so much that they failed to notice when a relatively small newcomer called Nike overtook them to become #1 in the world
The Walmart expansion into Germany was a total disaster. They blindly tried to force their way onto an extremely competitive market with a completely different work and shopping culture. Most Germans don’t even know that Walmart ever existed in Germany and they have since completely left the country at a massive financial loss.
American car manufacturers in the 80s. I was buying my first family car and it was between a Ford Taurus wagon and a Toyota camry wagon. The Ford sales guy said “Yeah, the Japs have to learn they can’t make cars that last 15 years!” and then laughed. We got the Camry. No wonder the American car manufacturers all had to be bailed out.
Yahoo was offered Google for a million dollars , three times and they turned them down.
NOKIAThey were not that big in the US but they dominated the mobile phone market in most of the rest of the world at one point.When the first iPhone came out they were very dismissive of it, we all know how that turned out.
M and M’s declining to be the candy of choice for E.T. I remember watching the movie in the theaters thinking, “Oh, Reece’s Pieces, that’s cute.” Huge mistake.
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Pepsi ran a lottery in the Philippines but when there were more winners than expected they refused to pay out the cash prizes. There were actual riots, a few people died.
World War II was over. Germany was a bombed-out smoking ruin. The victors saw that communism was taking hold in countries with collapsed economies, so they wanted to resurrect the economies of Europe. They were desperate to just get people working again. They’d try anything that had a ghost of a chance at working.The U.S. essentially told Ford that they’d give them the Volkswagenwerk, the factory that made VWs. If Ford were to take over, just run this factory and make some cars, get people back to work, they could have it for free.Henry Ford II told his board of directors: “Gentlemen, what we’re being offered here isn’t worth a damn.” And declined the offer.
Target’s expansion to Canada was a disaster.They spent billions purchasing existing Zellers (Canadian department store) locations from Hudsons Bay Company (HBC). Then they spent 100s of millions more renovating them. They leased more locations to open stores. 133 in total. Due to a variety of issues, mainly distribution problems -they tanked, Target Canada declared bankruptcy and had to pay more millions to get out of leases and sell their owned real estate. This all happened in about 5 years.My favourite part of the story is the HBC took some of the proceeds from the sale of Zellers and bought Saks Fifth Avenue with it. They’re recently begun re-opening Zellers
Hasbro laying off all their staff at wizards of the coast in their DND and Magic The Gathering divisions. You don’t gut the only departments responsible for your only reason for profit and growth. Like WTF are they thinking unless the CEO is planning on shorting his own company stock?
The Metaverse
Lenovo shipping laptops loaded with the Superfish malware.
IBM. They let Microsoft retain the rights to the PC operating system they put on the IBM PC.
The entire Penn Central disaster. The railroad was massive but terribly managed and lasted less than 3 years before becoming the biggest bankruptcy in US history at the time
Southwest airlines last Christmas
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