Worst business decisions ever.

[CastletonSnob]

What are the worst business decisions you’ve ever seen?

Blockbuster passing on Netflix has to be up there.

[The Stormbringer]

Just about everything Donald Trump decided to do. Dude should've passively invested all the money he got rather than going into crazy business ventures that were destined to fail. Anyone who thinks he's "a good businessman" doesn't realize how many times he's bankrupted companies, welched on deals, or had to get more in loans.

[Milchshake]

Canceling ALF.



Netflix needs to make this crossover show happen.

[CastletonSnob]

Nickelodeon passing on Adventure Time, which would become a huge hit for Cartoon Network, and one of the best and most influential cartoons of the 2010s.

Nickelodeon also passed on Ed Edd n Eddy, which also became a hit on Cartoon Network.

And just in case you thought Nickelodeon's decision making regarding which shows to pick up couldn't get any worse, they passed on Phineas and Ferb, which became one of Disney Channel's biggest hits.

[Edge-]

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...-shutting-down

Juicero will forever be my highlight. Dumping $100M+ into a "smart device" that literally works worse than using your hands.

[P for Pancetta]

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...-shutting-down

Juicero will forever be my highlight. Dumping $100M+ into a "smart device" that literally works worse than using your hands.

The guy behind Juicero went on to go and sell raw water. Which is water they collect from spring streams along the side of roads and don't process further in any way.

[Battlebeard]

What are the worst business decisions you’ve ever seen?

Blockbuster passing on Netflix has to be up there.

I think it's very sad the way the movie/series market developed though, it shouldn't have been a bad deal. Streaming is the worst thing that ever happened to the movie industry, it killed so much joy and magic of the entire industry. I like owning my movies in physical form, and I have a grand collection of DvDs that I really value, I love that form of media. South Park made some excellent episodes about this, "Nightmare on Facetime" from S16 and the recent "Streaming Wars".

Anyway

Worst business decision I can think of is probably Nintendo declining Sony's request to cooperate. Nintendo was stubborn and stupid, and by declining Sony, Sony instead made Playstation and the rest is history. I guess it was good for the world of gaming, but bad for Nintendo themselves.

[Edge-]

The guy behind Juicero went on to go and sell raw water. Which is water they collect from spring streams along the side of roads and don't process further in any way.

Wait...really? I vaguely remember techbros being all about hyper-expensive, untreated, unfiltered water for a hot second but didn't know Juicero-boi was involved. Not surprising.

https://www.grubstreet.com/2018/01/j...raw-water.html

Apparently he lost his free supply (can you just...freely take public water and sell it, anyways?) and had to trespass onto private property in the dead of night to steal their water, lol.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-heal...silicon-valley

Though this reminds me of a lot of the social media dunking -

I need you to understand that in this article the Raw Water people are talking about the flavor profile & “mouth feel” of untreated, unfiltered water they found somewhere, for which they charge $36.99 per 2.5 gallons.

Spoiler: the mouth feel is giardia, the flavor is dysentery.

[CastletonSnob]

Worst business decision I can think of is probably Nintendo declining Sony's request to cooperate. Nintendo was stubborn and stupid, and by declining Sony, Sony instead made Playstation and the rest is history. I guess it was good for the world of gaming, but bad for Nintendo themselves.

I don't know about that. I doubt the SNES CD add-on would have succeeded, given how badly the Sega CD did.

[Cthulhu 2020]

Wait...really? I vaguely remember techbros being all about hyper-expensive, untreated, unfiltered water for a hot second but didn't know Juicero-boi was involved. Not surprising.

https://www.grubstreet.com/2018/01/j...raw-water.html

Apparently he lost his free supply (can you just...freely take public water and sell it, anyways?) and had to trespass onto private property in the dead of night to steal their water, lol.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-heal...silicon-valley

Though this reminds me of a lot of the social media dunking -

I come up with better ideas than this Juicero guy during my morning shits. Where's my $120M startup funding?

[Fuiking]

Dutch goverment selling KLM comes to mind.

[Tziva]

A few years ago in a restaurant, the table next to me was two dudes in expensive suits talking to each other about their plan to buy a local newspaper and then pump a bunch of money into it to try to turn it into a national paper. It is probably the worst business idea I have ever heard or can ever imagine. You'd have better odds if your business plan was "invest in lottery tickets."

It was just so many layers of bad idea, and you don't even need hindsight to see it. Buying a newspaper is stupid enough, but then planning to dump money into it to make it national is even worse. The few newspapers that will have the best chance of holding on in a digital age are local papers precisely because they do regional coverage that people can't find elsewhere.

(I have no idea if they ever actually did it, but afaik all my local papers are still chugging along as local papers so probably not)

[Edge-]

I come up with better ideas than this Juicero guy during my morning shits. Where's my $120M startup funding?

Head down to San Jose and get good at ultimate frisbee. I'm not kidding, apparently that's where a lot of these connections are made down there. Not on the golf course, as has been tradition.

[Biglog]

The worst business decisions imo have been the brick & mortar department stores that failed to adopt to the changing industry. K-Mart, Sears, and Montgomery Ward being the big ones. These were huge household names with stores in every big town. My metro area had ~8 K-Marts and and least 2 of each of the others. Sears was the place to go for tools and hardware, along for just about everything else. But they mismanaged themselves from having lines of customers out the door to being boarded up and sold off.

They all made the same mistakes, being slow to adapt since they were so used to being a cash cow that they were too afraid that change would break their business model. Then to try to save themselves they essentially turned to insurance sales, trying to push overpriced extended warranties on customers that just alienated them more.

My favorite was walking into a Sears late in it's day, where in the electronics department I found a very dust covered pack of blank CDs. 10 blank CDs were $150, still priced from when they were brand new on the market (the same pack was less than $10 anywhere else by then), and gathering dust on the shelf ever since. Just way slow to adapt.

[uuuhname]

Elon Musk, no further comment.

[P for Pancetta]

Wait...really? I vaguely remember techbros being all about hyper-expensive, untreated, unfiltered water for a hot second but didn't know Juicero-boi was involved. Not surprising.

https://www.grubstreet.com/2018/01/j...raw-water.html

Apparently he lost his free supply (can you just...freely take public water and sell it, anyways?) and had to trespass onto private property in the dead of night to steal their water, lol.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-heal...silicon-valley

Though this reminds me of a lot of the social media dunking -

It's weird, here is a nice vid featuring the guy collecting some water. I think it also shows the dangers of these kind of people, he's a reasonably charismatic guy that can come off as pretty smart. But if you look pass that veneer all that's left is an overconfident idiot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI-Y...annel=VICENews

[Cthulhu 2020]

I don't know about that. I doubt the SNES CD add-on would have succeeded, given how badly the Sega CD did.

SNES CD became the Playstation you know.

Sega CD failed for one big reason, and a few small ones, none of them had anything to do with "being a CD device you hook up to another console". It had two really shitty games at launch in Japan, and the few games that released for the Sega CD after were also all bad. So there were no software incentives for people to buy it. The two titles were not Sega flagship games, nor were they games that had been in arcades.

The high price of the console ($470 then, which would be just over $1000 now) wasn't necessarily a bad thing, and consumers were willing to pay it if it had the software.

The US release was $300, and had 10 games, but again, none of them were good games (except maybe Echo) and Sega leaned heavily on FMV "games" or rather really bad interactive movies, while the only real games were remastered ports of arcade titles.

[Battlebeard]

I don't know about that. I doubt the SNES CD add-on would have succeeded, given how badly the Sega CD did.

The product might not have been that succesful, but it might have prevented the Playstation from being created, which would have meant Nintendo would pretty much have dominated the entire video game industry for many years to come, as they were already pulling ahead of Sega and at the time they were the only serious contenders on that market.

I think the Playstation was good for the world, but if you look at this from Nintendos point of view, more competition is of course not good for them.

[cubby]

Yahoo passed on buying Google for $1M.

Whoops.

[uuuhname]

Nintendo doesn't even release new ports of games people have been demanding for literally decades. games they are willing to drop 60$+ to buy again. Nintendo does not have a competition problem, it has a problem with being led by a bunch of weirdos.