I have yet to see a return from all the Kramerica Industries stock I bought in the Nineties.
The U.S. Postal Service, a semi-independent government corporation, has to be on the list. They’re losing money hand over fist, and have been for years. Their workforce is notoriously (although not always accurately) surly, lazy and/or homicidal. I just had a letter returned to me as undeliverable three months after I mailed it. Gah.
If you’re going to have surly and homicidal employees, adding laziness to the mix is probably a good thing. If you had a bunch of surly homicidal go-getters, you’d really be in trouble.
I’d disagree with the Post Office. I’ve rarely met an employee who wasn’t professional and even cheerful, and they do a spectacular job of delivering mail. I’ve been sending off manuscripts for over 25 years and never had a single one lost, and they even accept my SASEs when the rates go up while it’s sitting on an editor’s desk (before forever stamps).
They lose money because they are limited in how much they can increase postage and because they have to deliver every day to every single address in their area, as well as staff post offices in small towns.
Fed Ex can’t do what the USPS does and make a profit (which is why the subcontract to the USPS to deliver packages that are too expensive for them to deliver themselves – and if it’s too expensive for FedEx, at its higher rates, the USPS isn’t exactly making a ton of money on them). Further for overseas mail, the USPS is often a third the price (we would send packages to Namibia for about $50 via USPS and a minimum of $400 by anyone else).
Plus the have officially recognized Kris Kringle as Santa Claus. 
Sometimes it just boggles my mind at the small businesses I see come and go around here. I just wonder where some of these peple even got the money to start a business and what exactly was their business plan.
There was an empty space in a gas station strip mall near me that had a sign “Opening Soon: Cafe’ Lattes”. I thought it was an odd space for a coffee shop since it was masive inside. When they finally opened I wandered inside. No decor. Just about 2 dozen tables with metal folding chairs. I was the only one there. There was only one employee and it was some teenage kid who looked puzzled as to why I was there. They had coffees and pizza available (great combination?). If you wanted pizza they were frozen and they had to make them for you. I ordered a latte and it took the kid forever since I don’t think he had ever made one before. They had 8-1/2 x 11 photocopies everywhere declaring Fridays were Karaoke nights.
I left and ended up dumping half my latte since it was awful. They had posted hours on the door but everytime I drove by (since it was next to the gas station I used) they seemed to be closed. When they were open I never saw more than 1 car ever parked outside and it was probably whoever was working there.
I can’t imagine Karaoke nights ever happened since the place was always abandoned. They lasted about 4 months before they closed for good.
I have no idea how that place ever got opened in the first place.
Maybe it was just a front for money laundering?
I used to have dealings with a fundraiser who was tasked with the thankless duty of Alumni Director at Dickinson School of Law at Penn State. I didn’t dare ask what the alumni giving rate was.
There are a lot of universities that are considered “black holes” for administrative workers. There’s one notorious example close to where I live now…I won’t mention its name. Suffice it to say that only a little digging on various blogs will reveal some interesting stories.
My guess is that somebody heard that coffeehouses were an “in” thing and figured he could open one for a relatively small investment and the customers would just appear. Presumedly he overlooked the importance of marketing in the food service industry.
British Motor Corporation/British Leyland/MG Rover.
Just about every classic car firm in the UK, bought up and merged to form a giant that then allowed its various marques to run things its own way and effectively compete against itself for some time.
The final offerings from the company were a mix of Japanese, German and Indian second hand designs, none of which matched the build quality afforded in their respective home countries.
I’m sorry but since you have no displayed location field and your ownly info is “north of Canada”, there really isn’t much to go on.
Eh, I lost that right when I became a guest. Western New York area.
I don’'t know, I’ve owned Philip Morris (Altria) stock for quite a few years. Made some good money from spin-offs (Kraft, PMI International) and it still pays a great dividend.
Sears. Last time I was there, sales staff outnumbered customers. Lots of appliance samples on the floor, but grossly overpriced unless on sale and nothing really in stock, everything had to be ordered.
RIAA Completely out of touch with the emerging media landscape, engaged in a series of manoeuvrings which ensured that everybody hated them and then dropped the ball on legitimate music downloads so thoroughly they inadvertently handed the monopoly over to Apple.
Post-Gates MS Their stock price has been flat over the last 10 years. Full of immensely bright people who have been consigned into oblivion. Apart from the one shining start of XBox, really no breakout hits in the last 10 years. Vista was a massive boondoggle, they gave away the mobile space to Google & Apple, their persistent flailing in search have them hemorrhaging money & Office doesn’t know if it wants to be something real grown ups want to use or some new Web 2.0 startup.
Yahoo It’s long slow slide into irrelevancy is marked by ever increasing bursts of desperation. They don’t know how to capitalize on the assets they have (Yahoo Mail, Flickr, Delicious etc.) nor how to expand into new new business areas.
AT&T The coup of getting the iPhone should have been the most brilliant decision ever but they managed to turn it into a net negative by completely trashing their reputation with complaints about dropped calls and insufficient network rollout. Instead of addressing these concerns, they instead engage in suing their competitors for factually accurate ads and telling their customers that they should use their phones less.
I’ve seen places like this, too. They rent an empty store in a dead strip mall, complete with hand-lettered signs, and then disappear. I can’t help but think of the old Willy n’ Ethel comic strip, I can just picture Willy sitting all depressed in his make-a-quick-buck Cafe’ Lattes emporium, Ethel saying “so how’s the discount Starbucks coming along?”
Philips used to be one of the world’s great companies-that status is looong gone-here is why:
-innovates new technologies, then fails to use them. Examples: developed the audio CD…at the same time, came up with a worthless cassette (digital format-called DCC). Dropped >$2 billion on developing DCC-only to find out that nobody wanted it!
-developed a new digital video format (CD based). Great system, but failed to sign up other firms to use the format-lost $3 billion on this!
-spent >$1 billion developing a new LCD technology-only to abandon it and adopt Korean-made LCDs for big screen TVs-lost over $1 billion
-developed MPEG and JPEG compression technology-and gave it away (cost over $800 million to develop.
-kept trying to compete withn Asian mfgs. in consumer electronics-found thatb customers would not pay 8X the price for a radio or TV made in Europe.
A real shame-good technology but incompetent management.:mad:
Yeah, the USPS is hardly a model of efficiency, but actually I came here to vote for FedEX. Over a period of two weeks FedEX could not deliver a parcel to me. Repeated promises by Cust Serv were broken. I finally gave up and had the shipper send by USPS, which got it in one. :mad:
I agree with Little Nemo about TSR. :mad:
This was around the time that the original investors in TSR (who had been gamers) sold out their shares to new owners. The new owners were financial people who had no background in gaming.
One of their rules was that they didn’t want their employees wasting any time at work sitting around playing games.
Here’s a clue. You’re running a company that designs games. People playing games isn’t goofing off, it’s product testing. Supposedly it got to the point where the employees had to hide in closets or get together after work so they could do their job.
That reminds me of a Caribbean place that opened in my college town. It was in what looked like a run down house at the end of an out-of-the-way side street in a mostly residential neighborhood. There may have a handlettered sign, but I’m not sure they had even that. The inside was dark and there was minimal if any decor.
My friend and I went there once and the food was actually pretty good. But the only reason I even knew about it was because someone who worked with me on the school paper somehow knew the owner and wrote a story on him. Otherwise there would have been no way to know that it even existed. If that place lasted three months, it lasted a long time.
At this point, I’d have to nominate Sears Online.
Our dishwasher breaks, so we order a new one online. We bought a bunch of gift cards with our Discover card at the local grocery store, because if we do that they give us discounts on both food and gas. Sears says they can install that particular dishwasher on the 16th, but after I order tells me that the first available install date is the 22nd. We pick the 23rd because it’s a Saturday and we don’t want to take time off work.
We use the gift cards, and put about $22 of taxes on the Discover Card. Sears magically declines the Discover Card (there was no fraud alert put on it, as we found out, and we had plenty of balance remaining, so there was no reason to decline the card). Instead of asking us to pay the $22 with another card, they VOID THE ENTIRE ORDER, including the gift cards, meaning that we have to wait until they refund the gift cards before we can try it again. They tell us that refunding the gift cards can take up to 3-5 days. We’ve been without a dishwasher for a month due to trying to get the old one repaired and getting the run-around from a company too local to mention their incompetence in this thread, so we’re frustrated at having to wait longer. By the end of the evening, they’ve refunded 5 of the 6 gift cards, so we say “screw it” and put the remainder on a Mastercard so we can still get the delivery and install on the 23rd. So that shafts us out of $100.
On the 21st, I get an e-mail from Sears. “Your item is ready for in-store pickup.” The e-mail says to print it out and take the bar code to the store to pick up our dishwasher. The store location listed in the e-mail is OUR HOUSE. So I call Sears Customer Service the following day and basically ask “WTF is this?” The apologetic CSR agrees that the e-mail was confusing, and tells me that the installation agent should be calling us between 6-9 that evening to schedule the install for the following day. We never get a call.
When we don’t get a call on Saturday morning, we begin our ordeal. Installation gives us the installer’s cell phone number. We call and leave a message. We call Sears back in an hour. They say they’ll call dispatch and try to figure out what’s going on and call us back before noon. By 12:30, we’re on the phone with Sears again, who is telling us that nobody will be available to install our dishwasher until Monday. We tell them that this is unacceptable, and escalate to a supervisor. The supervisor tells us that he’s going to try to figure out where our dishwasher is and see if anyone else can install it. Apparently there’s only one installer in the entire area. They have to try to get someone to come down from Cleveland (about 2.5 hours away), and that’s only if our dishwasher isn’t in the unresponsive guy’s truck. He promises someone will call us back. They don’t. We decide that if we hear nothing by 3PM, we’re cancelling the order, selling the gift cards on eBay for a slight loss, and getting a dishwasher from a local scratch-and-dent place. We hear nothing by 3PM. We call and cancel the order. They tell us they’ll have the gift cards refunded in 3-5 days. We go and get a new dishwasher and install it ourselves. It’s brand-new and one step better than the one we got from Sears, for the same price. Buying it takes 45 minutes, installation takes about an hour and a half. We were on the phone with Sears for the same amount of time as it took to buy and install the dishwasher ourselves.
Yesterday, we got a call from the Sears installer trying to set up installation of our dishwasher. I had to call and cancel the order AGAIN. They claim now that they’ll mail us NEW gift cards instead of refunding the old ones. I’m still going to hang onto the old ones–maybe they’ll refund them AND send me new gift cards. Given how incompetent they’ve been during every step of this ordeal, I wouldn’t put it past them. I also wouldn’t put it past them to never give us our money back. Sears is fucking useless and I will NEVER order from them again.
I’m not sure how many times it’s gone (or almost gone) bankrupt during that period (Google “greyhound bankruptcy”) but the old stockholders were almost zeroed out at some point in the 1990’s with a Canadian company taking over and keeping the old name. (I became aware of this because I had a tiny number of Greyhound convertible bonds – they never “converted” but at least I got principal and interest back.)
Though based on a mere two anecdotes, I’d nominate large “employee-owned” businesses as having unfriendly employees, if not incompetent. At Avis, my request for a smaller cheaper car was met with “Why would we want to do that?” When calling United Airlines about a ticket they’d miswritten when it was “employee-owned”, their guy insulted me, mainly for buying a discount ticket. (At one point he said “I know how much you paid for your ticket!” Since I had a doubt about what the travel agent had done I responded “Good! Tell me!” … But he didn’t really know.)