That sorta worked out for my cousin Bob (not his name). Whenever a new doll in the Barbie line came out (Midge, Skipper, Alan, etc.) my grandmother would get us one for Christmas. All her granddaughters played with theirs. Bob kept his in their boxes, up in a closet. When he went away to college, he sold them and bought a set of golf clubs.
Not that any of the rest of us wanted golf clubs.
There was a website and book called Fucked Companies, which documented terrible business decisions during the dot.com boom. One that stuck in my mind was furniture.com, which got startup money and opened their website and then discovered that Fedex and the post office would not deliver anything as big as a couch.
OK, I don’t get that website . I can see why it would be easier for me to look at a bunch of dressers from different stores on a single website - but when I click on something , it takes me to Amazon or Rooms to Go or another furniture store to buy the furniture. So what does furniture.com actually do and how does it make money?
It sounds like they have B&M stores, and ship via methods other than Fedex or the mail.
I thought for sure that that was going to be a Jollibee’s.
The original site from the dot.com boom lost money hand over fist because they couldn’t deliver the items they sold. They’ve been out of business for decades.
The weird thing is that prior to the speech and ensuing media circus, the general public already knew that the jewellery and other trinkets from Ratners were of low quality, but they were OK with it. They just weren’t OK with the revealed extent of it, and the CEO making an emphatic joke out of it. Quite a remarkable set of events really.
The movie is also credited with saving the product, as sales had not been robust.
I actually won a radio call-in contest that year, where one of the prizes was a coupon for a free bag of Reese’s Pieces - of a specific size that no grocery store in town carried.
I wound up visiting another town, 3 hours away, where the coupon met with success.
I think Ratner’s mistake was insulting his customers. When they read about him bragging to the business leaders about making money by selling crap, his tone suggested that his customers were fools. They may have lacked taste but they were quite aware that such low prices does not buy quality.
The UK has some famously rabid tabloid newspapers and they went to town on this story. It was spun as if he was taking his working class customers to be fools. They reacted angrily by simply not going into his shops.
Ratner was trying to impress the business community. He was boasting about his ability to sell and make money and I guess he was looking for some kind of approval from his audience. Such speeches don’t usually get much attention in the popular press. I am sure he never expected the damning headlines the next day.
Ratner, I think, started out as a market trader. Maybe that had something to with it.
Normally the reasons for big business failures are hidden away in private meetings. In this case it was a spectacular and very public crash and burn.
He would probably have continued in business happily selling trash and quietly making money if he had not decided to make that speech.
The Australian Bunnings hardware chain bought the UK Homebase DIY chain, fired all the existing management, and put their own people in. They planned to rebrand them all as Bunnings stores and thought they had nothing to learn about local market conditions, insisting on pushing lines that went down well in Australian outdoor weather, but were useless here. I went to the first one, it was chaos with nobody able to locate what I wanted (despite another, nearer, branch stating that it definitely had what I wanted). They ended up having someone else taking the chain off their hands for a dollar.
“we’re going to compete with British hardware stores by selling our outdoor paint at 25% off even the cheapest British paint! Sure it’s water soluble but I doubt the Brits will notice!”
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. Not only did he insult his customers, he did it behind their back, to people generally better off than his customers - basically ‘All us rich boys are laughing at you poor idiots we fleeced’, then suddenly it wasn’t a private joke any more. The timing was pertinent too - the early 1980s was an era when there was a surge of nouveau riche types that the public was perhaps initially envious of, but envy turns to hate really easily.
I knew someone on that engineering team. (He was proud of it, for no reason I could see.) They were competing against the Commodore 64, and their costs were higher than Commodore. When they were falling behind, they decided to get into a price war with Commodore. Very bad idea.
I owned a Commodore 64, but don’t remember any killer apps on any of those machines.
The killer apps on the C64 were all the great games that met arcade game standards, at least for millions of 16 year olds like me in the 80s. The fact that those games were so easily cracked and pirated (on the schoolyard) sealed that.
A local example, and while far from being “worst ever”, was still kind of dumb. Back when brew pubs were first starting to pop up everywhere, my wife and I decided to go have dinner one night at a new one that opened downtown.
They didn’t have a beer menu, so when the waiter came to take our order I asked what beers they had available. His response was “Stout…” I expected him to rattle off at least two or three more varieties, but no, that was it. Stout.
Now, I’ve got nothing against stout. It’s not my favorite, but I will drink it on occasion. But I think if I was going to open a brew pub, I would plan on having more than one kind of beer. And if I was going to have only one kind of beer, I’d go with something with a little broader appeal. We never went back, and they were out of business within just a few months. (It didn’t help that the food wasn’t very good either.)
It always takes longer and costs more to start a business than folks expect. Even seasoned pros screw that up by a few percent most times and newbies to entrepreneurship often goof by a factor of 2 or 3.
All that can lead to a rationalized decision to open before they’re really ready and offer what they hope is a “minimum viable product” (“MVP”) to get some revenue in the door while they finish building out the rest of their business. E.g., the other 5 types of beer they intended to brew.
The danger of course is exactly what happened to you. The MVP isn’t quite good enough and all they succeeded in doing was making a bad first impression. Very few customers give businesses a second try after a miscue the first time.
Of course, it may have been that their alternative to opening with the stout only as an MVP was to simply shut down and abandon all their investment before selling the first pint. An unattractive trap to be placed in for sure.
I saw the opposite of that recently with a brewpub that opened recently. They had a decent selection of beers but a very limited food menu and it was damn expensive. So, I probably won’t be back even though they had signs advising that the full menu would be available soon.
It fell into the category of ‘decent enough but not memorable’ for the burger and beer but definitely some sky high prices. I do walk by it occasionally so I’ll scan the QR code in a few months to see what’s changed. Somehow, I think it’s one place that won’t last winter.