Raw Roast Beef—Home of the sandwich that bites you back.
With a bloody cow mascot named Mr. Moo, probably would have sold better than Mr. Delicious.
I never owned a Saturn, but the people I knew who did also said that while they didn’t need a lot of repairs, when they did, they were very expensive.
Remember in the early 1990s, when Montgomery Wards would have someone seated outside the store’s main mall entrance at a card table, with some doodad people could get if they signed up for an automatically-approved credit card? (Usually a cheapo plastic ice tea pitcher, or a 1-pound bag of M&Ms.) My brother and his now-wife lived in Kansas City, where MW was headquartered, at the time, and one year post-Christmas worked as temporary help in their credit card department. They said at the time that the company would never recover from the default rate on those credit cards.
Wasn’t there also a car manufacturer that decided it would be a good idea to automatically approve new car loans, as long as people were employed, and rescinded that pretty quickly when so many of the cars were repo’ed, or destroyed via insurance fraud? IIRC, it was Mitsubishi.
Oh yeah I remember those. My family got a $15 book light from it (one of those big battery operated lights that would clip onto a books cover) but then when we opened the actual box there was just a foam insert in it.
Was that the ‘cold side cold and the hot side hot’ burger? I loved those.
While digital camera sales overall have plummeted as a result of increasingly capable smartphone cameras, there remains a sizable market for higher-end cameras, especially mirrorless models.
In all seriousness, decades ago I ate at a place in Chapel Hill, NC whose signature item was rare roast beef. Not technically raw, but from what I could tell it was cooked just enough to make the health department happy, and for all intents and purposes was raw in the center.
The Arch Deluxe was the standard McDonald’s sandwiches, on a special bun that included potato flour and pepper. I thought they were good!
As for the cold side/hot side, that was the McDLT. For those unfamiliar with it, it was served in a two-sided package; one side had the bun, meat, and cheese, and the other side had the vegetable toppings (lettuce, tomato, onion, etc.).
I think it was an issue of bad timing. The hardware just wasn’t up to the demands yet. Sales was poor, because the devices were slow, battery life was bad, and the interface turned off many potential users (I’d have loved one at the time!).
A few years later the hardware was better, Apple did an entirely new interface instead of trying to keep the desktop motif, and it was a wild success. I think Microsoft missed the smart phone train, because they had already learned it wouldn’t work.
Seems like a missed opportunity to put Saturn owners in Buicks. I’m sure inter-division fighting and short sightedness makes that kind of synergy impossible.
IIRC, they tasked us with investigating something. I can’t even remember what that something was because it was conditional on a premise. I couldn’t get the premise to work and so couldn’t do what they wanted. they called us/me incompetent and took their business elsewhere. The sales peeps and upper execs didn’t even bother to try to ‘save’ them.
What was the premise you ask? Well, that Sonic customers were more artistic and creative than the general population. This was a GIVEN. An all-knowing truth that was beyond reproach.
The problem is that, in order for me to do what they wanted, this had to be TRUE. I couldn’t get past the data that actually said the opposite…that Sonic customers were less artistic and creative than the general pop. I remember discussing with the Project Director and the executive high up the food chain…basically them saying that I could tend to find something in anything to please the client. I was a more ‘liberal’ statistician…willing to ‘push’ the data more than most…so long as people knew I was doing this. However, I told them, I can’t do ANYTHING with a negative relationship. Literally nothing could be done.
They were like…you guys are idiots. We KNOW our customers are more artistic and creative. Showing them anything was like showing Greek writing to an amoeba.
I feel compelled after such negativity that I/we had GREAT clients. Believe it or not, on of the best client team I ever worked with was Taco Bell 
I first worked with them when their first try into the breakfast market failed…and then they came to us. We helped them set up a second try which worked well. These people were GOOD. They accepted bad news with evidence and then worked at overcoming it. They were upbeat and fun to work with. Some of the best.
I still remember when they tasked me to find their closest competitor. They ‘knew’ who it was but didn’t want to taint me. I came back and showed strong evidence that it was Subway. Their jaws dropped and were stunned. I showed them the evidence. They were like “McDonald’s we thought was our closest competitor?!”.
I then showed them WHY Subway was their closest and it mainly had to do with all the other breakfasts out there being the same but Subway was different…and so was theirs. I even added, “All the others besides you and Subway is a McMuffin with an egg on top!”. They laughed. Accepted it and moved on.
A few months later MY jaw dropped when I saw a Taco Bell commercial showing a young woman in a car…smiling up a storm and someone asking her about Taco Bell breakfast…she rattled on and then said “Everything else is just a McMuffin with an egg on top!”. My jaw dropped. Now, I don’t think they ‘plagiarized me’ but that similar minds went down a similar track. It was cool to hear my own words coming back at me in a commercial though
Remember it quite well during the Champagne era. I was in college then and remember eating there every Wednesday for a semester as I had a class that didn’t get out until 9 and the dining hall was closed. While I enjoyed some of their menu diversification, they kept changing things all the time. I remember especially the weird way they tried to separate out the salad bar into multiple areas: a bar for just salad, a bar for baked potatoes and then some sort of buffet that also gave you access to the salad. Impossible to control, especially with broke and hungry college students.
I think @BlinkingDuck has just given us the root of ALL the worst business decisions ever. Senior management gets locked into one fundamental premise that simply must be true, despite all evidence to the contrary. A whole series of logical, but wrong decisions, come from the wrong premise. and the whole thing cascades into failure.
In the non-business arena, I have some experience with churches and school systems that are locked into a 1950s view of America: mothers stay home and have time to volunteer; fathers work 9-to-5, don’t have to travel for their job and have their evenings free; nobody works on weekends; families will stay in the same house for years, and when the kids grow up they’ll stay in the same town and eventually be there to take care of their elderly parents. Of course, none of that is a given anymore. Public schools hang on because they’re tax-supported, but churches and many private schools are in deep trouble.
I can remember going to watch E.T. and seeing piles of Reese’s Pieces at the concession stand. Imagine normal stacks of other movie candy next a huge pile of Reese’s Pieces. I don’t think I had ever noticed Reese’s Pieces at the movies before. I know that was the first time I tried them.
It certainly was that simple back when Windows Phone was still drawing breath—there were no licensing fees for GMS back then. Google didn’t start charging a license fee for GMS until after WP was effectively dead. And that fee only applies in Europe. And all those OEMs selling in Europe probably renegotiated their licenses such that the revenue they share from installing Chrome and Google Search easily covers the license fee, which Google was only too happy to do to ensure Chrome and Search remained on the phones.
I was a young pup working at McDonald’s (my first job) when they were rolled out in the mid-1980’s. I loved them, because they had fresh(ish/er) produce and mayo, which the rest of McD’s fare didn’t. So it was a step up for lunches on my break 
.
But the package was seriously cumbersome and ridiculously wasteful before that was really a thing. One side of the styrofoam was bulked up so the “cold” half could survive without wilting under the heat lamp. But it was still a dead-dumb concept and I still remember all the mocking of it. "So we put this package under a heat lamp…too…ummm…keep it cool…yeah. Ah the good old days, when McDonald’s still used beef tallow to fry things and you could still get molten-hot fried apple pies.
One in a company I worked for.
They had a really good year. Numbers were up by a factor of 10. IOW, the previous year they had made about 1 million the previous year, and 10 or 11 million the current year.
However, that 10 million jump was due to one contract with one company, to develop a brand new system. And they projected their future growth on just those two data points.
My inner statistician was appalled
The Death of WCW, by R.D. Reynolds and Bryan Alvarez, is the definitive history of the rise and fall of the company for anyone who’s interested in a deep dive. They start with Ted Turner buying the company from Jim Crockett (so as to get southern wrestling back on TBS after Vince McMahon bought out the Georgia territory) and follow it through to the bitter end, complete with week-by-week breakdowns of the Monday night ratings wars in 1996-1998, and even contrast some of the mistakes WCW made with times when WWE and TNA made the same mistakes in the following decade.
But I digress.
I would say tablet back in the day of heavy laptops with no battery life. I may still have my iPaq and fold-out keyboard in a box in the garage. That thing got me through a masters program. Type in notes and later download them into MS Word. A stupid but addictive game to play between classes while I listened to music on it.
Did they honestly think they’d have $1B in sales in two years because with some companies I’ve worked for, that would be their expectation.
Well, Apple already had tried the Newton PDAs in the 90s, so I think they just learned from that and applied it to the iPod and then into their phone and tablet.
And I only knew of one person to have a Newton, but I saw lots of Palm Pilots and a few iPacs. So as an attempt to get a large share of PDAs it was a failure I feel, even if they used the experience for later successes