Amazingly Dumb Decisions Made By Companies

Author image for Eric Lund
Eric Lund
Sep 6, 2021 3:00 PM EDT

For some reason it's almost a little reassuring that we aren't the only ones making dumb financial decisions and horrible business ideas. In a way it's nice that the people who head multi-billion dollar companies can have worse leadership skills than your uncle who keeps trying to get you to "loan" him your savings so he can start a caviar farm. 

Add as a preferred
source on Google
Advertisement
  • 01
    Font - WickedCoolUsername 12h 2 2 S & 2 More In 1998 Yahoo refused to buy Google for $1 million. In 2002 Yahoo offered to buy Google for $3 billion, but Google wanted $5 billion. Yahoo refused the offer. In 2006 Yahoo was to buy Facebook for $1.1 billion, but Yahoo's Ceo lowered it to $800 million and Facebook backed out. In 2008 Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion, but Yahoo refused. In 2016 Verizon bought Yahoo for $4.6 billion.
    via AskReddit
  • 02
    Font - hurr4drama - 10h 3 2 There was a donut shop by my high school. Opened at 6am and closed at 5pm so students would be there every day before school started at 7:30 and after school ended at 2:15. They changed their hours to 8am-3pm and couldn't make anymore money. They shut down a few months after the change.
    via AskReddit
  • 03
    Hair - fork_hands_mcmike - 12h 9 S Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion and sold it for $3 million 6 years later
    via AskReddit
  • 04
    Mammal - Omniwing - 10h One time Red Lobster offered an unlimited king crab leg deal, cause they brought the servings out slowly and were like 'nobody is gonna sit there for 6 hours and just eat king crab legs'. Actually, lots of people did. So many they lost millions.
    via AskReddit
  • 05
    Font - kkngs · 12h Sears ended their catalog/mail order business in 1993. For over 100 years they had sold everything from hubcaps to houses via mail order and shipped them all over the country. Amazon was founded in 1994.
    via AskReddit
  • 06
    Font - JoshBobJovi · 11h Quiznos. Corporate office decided to buy the vendors, and then contract all of the franchises to only buy materials from Corporate with a price hike. The margins got way too high and all of the stores went out of business. They shot themselves straight in the foot.
    via AskReddit
  • 07
    Plant - thehankinato - 13h Kodak completely went under when they chose not to adopt digital photography. They eventually came back several years later, somehow.
    via AskReddit
  • 08
    Font - heinzbumbeans · 9h not a company, but a country. the Northern ireland renewable heat incentive. basically they came up with the bright idea of encouraging people to use renewable power by paying people to do so. except you got more back per unit than the cost per unit. so people would buy an electric heater, put it on 24/7, get the money, use the extra money to buy another heater, plug that in for 24/7, get more money, buy another heater and so on. £500 million later they realised it wasn
    via AskReddit
  • 09
    Font - contrarian01 - 11h MoviePass 1.0k Reply Share Report Save dirtyLizard - 10h MoviePass was a weird one. Their model was too good to be true. They lost money on every subscriber who was seeing more than 2 movies a month which, IIRC, was almost all of their subscribers. 1.0k Reply Share Report Save Batman8603 - 9h That on top of the local movie theater offering infinite refill year long popcorn buckets for like 60 bucks and we abused both to the max. Easily spent the cost 50x over. We saw li
    via AskReddit
  • 10
    Font - Phil_Drill - 9h · edited 3h JEPenny JCPenney tried to stop bullsh: ing customers and it backfired. They said no more sales, they're just going to price everything low, because pretty much all sales at department stores are lies anyway. You're not really getting 70% off, the retail price was deliberately set stupid high to convince you it was a great deal. But the discount price is the actual value of it. So yeah JCPenney's heart was in the right place but ultimately it failed because cust
    via AskReddit
  • 11
    Font - Aimaan-Zakaria · 9h In 2012, after a three-year hiatus in the sport, F1 team Lotus signed driver Kimi Raikonnen for the 2012 season. His contract included a clause that stated that Raikonnen would earn 50,000 euros for every point he scored in the two seasons of his contract. Raikonnen then went on to finish third in the 2012 championship, and 5th in the 2013 season, which was exceptionally impressive for Lotus. In doing this, he got 390 points in two seasons, and Lotus had to pay him 50,
    via AskReddit
  • 12
    Font - Hattix · 11h 2 Borders Books. It had to chance to be Amazon, from Amazon, before Amazon, and turned it down. Amazon Books, as it was then called, was a small online bookseller. It had a rather incompetent search engine, titles were misclassified, and it dabbled in office supplies. It was one early "e-tailer" among many. Amazon's pitch was that it was trying to be an online version of the retail giant Staples and it could ship quickly. Then a conversation happened with the giant Borders Bo
    via AskReddit
  • 13
    Font - SorosBuxlaundromat - 10h · edited 7m I got a fun one. You know how on shark tank they always introduce Kevin O'Leary as having made his fortune selling a educational games company? He single handedly killed the learning games industry (those Carmen san Diego type games that were real popular in the early 00's) by forcing the devs to churn them out faster and cheaper at the cost of quality, slowly killing the market, and he also nearly bankrupted Mattel when they acquired his company. Edit
    via AskReddit
  • 14
    Font - NoSoul2335 · 11h 3 2 Ayds diet candy. They didn't change their name after the emergence of the AIDS virus.
    via AskReddit
  • 15
    Font - oftenGetsItWrong - 11h Quibi when it decided that 10 minute clips watched in portrait on a commuter train is the future of home entertainment.
    via AskReddit
  • 16
    Font - theycallmemomo · 9h I used to work at a Kmart. They never bothered to update any of the store layouts, and they were more concerned with signing people up for their rewards card and/or credit cards, which led to longer lines, which led to more complaints..you get the idea. Also, the merger with Sears was the final nail in the coffin. Now, all the Kmarts in the area are closed.
    via AskReddit
  • 17
    Font - Font - downtimeredditor · 12h Yik Yak It was completely anonymous message posting at first. I actually talked to the original founders at a start up intern fair in Atlanta back in Nov 2013. And they said their app was suppose to be some online localized public bulletin board where people can post about events or parties or study groups. Obviously it became like a fun anonymous messaging app. They then obviously started to I guess make it less anonymous by introducing usernames which while
    via AskReddit
  • 18
    Font - Font - SniffleBot · 10h 3 2 Schwinn. The executives of America's most venerable bicycle maker could not be convinced that mountain bikes were anything more than a fad. They made one and called it the Klunker (yes, really). Then when they realized it wasn't, they got some small Asian company to design a mountain bike for them ... giving them basically all they had ever learned about making bicycles in over a century as technical assistance. The small Asian company used this to improve its
    via AskReddit
  • 19
    Font - Schlitz. Throughout the '60s they were one of America's biggest national beers, a tough competitor to Budweiser and Pabst. They hired a new CEO, from within, in about 1974 or so who was greatly enamored of a study which showed that about 30% or so of beer drinkers couldn't distinguish their putatively favorite beer from other brands in taste test ... so why, he asked, are we spending so much money making our beer so distinctive when it doesn't matter to our customers? He oversaw the intro
    via AskReddit
  • 20
    Font - Oh, and then they didn't realize that light beer was going to become a thing, so they got their clock cleaned by Bud and Miller in that segment. And they ran an ad campaign in which some belligerent-sounding guy only half-jokingly (it seemed) threatened to kill the guy talking to him off-camera if he took his Schlitz away. By the early 1980s they went back to how they had once brewed their beer, but the damage was done and they had to sell out to Stroh's. I barely see much of that one aro
    via AskReddit

Want More? Follow Us and Add Us as a Preferred Source on Google.

Tags

wtf decisions finance lol dumb companies company money stupid
Scroll Down For The Next Article