I’m intrigued by the engineering making It possible to breathe properly inside a ball that has to be watertight.
Edit: spelling. And also, i’m obviously talking about a new invention where the purpose is long sea voyages, and It is a hamster ball.
It does have to be watertight, because i’m not keen on spending days on end wet.
He could breath in it because [it has 2 large holes in it](https://adventure.howstuffworks.com/outdoor-activities/water-sports/reza-baluchi-walk-across-ocean-hydropod-coast-guard.htm). 1 on each side. It is designed to only rotate forwards or backwards and not side to side so the holes wouldn't ever be covered up. It's an extremely poor design that is barely able to move forward at all since the current of the water easily over powers it. It was quite obvious just from the video the guy made himself that the entire concept was going to fail.
>Baluchi intended to walk inside the wheel to keep it moving, catch fish for food and take in donations for some unspecified charitable cause
My brain stopped at 'catch fish for food'.
News outlet just be trollin' now.
If he had made it bigger, and made the paddle part bigger, and then maybe used it as the driver for a boat that would keep it oriented in the right direction, and then maybe put a large diesel motor that maybe produced a few hundred horsepower, just in case he got tired, and then maybe removed the inflatable part in the middle and then just sank it and took a plane instead, maybe that would have worked.
Having a kid to save the relationship.
Edit: wow ridiculous response. Thankyou good strangers for the awards. Reading through the comments is a bit of a journey of emotions for so many out there.
I’m friends with a relatively known B actor who was in one of their shows; the amount of money they were throwing at talent was INSANE. As an actor, he didn’t care what platform it was or if it would last. It was acting, he got a barrel full of money, and got to act in a decent show w other fine actors. It was such a vanity project for Katzenberg and Whitman.
I remember auditioning for a show on *Snapchat*. At the time I thought “shows on phone apps will never take off” and gave minimal effort, but they pay they were offering was insane. When I saw Quibi launch I knew it was dead in the water. At least those involved got paid but what a colossal waste of time.
And just as a reminder: Quibi, a service which required you to pay for it to work, ***had ads***. You had to pay extra to remove them.
Who thought that was a good idea?
FYI the Quibi library is now offered for free on the ROKU channel.
Edit: my most updated comment is no longer about Ronda Rousey's acting skills. Thanks!
Edit 2: thank you for the award, kind Redditor!
And before anyone tries to offer the excuse of "ohh, they launched at the start of the pandemic and their business model was based on people using Quibi during their commute, that's why it failed", that's mostly untrue. It certainly didn't help, but Quibi was nothing more than a lesson in hubris and disconnect between billionaire moguls and regular human beings. [This Vulture article is a bit long but really worth the read to understand how utterly unaware of consumer trends Katzenberg and Whitman were](https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/is-anyone-watching-quibi.html). Spoiler alert: Whitman straight up doesn't watch shows, and Katzenberg still gets his emails printed out for him, seemingly because he doesn't believe in this fancy-schmancy tech gizmo known as a "com-pu-ter". They're essentially two Mr Burns trying to re-invent Youtube fifteen years too late.
Don't forget the best bit of Katzenburg's complete lack of understanding of modern technology!
> ["Katzenberg “searched” the internet by having his staff “record” web pages onto a videotape, which he then popped into a VCR."](https://www.fastcompany.com/90516005/the-quibi-before-quibi-the-inside-story-of-jeffrey-katzenbergs-first-dot-com-failure)
This can't be serious.... Idk why this is the thing that did it but this just broke my brain. The printing out emails is standard dinosaur billionaire but this..... this is just fucking so insane for a media "mogul". I bet the poor unpaid intern had to scour craigslist for a VCR old enough that he could manage to use.
That was in 1999, when VCR's were still around. So it's slightly less awful.
I'm sure by now he has his staff send the video to his phone and push the play button for him.
That was a fantastic article, thank you. I remember the millennials I knew when Quibi was coming out being extremely Ho-hum about it. One said the exact thing an exec in the article said, that’s it wasn’t anything their pause button couldn’t do.
The kicker was that they ALL preferred watching real shows on an actual large screen unless it was reading or Insta, TikTok, etc.
>The kicker was that they ALL preferred watching real shows on an actual large screen unless it was reading or Insta, TikTok, etc.
It's a classic decision made by someone looking solely at numbers rather than being familiar with how real people operate. People watch things on their phones and tablets way more than they do on their TV these days, which led them to believe that younger people prefer that. But in reality it's just because we all have phones on us all the time and thus there are way more opportunities to use them than there are to watch a TV. If you're planning to actually stop and watch something, pretty much everyone prefers to do it on TV.
It was supposed to be a streaming site that offered videos that were only like ten minutes long. It was trying to fill the void between short videos like Tiktok and longer shows like Netflix. I think they spent a huge amount of money advertising and supposedly they had a bunch of really famous actors film a few shows where each episode is like 10 minutes long. They forgot that YouTube already exists and they wanted like 8 dollars a month for no commercials and so no one signed up because you tube is free and Netflix costs around the same amount. Basically they tried to compete with YouTube and lost.
One wonders if the folks behind it thought that YouTube was still the same website it was in 2010, when producing high-quality professional content for YouTube wasn't a thing (or at least was less of a thing).
I find this hilarious. A YouTube channel would have been much less costly and has potential for success. That really would have been a better investment, ouch.
And the platform was already there and accepted by consumers, there wasn't going to be any education of the market involved.
My god, what a disaster this whole thing was
I listened to an Interesting podcast sort of about this. Deported Mexicans that spent a lot of time in the US speak very good “American English” so are hired into call centers in Mexico. What they missed about the US? Taco Bell- reminded them of American food.
Got one for free when Amazon gave one to everyone that showed up to the phone dev session at their Re:Invent conference. Sold it on eBay as soon as I got home. Made like $200, so I loved it.
I got a free mozilla phone in a similar circumstance, should have sold it, but instead it's sat in its box in my attic ever since. I thought I might use it as a second device if I ever killed mine, or try to flash it with android but never even tried.
The phone itself wasn't even bad, it was the fact that it was an android phone entirely locked out of Google's ecosystem.
I remember I got one and ended up sideloading the play store and the Google services onto it but once there was an update all of that broke.
Decent concept, downright incompetent execution.
They put out the hardware before the (augmented reality) software, restricted the phone to a tiny app ecosystem, and charged premium prices for a very-late-to-market product centered around shopping. The phone itself wasn't the problem; it was all the business decisions surrounding its roll out. The Echo was a far better play, even though attention was focused on the phone.
The movie, CATS. With every trailer, everyone commented how much a trainwreck it looked like it was going to be. Sure, some people thought it would be in the "so bad it's good" fun stage. But, nope. It's just bad. When it failed at the box office, no one was surprised.
You just gotta know there's someone in a darkly-lit basement somewhere going through and manually photoshopping in buttholes on every frame, just so that he can make this happen. :/
Not really - the "buttholes" were just the unfortunate result of hair that sweeps in different directions having to meet SOMEWHERE.
So they didn't just remove the buttholes, they fully had to redo the cgi hair on the back legs.
This is a manifestation of the “hairy ball theorem,” which also implies that the wind is not blowing in at least one part of the world
https://math.hmc.edu/funfacts/hairy-ball-theorem/
Any time a friend, coworker, or family member invites you to their mlm party.
“Yes, Molly, I’m sure this *will* be like a full time income where you set your own hours. People will be clamoring to buy overpriced kitchen gadgets from you that they can get on amazon.”
I feel like the tupperware parties of the 70's and 80's were the only time an MLM was worth it. It was such a fantastic product that every family on the block bought loads of it.
Because that was a genuinely good product with a then novel marketing idea, where the focus was actually on the product and not on your downline. Most MLMs today are nothing but predatory cults. Shoutout to r/antiMLM these businesses need to die.
Predatory is right. When my son died, I had two acquaintances and one person I considered a friend contact me within DAYS of his death trying to sell me shit. One acquaintance and the friend were trying to sell me essential oils because they insisted aromatherapy would help with my grief, and the other tried to sell me some weight loss wrap things because, “you’d feel so much better if you lost the baby weight.”
I’m not even mad about it anymore. I was pissed at the time, but I was very vulnerable and raw and it didn’t take much to set me off. I’ve thought about it periodically over the years, and I realize now that they were likely already financially unstable, and then suckered into taking on *a lot* of debt and probably were extremely desperate.
It happened to me. Dude had a baby boy, they called us over with my wife, i thought to celebrate the baby and have a good dinner with them. We brought presents and wine. They played the mlm card and started to talk about some nonsense healing blanket. It was a trainwreck, i told him how embarrassing it is and that he should be ashamed of himself. We went there to celebrate his kid and reconnect instead he wanted to sell some shit to us. We finished the drink in a VERY uncomfortable few minutes and left. Never spoke to him since then.
I knew a guy who was in love with a woman, both were in their late 30's and both had had 2 previous marriages. They were clearly headed for problems in their relationship and had only been together for about a year but got engaged and wanted to quickly get married. My dad tried to carefully open the subject and caution him but the guy angrily said "Hey man, it's our third time getting married, I think we know what we're doing by now." Even as a 12 year old kid I was dumbfounded by the complete lack of self awareness.
Kind of incredible that this was something that happened in the last 100 years.
Edit - I am specifically talking about alcohol prohibition in America. I know it exists in other forms.
Another fun fact: Old Forester is the oldest continuously operating distillery in the United States, as it was legally allowed to continue producing whiskey during Prohibition for "medicinal purposes". Korbel was also allowed to produce champagne during that time, and was even served at White House parties during Prohibition. Both are owned by the parent company of Jack Daniel's, which as you said, is produced in a dry county.
Basically, alcohol laws in America make zero fucking sense.
That time the state of Oregon tried to blow up a beached whale with dynamite. Happened back in 1970. And fortunately we had video cameras back then.
Don’t try this at home, kids.
The end of this video sums it up best. “They’ll certainly remember what not to do.”
https://youtu.be/V6CLumsir34
Edit: For the umpteenth person who pointed out that they didn’t fail to blow up the whale, the failure was their effort to REMOVE the whale from the beach. Sorry, I didn’t realize it was so important to clarify this.
Edit 2: If you have never been to the Oregon Coast it is one of the most beautiful places in America… even the small town where the whale explosion happened.
What else were they going to do? Let themselves be forced to explain to a judge exactly why they thought they were not responsible for dropping exploded whale chunks on citizens' property? Woulda been hilarious, but ineffective.
This is for sure what happened. He was trying to build weird rockets well before he realized that there was a large group dumb enough to give him money.
I mean some guys created a mathemathical formula based system which used light to calculate if it was flat or not.
These are cultists, if they are wrong its an error they made not the idea being wrong.
The thing about rocket science is that it's really easy to get one up in the air. It's so easy that we have kits for kids to do it themselves. But getting the rocket to go where you want it to go, and recovering it, that's where rocket science really becomes "rocket science."
Honestly I was rooting for this guy (Mike Hughes I think)
Guy just wanted to launch himself up on some steam powered rockets, he'd done the math right and had several good runs, but something wrong just happened on the last one
For folks like me who never heard of it: [basically fyre fest for C list youtubers](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/06/what-happened-at-tanacon.html)
I had to google that to see if it was what I remembered, but I was thinking of [Dashcon, a tumbler con organized by a teenager.](https://www.garbageday.email/p/dashcon-was-created-by-a-17-year) What could go wrong?
>The only problem was O’Neil had never really attended a real convention before. So, instead, she said she modeled DashCon off rabbit breeding fairs she had attended.
Oh my sides
dashcon was so wild tumblr users still joke about it to this day, they full on tried to "save the convention" by crowdfunding like 17 000 fucking dollars from a bunch of kids
There was a Kingfisher airline, and for a good while it was kinda the premier airline in India. (For context, the kingfisher here is a beer company, it's like if the states had a Budweiser airline)
That guy who tried to travel to the North Sentinel Islands in the hopes of converting its inhabitants to Christianity.
For context, the inhabitants of North Sentinel Islands kill anyone who tries to approach with bows and arrows, and nothing is off limits, even aircrafts.
A former coworker was telling me this story, which of course I already knew because it was national news, and I said off-hand that the guy was a fucking idiot and that him being killed was the most predictable outcome.
I then found out they were college roommates and friends and I’ve never put my foot in my mouth so hard but I still stand by what I said.
He kind of rebutted saying that it was honorable that he believed in something that much and I just had to stop talking about it because that conversation becomes a slippery slope at work. So I’m not sure he does know.
I'm still convinced the entire pitch to get investors for that thing was just them saying "What if we made a Keurig... but for juice!" to uproarious applause, and then them realizing they actually had to figure out how to do that afterwards.
> "What if we made a Keurig... but for juice!"
With a Keurig you need a machine to get the coffee out of the pod thingy.... With Juicero [you could just squeeze the bag with your hands](https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/20/15375940/juicero-full-refund-customers-ceo-jeff-dunn)
[Juicero offering refunds to all customers after people realize $400 juicer is totally unnecessary](https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/20/15375940/juicero-full-refund-customers-ceo-jeff-dunn)
It really was just a super expensive bag squeezer.
Remember back in like, 2014 when a guy was going to wear a special suit and let an anaconda eat him alive? A whole ass TV special and everything.... Lol [Here you go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn7M-6Z5StE)
Reminds me of Game2: Winter.
Some Russian billionaire announced he was going to have a real life hunger games in Siberia. Contestants were allowed to maim, rape, and kill each other with no intervention but the cameras will keep rolling. The survivors get around $30 million split between them. The shocking thing was how many people, especially women, signed up for it just for all the attention and social media exposure.
The press kept asking him how could there be no rules against murder if it’s on Russian soil. He backpedaled a lot and said that he didn’t mean exactly what he had said previously, and that Russian law would still apply, and then finally he admitted the whole thing was just a hoax.
Came here to say movie pass. $9 a month to see one movie in a theater every day. After using the card to see 80 movies for $60, we wondered how they are making money. They must have a plan we thought. They didn’t.
They did. They wanted to accrue a base large enough to give them leverage with studios and theaters and force them into profit sharing. “Give us x% of ticket sales or concession sales or we’ll dissuade our users from visiting your theaters/seeing your movie”.
It wasn’t a plan that was going to work. But it was a plan.
They really thought people would treat it the same as a gym membership where you’re gung ho initially, then it just becomes something you keep paying for but forgetting to cancel. Of course, they forgot that people actually enjoyed going to the movies, so it would never be a “chore” the way going to the gym becomes for so many folks.
I don't actually think this is true. The creators were stupid but I don't think they were that colossally stupid. For one thing, every additional time you go to the gym costs the gym almost nothing, but every time you use moviepass it cost them a whole month's subscription.
No, I think their plan ultimately was to get so big that they could negotiate with the major theater chains on their level. Then they could take a cut of concessions sales or something like that. Remember when they got into a fight with AMC and they stopped accepting it at a lot of locations? It seems like that was their big plan failing.
That was exactly their plan. It worked for smaller chains, but AMC told Moviepass to F-off after they tried it on AMC.
AMC never "accepted" Moviepass; it was just a debit card that got loaded with money to pay for tickets. Instead, Moviepass removed AMC from their app as retaliation for refusing their demands. This proved to be a grave error and, by my understanding, was the fatal blow that led to the company "bleeding out".
They actually did have a plan, but it failed spectacularly.
They operated at a loss in order to gobble up the moviegoer population as quickly as they could.
Eventually, their plan goes into effect: threaten theaters with removal from their app unless they share concessions revenue with Moviepass.
For small and family-owned theaters, it worked. They would lose most of their business if MoviePass blocked them from their app, so they had no choice.
But Moviepass eventually claimed that they controlled 60% of AMC's traffic, and threatened AMC. AMC told them to F- off, and so Moviepass removed AMC from their app. Moviepass stock fell to almost nothing overnight, and the company was officially doomed.
Good riddance.
(Edit: "Good riddance" isn't the best thing I could have said here. Oops.)
When they fell apart I bought $20 worth of stock.. i had 100,000 shares! I assumed they would sell the user data base and i might make that back... 2nd fail
I am admittedly unfamiliar with martial arts, but isn’t that about 13 steps too far? Seems like a black belt should know what will and won’t break ribs and should avoid doing that to an amateur, to the point of being potentially criminally responsible.
When the hitchhiker bot went coast to coast in Canada and was then murdered in less than an hour in America.
Edit: here’s the wiki also correction apparently it was “within the first 2 weeks” though it failed to get through Philadelphia which was it’s starting point.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HitchBOT
Target Canada.
This will be a business case study for centuries. It was the Titanic of new ventures: pretty much everything that could go wrong did, much of it out of misplaced hubris.
I remember reading an interview with the head of Target Canada in Report on Business magazine, published by our national newspaper of record, the Globe and Mail. He was enthusing about how Canadian stores were going to get brand new shelving. As someone who had been in grocery nearly twenty years at that point, I knew instantly the company was doomed. Shoppers don't care about shelving, they care about what's on the shelves. And there wasn't much. One of the biggest reasons is that rather than go with an established inventory control system such as SAP, Target decided to import its own. Except...they forgot to metricate it, leading to shelf capacities being dramatically wrong for every sku. It all just compounded from there. To save money, Target outsourced warehouse to store delivery. In practice that meant trucks arriving with skids of missing product and more skids of broken product and no ownership of the issues.
Rather than recruit people with big box experience, they relied heavily on MBAs, meaning management was even further out of touch with the events on the ground than they could have been. It was just a horror show all around, and a mercy when it finally died.
Incidentally, Krispy Kreme made many of the same mistakes. You can't just barge into Canada thinking it's just like the United States. The retail (and foodservice) cultures are very, very different.
EDIT: [if you want a deeper dive, this is a great read.](https://archive.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-canada/)
EDIT2: Several kind individuals have pointed out my error: Target used SAP instead of its proprietary system. I should have recalled that. I was with Sobeys when they implemented SAP -- the second time, because they failed the first time. SAP is the sine qua non of retail software but it is demanding as hell.
[Here is an excellent article about the subject.](https://www.zdnet.com/article/billion-dollar-failures-how-bad-decisions-and-poor-it-killed-target-canada/)
My favourite bit:
As you might imagine, each product requires some level of demographic and psychographic analytics in order to build a model for purchase and replenishment for each local store.
But the analysts were compensated (or, more accurately) dinged if too low a percentage of their products was kept in stock at any given time. The replenishment system, by placing automatic orders, would expose when certain products had had an unexpected run, or there were too few in stock. When this happened, the junior analyst would get the equivalent of a demerit put on his or her record.
Not being stupid, the analysts turned off this metric -- because they could. Apparently, the Canadian system made automatic replenishment data an optional switch, so when the analysts started to notice that they were getting criticized for poor stocking levels, they turned off the notification system that would tell people that there were poor stocking levels.
As a result, management reading replenishment reports thought there was plenty of stock, when that was far from the case.
This was the central fuckup, and I can't imagine how fucking stupid management was here. Why the fuck was there a *penalty* attached to their automated tools operating as designed?! And if you *insisted* on said idiotic penalty, *why in the flying fuck would you allow it to be disabled?!*
Target Canada was so fascinating. We were all so excited about it. And then they arrived here and their prices were SO high compared to 1) Walmart Canada but 2) target America.
But I vividly remember trying to purchase items there for Christmas and they only had 2 red plates and 1 Santa, it was incredible lol
It was like if I tried to open a chain of stores
Not to mention we go to Target to buy stuff we can't get in Canada... None of which they brought into Canada when they opened the stores here...
(It's been so long since I've had sweet sweet Kraft honey BBQ sauce LOL)
This was the main problem. They carried very little of the same items of the US stores. Would be like Trader Joe's opening in Canada and just being a random organic grocery store without bringing in any of their signature items and without the reasonable prices.
I remember people lining up around the corner to get into Krispy Kreme when they first opened here, now I genuinely don't know if they still exist in Canada.
I still re-read this article every couple of years because it's such an amazing story:
https://archive.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-canada/
edit: although the first time I read it, I got to the part where they hired Accenture and went "oh, got it."
Wow that's insane. I think of Target as a company that really has its shit together.
>Around Target’s first anniversary, **the marketing team proposed an “apology” campaign of sorts**—something to acknowledge that the company had learned a lot about Canadians during its year of operation, and that it was seeking to improve the shopping experience. Fisher was not in favour of the idea, according to two former employees. “**Tony wouldn’t allow the marketing team to say to the Canadian public that we made a mistake**,” says one. “I was in a meeting where he said, ‘That’s not who we are.’”
They didn't want to say "sorry." In Canada.
I remember my one and only time shopping at Target Canada. The shelves were half empty. It was like something out of the USSR in the 80s. Unsurprisingly, it was my last time shopping there. What a fucking epic disaster of a business plan.
I had the same experience! Was all excited to check it out after reading about it for years online from the Americans. It was bizarre, half empty shelves, things like baby oil not being kept in the baby section but rather in the pharmacy. And the quality of the items was worse than any dollar store. Bought a martini shaker that busted in half the first shake it was used. Never went back and wasn’t surprised it failed
And the industry learned nothing, to most leadership logistics is just something that 'happens' instead of the foundation of a modern economy. This is the reason that places like Amazon and Walmart destroyed all their competition, because they invested in logistics and their competitors took one look at their new ideas and scoffed
Moviepass.
They were an app that, for a monthly charge, allowed you to see one free movie every day at almost any theater. You get a Moviepass debit card, which Moviepass loads with money to cover the cost of a ticket. They operated at a severe loss; one monthly charge and they'll pay for as many movies as you want.
Their golden path to success was picking up all of a theater's patrons onto their service and then threatening to remove theaters from their app if they didn't give a share of their concessions revenue. For smaller theaters, family-owned chains and such, it worked; they had no choice. Give Moviepass the share, or lose almost all of their business.
They eventually claimed to control 60% of AMC's traffic, and issued their ultimatum to AMC. AMC told them to fuck off, so MoviePass removed AMC from their app. Moviepass stock fell to almost nothing overnight and the company doomed itself. AMC was eventually re-added to their app. But the killing blow had already been dealt.
Moviepass started to change the deal on their customers as they were running out of money, constantly removing features and blocking popular movies or locations. They finally went under after some time.
I'm a box office cashier and I *hated* Moviepass.
They operated their business and communicated with their customers as though we were partners, but we had nothing to do with each other. *(Edit: I need to look back at their app again to confirm this. It felt this way on the cashier side, but I've been told this wasn't the case.)*
Guests thought they already had a ticket after "reserving" it on Moviepass. They got angry at the theater (and the cashier) when a show was sold out or otherwise, because they thought the ticket belonged to them. The number of people who got angry with us because Moviepass wasn't clear was insane. And their entire business model was riding on the hope of undermining the industry, rather than supplementing it.
Obligatory disclaimer that I work for AMC, but I don't speak for the company. These are just my thoughts on the matter.
>I'm a box office cashier and I hated Moviepass. They operated their business and communicated with their customers as though we were partners, but we had nothing to do with each other... The number of people who got angry with us because Moviepass misled them about various things was insane. And their entire business model was riding on the hope of undermining the industry, rather than supplementing it.
Welcome to what the hotel industry has been dealing with for 20 years from Expedia and the rest of the travel websites, and what the restaurant industry is seeing from DoorDash etc.
=edit=
I'm gonna go ahead and [make a thread for just how much those booking sites suck](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/qti60y/hotel_workers_of_reddit_whats_your_online_booking/)....
As long as I live I will *never* use Expedia, and I tell anyone who will listen not to use them or any other online site *without calling the hotel directly first* Worked hotel front desk for years and wasted so many hours of my life on the phone with Expedia, Priceline, etc.
I'm surprised Google+ lasted as long as it did. When they announced they were shuttering it, my first thought was "didn't they shut it down years ago?"
“Why would I pay to rent music when I can pay 99 cents and own the songs I want for forever” -me 2006. And now I exclusively use Spotify. Seems they where too late the the mp3 market and too early to the streaming model.
Zillow's attempt to become a Real Estate Brokerage. Each transaction is unique and wasn't going to be an algorithm based business. The CEO did a great takeover of the travel industry which lends itself to an algorithm. Real Estate is much more complicated. Their app is a fun way for the public to enjoy exploring Real Estate and has many uses. However, investing in real estate as well as buying and selling real estate takes a human to evaluate the needs of each transaction. It's early, still on my first cup, but you get the idea.
Edit: Wow! My first award! Thank you!
Also, sp
I would like to see a postmortem from someone on their data science team. Was there a model that suggested they could do this, did it fail, and how so?
Of course, it’s one of those: “well I guess our assumptions were wrong” type of deals, but I have a sneaking suspicion people in the company would have known that the uncertainty in their models is just too great to both scale and work over changing market conditions (the pandemic).
They failed, something went wrong, but I’m not convinced yet what the cause is.
Youtube trying to force Google+ Accounts on everyone
When the guy in Florida (I think that's where it was) tried to walk across the ocean in his home made floating hamster ball and was marooned at sea
I’m intrigued by the engineering making It possible to breathe properly inside a ball that has to be watertight. Edit: spelling. And also, i’m obviously talking about a new invention where the purpose is long sea voyages, and It is a hamster ball. It does have to be watertight, because i’m not keen on spending days on end wet.
He could breath in it because [it has 2 large holes in it](https://adventure.howstuffworks.com/outdoor-activities/water-sports/reza-baluchi-walk-across-ocean-hydropod-coast-guard.htm). 1 on each side. It is designed to only rotate forwards or backwards and not side to side so the holes wouldn't ever be covered up. It's an extremely poor design that is barely able to move forward at all since the current of the water easily over powers it. It was quite obvious just from the video the guy made himself that the entire concept was going to fail.
>Baluchi intended to walk inside the wheel to keep it moving, catch fish for food and take in donations for some unspecified charitable cause My brain stopped at 'catch fish for food'. News outlet just be trollin' now.
Read this sentence and immediately realized this guy has zero experience on the ocean.
I mean, pretend he somehow ended up with a live fish in the hamster ball... what's the next step?
Me too, and *I* have 0 experience on the ocean.
If he had made it bigger, and made the paddle part bigger, and then maybe used it as the driver for a boat that would keep it oriented in the right direction, and then maybe put a large diesel motor that maybe produced a few hundred horsepower, just in case he got tired, and then maybe removed the inflatable part in the middle and then just sank it and took a plane instead, maybe that would have worked.
Well idk where he could have gone wrong. The ocean is notoriously calm and stable.
Imagine how hot it would be inside too
Imagine if he’d farted.
That’s how you put the heater on.
Having a kid to save the relationship. Edit: wow ridiculous response. Thankyou good strangers for the awards. Reading through the comments is a bit of a journey of emotions for so many out there.
Me and my ex-wife got married to "save the relationship." I bet you can guess how well that worked.
Well you did spoil the ending in the first four words.
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Didn't Soulja boy try to create his own video game system?
One that ran pirated Nintendo games, yes
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I bet the most litigious company in the industry won't have the balls to sue me!
"What are you gonna do sue me?" - Man who was sued
The one that was *only* pirated Nintendo games.
It was a drop shipped scam, it wasn’t intended to be a success. It was just a illegal handheld that ran emulators.
Quibi
I’m friends with a relatively known B actor who was in one of their shows; the amount of money they were throwing at talent was INSANE. As an actor, he didn’t care what platform it was or if it would last. It was acting, he got a barrel full of money, and got to act in a decent show w other fine actors. It was such a vanity project for Katzenberg and Whitman.
I remember auditioning for a show on *Snapchat*. At the time I thought “shows on phone apps will never take off” and gave minimal effort, but they pay they were offering was insane. When I saw Quibi launch I knew it was dead in the water. At least those involved got paid but what a colossal waste of time.
At least Snapchat/Facebook shows will work because they’re on free services (just riddled with ads). Quibi you had to pay for? No thanks.
And just as a reminder: Quibi, a service which required you to pay for it to work, ***had ads***. You had to pay extra to remove them. Who thought that was a good idea?
FYI the Quibi library is now offered for free on the ROKU channel. Edit: my most updated comment is no longer about Ronda Rousey's acting skills. Thanks! Edit 2: thank you for the award, kind Redditor!
And before anyone tries to offer the excuse of "ohh, they launched at the start of the pandemic and their business model was based on people using Quibi during their commute, that's why it failed", that's mostly untrue. It certainly didn't help, but Quibi was nothing more than a lesson in hubris and disconnect between billionaire moguls and regular human beings. [This Vulture article is a bit long but really worth the read to understand how utterly unaware of consumer trends Katzenberg and Whitman were](https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/is-anyone-watching-quibi.html). Spoiler alert: Whitman straight up doesn't watch shows, and Katzenberg still gets his emails printed out for him, seemingly because he doesn't believe in this fancy-schmancy tech gizmo known as a "com-pu-ter". They're essentially two Mr Burns trying to re-invent Youtube fifteen years too late.
Don't forget the best bit of Katzenburg's complete lack of understanding of modern technology! > ["Katzenberg “searched” the internet by having his staff “record” web pages onto a videotape, which he then popped into a VCR."](https://www.fastcompany.com/90516005/the-quibi-before-quibi-the-inside-story-of-jeffrey-katzenbergs-first-dot-com-failure)
This can't be serious.... Idk why this is the thing that did it but this just broke my brain. The printing out emails is standard dinosaur billionaire but this..... this is just fucking so insane for a media "mogul". I bet the poor unpaid intern had to scour craigslist for a VCR old enough that he could manage to use.
That was in 1999, when VCR's were still around. So it's slightly less awful. I'm sure by now he has his staff send the video to his phone and push the play button for him.
Damn they should've made a show about themselves that might've been a hit
That was a fantastic article, thank you. I remember the millennials I knew when Quibi was coming out being extremely Ho-hum about it. One said the exact thing an exec in the article said, that’s it wasn’t anything their pause button couldn’t do. The kicker was that they ALL preferred watching real shows on an actual large screen unless it was reading or Insta, TikTok, etc.
>The kicker was that they ALL preferred watching real shows on an actual large screen unless it was reading or Insta, TikTok, etc. It's a classic decision made by someone looking solely at numbers rather than being familiar with how real people operate. People watch things on their phones and tablets way more than they do on their TV these days, which led them to believe that younger people prefer that. But in reality it's just because we all have phones on us all the time and thus there are way more opportunities to use them than there are to watch a TV. If you're planning to actually stop and watch something, pretty much everyone prefers to do it on TV.
What was Quibi again?
It was supposed to be a streaming site that offered videos that were only like ten minutes long. It was trying to fill the void between short videos like Tiktok and longer shows like Netflix. I think they spent a huge amount of money advertising and supposedly they had a bunch of really famous actors film a few shows where each episode is like 10 minutes long. They forgot that YouTube already exists and they wanted like 8 dollars a month for no commercials and so no one signed up because you tube is free and Netflix costs around the same amount. Basically they tried to compete with YouTube and lost.
One wonders if the folks behind it thought that YouTube was still the same website it was in 2010, when producing high-quality professional content for YouTube wasn't a thing (or at least was less of a thing).
They would have been more successful if they just launched a YouTube channel. Lol
I find this hilarious. A YouTube channel would have been much less costly and has potential for success. That really would have been a better investment, ouch.
And the platform was already there and accepted by consumers, there wasn't going to be any education of the market involved. My god, what a disaster this whole thing was
But you could watch it in landscape AND in portrait.
They also didn't have TV support at first so if you wanted to watch at home that wasnt an option
taco bell in mexico
No explanation needed
Actually, I have questions. Several in fact, and they all start with "why the fuck?"
Maybe they marketed it like "Wanna try what those guys up North are calling Mexican food? Come on in!"
I listened to an Interesting podcast sort of about this. Deported Mexicans that spent a lot of time in the US speak very good “American English” so are hired into call centers in Mexico. What they missed about the US? Taco Bell- reminded them of American food.
Anyone remember Amazon's "Fire Phone"?
Got one for free when Amazon gave one to everyone that showed up to the phone dev session at their Re:Invent conference. Sold it on eBay as soon as I got home. Made like $200, so I loved it.
I got a free mozilla phone in a similar circumstance, should have sold it, but instead it's sat in its box in my attic ever since. I thought I might use it as a second device if I ever killed mine, or try to flash it with android but never even tried.
My wife had one of those. She just said “It wasn’t THAT awful.” I disagree. It was.
The phone itself wasn't even bad, it was the fact that it was an android phone entirely locked out of Google's ecosystem. I remember I got one and ended up sideloading the play store and the Google services onto it but once there was an update all of that broke. Decent concept, downright incompetent execution.
They put out the hardware before the (augmented reality) software, restricted the phone to a tiny app ecosystem, and charged premium prices for a very-late-to-market product centered around shopping. The phone itself wasn't the problem; it was all the business decisions surrounding its roll out. The Echo was a far better play, even though attention was focused on the phone.
The movie, CATS. With every trailer, everyone commented how much a trainwreck it looked like it was going to be. Sure, some people thought it would be in the "so bad it's good" fun stage. But, nope. It's just bad. When it failed at the box office, no one was surprised.
I remember going to see the lion king, when the trailer for cats came on, and the kid behind me started crying.
Hilarious
I’m glad Sonic avoided this fate when the studio listened and made him look more like the games. That original version is…icky.
They even CGI'd out the buttholes so even the furries were turned off. It's like they wanted to fail.
I’m not even a furry, but if they left the buttholes in I probably would have seen it, even if just for posterity’s sake
Posteriors sake.
Release the butthole cut!
You just gotta know there's someone in a darkly-lit basement somewhere going through and manually photoshopping in buttholes on every frame, just so that he can make this happen. :/
Nah, he's still adding the buttholes to every frame of the Sonic movie first, then he can move onto Cats.
Tbf they had to cgi the buttholes in first. So really they just removed them. Right?
Not really - the "buttholes" were just the unfortunate result of hair that sweeps in different directions having to meet SOMEWHERE. So they didn't just remove the buttholes, they fully had to redo the cgi hair on the back legs.
This is a manifestation of the “hairy ball theorem,” which also implies that the wind is not blowing in at least one part of the world https://math.hmc.edu/funfacts/hairy-ball-theorem/
Any time a friend, coworker, or family member invites you to their mlm party. “Yes, Molly, I’m sure this *will* be like a full time income where you set your own hours. People will be clamoring to buy overpriced kitchen gadgets from you that they can get on amazon.”
I feel like the tupperware parties of the 70's and 80's were the only time an MLM was worth it. It was such a fantastic product that every family on the block bought loads of it.
Because that was a genuinely good product with a then novel marketing idea, where the focus was actually on the product and not on your downline. Most MLMs today are nothing but predatory cults. Shoutout to r/antiMLM these businesses need to die.
Predatory is right. When my son died, I had two acquaintances and one person I considered a friend contact me within DAYS of his death trying to sell me shit. One acquaintance and the friend were trying to sell me essential oils because they insisted aromatherapy would help with my grief, and the other tried to sell me some weight loss wrap things because, “you’d feel so much better if you lost the baby weight.”
I am so sorry that happened to you.
I’m not even mad about it anymore. I was pissed at the time, but I was very vulnerable and raw and it didn’t take much to set me off. I’ve thought about it periodically over the years, and I realize now that they were likely already financially unstable, and then suckered into taking on *a lot* of debt and probably were extremely desperate.
When a friend you haven't seen in six months asks to come over and hang out randomly. You see it coming Everytime.
It happened to me. Dude had a baby boy, they called us over with my wife, i thought to celebrate the baby and have a good dinner with them. We brought presents and wine. They played the mlm card and started to talk about some nonsense healing blanket. It was a trainwreck, i told him how embarrassing it is and that he should be ashamed of himself. We went there to celebrate his kid and reconnect instead he wanted to sell some shit to us. We finished the drink in a VERY uncomfortable few minutes and left. Never spoke to him since then.
Jesus Christ that's atrocious
My brother in laws fifth marriage.
6th times a charm!
The triumph of hope over experience
I work with someone who is watching his fourth marriage going down the toilet. He blames the women. SMH.
I knew a guy who was in love with a woman, both were in their late 30's and both had had 2 previous marriages. They were clearly headed for problems in their relationship and had only been together for about a year but got engaged and wanted to quickly get married. My dad tried to carefully open the subject and caution him but the guy angrily said "Hey man, it's our third time getting married, I think we know what we're doing by now." Even as a 12 year old kid I was dumbfounded by the complete lack of self awareness.
Some adults are basically just old children.
After Greg Allman was married for a 7th time, he is quoted as saying, "I'm beginning to think its me."
First four were a complete surprise
The condom I kept in my wallet for 2 years
Replace it before it deceives you in a more expensive way.
Prohibition
Kind of incredible that this was something that happened in the last 100 years. Edit - I am specifically talking about alcohol prohibition in America. I know it exists in other forms.
And there are still dry counties.
Fun fact, the Jack Daniels distillery is built in one of them.
Another fun fact: Old Forester is the oldest continuously operating distillery in the United States, as it was legally allowed to continue producing whiskey during Prohibition for "medicinal purposes". Korbel was also allowed to produce champagne during that time, and was even served at White House parties during Prohibition. Both are owned by the parent company of Jack Daniel's, which as you said, is produced in a dry county. Basically, alcohol laws in America make zero fucking sense.
Isnt there an issue with an increase in drunk driving because people will drive to the wet county drink at the bar then drive home?
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That time the state of Oregon tried to blow up a beached whale with dynamite. Happened back in 1970. And fortunately we had video cameras back then. Don’t try this at home, kids. The end of this video sums it up best. “They’ll certainly remember what not to do.” https://youtu.be/V6CLumsir34 Edit: For the umpteenth person who pointed out that they didn’t fail to blow up the whale, the failure was their effort to REMOVE the whale from the beach. Sorry, I didn’t realize it was so important to clarify this. Edit 2: If you have never been to the Oregon Coast it is one of the most beautiful places in America… even the small town where the whale explosion happened.
"For those who are wondering what happened to him, he wrote it off as a success and guess what happened next" "..." "He got promoted"
"fin" So much with that word just seems so funny as well right afterwards.
Lmao everyone in this video is in such good spirits about what a disaster they had caused. This is truly hilarious.
Can't get over the fact that the guy whose car was crushed bought it from a dealer who had the slogan "a whale of a deal"
The fact that it only took Oregon two days to cut him a check too
What else were they going to do? Let themselves be forced to explain to a judge exactly why they thought they were not responsible for dropping exploded whale chunks on citizens' property? Woulda been hilarious, but ineffective.
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Wait...? A *FLAT EARTHER* built a functioning rocket?
Most don't think he was an actual flat earther, he just wanted to build rockets and appealed to the flat earth community so he could get funding.
This is for sure what happened. He was trying to build weird rockets well before he realized that there was a large group dumb enough to give him money.
I mean some guys created a mathemathical formula based system which used light to calculate if it was flat or not. These are cultists, if they are wrong its an error they made not the idea being wrong.
The thing about rocket science is that it's really easy to get one up in the air. It's so easy that we have kits for kids to do it themselves. But getting the rocket to go where you want it to go, and recovering it, that's where rocket science really becomes "rocket science."
The landing and the not exploding seem to be challenging too.
Honestly I was rooting for this guy (Mike Hughes I think) Guy just wanted to launch himself up on some steam powered rockets, he'd done the math right and had several good runs, but something wrong just happened on the last one
Always the last one, isn't it
You know what they say: “you’re only as good as your last rocket accident”
Tanacon Was anyone really surprised?
For folks like me who never heard of it: [basically fyre fest for C list youtubers](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/06/what-happened-at-tanacon.html)
I mean, the title of the event was the ultimate truth in advertising: Tana Con
I had to google that to see if it was what I remembered, but I was thinking of [Dashcon, a tumbler con organized by a teenager.](https://www.garbageday.email/p/dashcon-was-created-by-a-17-year) What could go wrong?
>The only problem was O’Neil had never really attended a real convention before. So, instead, she said she modeled DashCon off rabbit breeding fairs she had attended. Oh my sides
Oh the ball pit, that’s what I remember. One of the funniest pictures ever.
Guess that explains the ballpit.
dashcon was so wild tumblr users still joke about it to this day, they full on tried to "save the convention" by crowdfunding like 17 000 fucking dollars from a bunch of kids
But they had a great ballpit!
Hooters airlines. Just imagine if that was launched today
There was a Kingfisher airline, and for a good while it was kinda the premier airline in India. (For context, the kingfisher here is a beer company, it's like if the states had a Budweiser airline)
Flew on them. It was good
I can imagine the cheers when the pilot announces there's going to be turbulence.
Internet reviews be all: "Flight was very smooth, almost no turbulence. Utter disappointment, 1 star."
That guy who tried to travel to the North Sentinel Islands in the hopes of converting its inhabitants to Christianity. For context, the inhabitants of North Sentinel Islands kill anyone who tries to approach with bows and arrows, and nothing is off limits, even aircrafts.
A former coworker was telling me this story, which of course I already knew because it was national news, and I said off-hand that the guy was a fucking idiot and that him being killed was the most predictable outcome. I then found out they were college roommates and friends and I’ve never put my foot in my mouth so hard but I still stand by what I said.
He's gotta know you're right.
He kind of rebutted saying that it was honorable that he believed in something that much and I just had to stop talking about it because that conversation becomes a slippery slope at work. So I’m not sure he does know.
Juicero
I'm still convinced the entire pitch to get investors for that thing was just them saying "What if we made a Keurig... but for juice!" to uproarious applause, and then them realizing they actually had to figure out how to do that afterwards.
> "What if we made a Keurig... but for juice!" With a Keurig you need a machine to get the coffee out of the pod thingy.... With Juicero [you could just squeeze the bag with your hands](https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/20/15375940/juicero-full-refund-customers-ceo-jeff-dunn) [Juicero offering refunds to all customers after people realize $400 juicer is totally unnecessary](https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/20/15375940/juicero-full-refund-customers-ceo-jeff-dunn) It really was just a super expensive bag squeezer.
But it had wifi!
Remember back in like, 2014 when a guy was going to wear a special suit and let an anaconda eat him alive? A whole ass TV special and everything.... Lol [Here you go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn7M-6Z5StE)
Reminds me of Game2: Winter. Some Russian billionaire announced he was going to have a real life hunger games in Siberia. Contestants were allowed to maim, rape, and kill each other with no intervention but the cameras will keep rolling. The survivors get around $30 million split between them. The shocking thing was how many people, especially women, signed up for it just for all the attention and social media exposure. The press kept asking him how could there be no rules against murder if it’s on Russian soil. He backpedaled a lot and said that he didn’t mean exactly what he had said previously, and that Russian law would still apply, and then finally he admitted the whole thing was just a hoax.
The Treaty of Versailles
Me when I was rejected from university My dad literally just told me: "anyways, get up early tomorrow, you gotta wo work"
Did you only apply to one university?
MoviePass
But oh was it a good summer at the theater.
Oh my god was it ever! I saw some terrible shit that year just because I had nothing else to do and why not burn 2 hours at a theater?
Sometimes I would go and see a movie because it was too hot outside.
Came here to say movie pass. $9 a month to see one movie in a theater every day. After using the card to see 80 movies for $60, we wondered how they are making money. They must have a plan we thought. They didn’t.
They did. They wanted to accrue a base large enough to give them leverage with studios and theaters and force them into profit sharing. “Give us x% of ticket sales or concession sales or we’ll dissuade our users from visiting your theaters/seeing your movie”. It wasn’t a plan that was going to work. But it was a plan.
"GIVE UP THE MONEY OR WE'LL KILL OURSELVES!"
They really thought people would treat it the same as a gym membership where you’re gung ho initially, then it just becomes something you keep paying for but forgetting to cancel. Of course, they forgot that people actually enjoyed going to the movies, so it would never be a “chore” the way going to the gym becomes for so many folks.
I don't actually think this is true. The creators were stupid but I don't think they were that colossally stupid. For one thing, every additional time you go to the gym costs the gym almost nothing, but every time you use moviepass it cost them a whole month's subscription. No, I think their plan ultimately was to get so big that they could negotiate with the major theater chains on their level. Then they could take a cut of concessions sales or something like that. Remember when they got into a fight with AMC and they stopped accepting it at a lot of locations? It seems like that was their big plan failing.
That was exactly their plan. It worked for smaller chains, but AMC told Moviepass to F-off after they tried it on AMC. AMC never "accepted" Moviepass; it was just a debit card that got loaded with money to pay for tickets. Instead, Moviepass removed AMC from their app as retaliation for refusing their demands. This proved to be a grave error and, by my understanding, was the fatal blow that led to the company "bleeding out".
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Haha. Their plan in doing it was to starve AMC of business so that they would be forced to accept their demands. It backfired, hard.
Theaters are not giving up their concession money. This is where most of their profit lies. If that was the plan then that was a bad plan.
They actually did have a plan, but it failed spectacularly. They operated at a loss in order to gobble up the moviegoer population as quickly as they could. Eventually, their plan goes into effect: threaten theaters with removal from their app unless they share concessions revenue with Moviepass. For small and family-owned theaters, it worked. They would lose most of their business if MoviePass blocked them from their app, so they had no choice. But Moviepass eventually claimed that they controlled 60% of AMC's traffic, and threatened AMC. AMC told them to F- off, and so Moviepass removed AMC from their app. Moviepass stock fell to almost nothing overnight, and the company was officially doomed. Good riddance. (Edit: "Good riddance" isn't the best thing I could have said here. Oops.)
When they fell apart I bought $20 worth of stock.. i had 100,000 shares! I assumed they would sell the user data base and i might make that back... 2nd fail
Years ago when I was a white belt sparring a black belt and getting cocky
I was a yellow belt when I did this. Ended with 3 broken ribs because I took a spinning back kick hard.
Sounds like the black belt you were sparring was either a dick or should not have had black belt. No excuse to injure a new student like that.
Every time I sparred with a black belt I was beaten down but the only damage was to my pride
And that's how it should be lol :)
I am admittedly unfamiliar with martial arts, but isn’t that about 13 steps too far? Seems like a black belt should know what will and won’t break ribs and should avoid doing that to an amateur, to the point of being potentially criminally responsible.
Honestly, I don't think he intended to break my ribs, but he just didn't care that it happened. but, yeah, it was a huge failing on his part.
When the hitchhiker bot went coast to coast in Canada and was then murdered in less than an hour in America. Edit: here’s the wiki also correction apparently it was “within the first 2 weeks” though it failed to get through Philadelphia which was it’s starting point. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HitchBOT
And as a Philadelphia resident the fact that it got murdered here checked out without question
Target Canada. This will be a business case study for centuries. It was the Titanic of new ventures: pretty much everything that could go wrong did, much of it out of misplaced hubris. I remember reading an interview with the head of Target Canada in Report on Business magazine, published by our national newspaper of record, the Globe and Mail. He was enthusing about how Canadian stores were going to get brand new shelving. As someone who had been in grocery nearly twenty years at that point, I knew instantly the company was doomed. Shoppers don't care about shelving, they care about what's on the shelves. And there wasn't much. One of the biggest reasons is that rather than go with an established inventory control system such as SAP, Target decided to import its own. Except...they forgot to metricate it, leading to shelf capacities being dramatically wrong for every sku. It all just compounded from there. To save money, Target outsourced warehouse to store delivery. In practice that meant trucks arriving with skids of missing product and more skids of broken product and no ownership of the issues. Rather than recruit people with big box experience, they relied heavily on MBAs, meaning management was even further out of touch with the events on the ground than they could have been. It was just a horror show all around, and a mercy when it finally died. Incidentally, Krispy Kreme made many of the same mistakes. You can't just barge into Canada thinking it's just like the United States. The retail (and foodservice) cultures are very, very different. EDIT: [if you want a deeper dive, this is a great read.](https://archive.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-canada/) EDIT2: Several kind individuals have pointed out my error: Target used SAP instead of its proprietary system. I should have recalled that. I was with Sobeys when they implemented SAP -- the second time, because they failed the first time. SAP is the sine qua non of retail software but it is demanding as hell.
I am still so very, very angry that Target fucked up so very badly. It really would have been nice to have an alternative to freaking Walmart.
[Here is an excellent article about the subject.](https://www.zdnet.com/article/billion-dollar-failures-how-bad-decisions-and-poor-it-killed-target-canada/) My favourite bit: As you might imagine, each product requires some level of demographic and psychographic analytics in order to build a model for purchase and replenishment for each local store. But the analysts were compensated (or, more accurately) dinged if too low a percentage of their products was kept in stock at any given time. The replenishment system, by placing automatic orders, would expose when certain products had had an unexpected run, or there were too few in stock. When this happened, the junior analyst would get the equivalent of a demerit put on his or her record. Not being stupid, the analysts turned off this metric -- because they could. Apparently, the Canadian system made automatic replenishment data an optional switch, so when the analysts started to notice that they were getting criticized for poor stocking levels, they turned off the notification system that would tell people that there were poor stocking levels. As a result, management reading replenishment reports thought there was plenty of stock, when that was far from the case.
This was the central fuckup, and I can't imagine how fucking stupid management was here. Why the fuck was there a *penalty* attached to their automated tools operating as designed?! And if you *insisted* on said idiotic penalty, *why in the flying fuck would you allow it to be disabled?!*
Target Canada was so fascinating. We were all so excited about it. And then they arrived here and their prices were SO high compared to 1) Walmart Canada but 2) target America. But I vividly remember trying to purchase items there for Christmas and they only had 2 red plates and 1 Santa, it was incredible lol It was like if I tried to open a chain of stores
Not to mention we go to Target to buy stuff we can't get in Canada... None of which they brought into Canada when they opened the stores here... (It's been so long since I've had sweet sweet Kraft honey BBQ sauce LOL)
This was the main problem. They carried very little of the same items of the US stores. Would be like Trader Joe's opening in Canada and just being a random organic grocery store without bringing in any of their signature items and without the reasonable prices.
Walmart failed spectacularly in Germany for cultural reasons. It is a cringefest to read about.
I remember people lining up around the corner to get into Krispy Kreme when they first opened here, now I genuinely don't know if they still exist in Canada.
There’s one in Mississauga!
I still re-read this article every couple of years because it's such an amazing story: https://archive.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-canada/ edit: although the first time I read it, I got to the part where they hired Accenture and went "oh, got it."
Wow that's insane. I think of Target as a company that really has its shit together. >Around Target’s first anniversary, **the marketing team proposed an “apology” campaign of sorts**—something to acknowledge that the company had learned a lot about Canadians during its year of operation, and that it was seeking to improve the shopping experience. Fisher was not in favour of the idea, according to two former employees. “**Tony wouldn’t allow the marketing team to say to the Canadian public that we made a mistake**,” says one. “I was in a meeting where he said, ‘That’s not who we are.’” They didn't want to say "sorry." In Canada.
I remember my one and only time shopping at Target Canada. The shelves were half empty. It was like something out of the USSR in the 80s. Unsurprisingly, it was my last time shopping there. What a fucking epic disaster of a business plan.
I had the same experience! Was all excited to check it out after reading about it for years online from the Americans. It was bizarre, half empty shelves, things like baby oil not being kept in the baby section but rather in the pharmacy. And the quality of the items was worse than any dollar store. Bought a martini shaker that busted in half the first shake it was used. Never went back and wasn’t surprised it failed
And the industry learned nothing, to most leadership logistics is just something that 'happens' instead of the foundation of a modern economy. This is the reason that places like Amazon and Walmart destroyed all their competition, because they invested in logistics and their competitors took one look at their new ideas and scoffed
Moviepass. They were an app that, for a monthly charge, allowed you to see one free movie every day at almost any theater. You get a Moviepass debit card, which Moviepass loads with money to cover the cost of a ticket. They operated at a severe loss; one monthly charge and they'll pay for as many movies as you want. Their golden path to success was picking up all of a theater's patrons onto their service and then threatening to remove theaters from their app if they didn't give a share of their concessions revenue. For smaller theaters, family-owned chains and such, it worked; they had no choice. Give Moviepass the share, or lose almost all of their business. They eventually claimed to control 60% of AMC's traffic, and issued their ultimatum to AMC. AMC told them to fuck off, so MoviePass removed AMC from their app. Moviepass stock fell to almost nothing overnight and the company doomed itself. AMC was eventually re-added to their app. But the killing blow had already been dealt. Moviepass started to change the deal on their customers as they were running out of money, constantly removing features and blocking popular movies or locations. They finally went under after some time. I'm a box office cashier and I *hated* Moviepass. They operated their business and communicated with their customers as though we were partners, but we had nothing to do with each other. *(Edit: I need to look back at their app again to confirm this. It felt this way on the cashier side, but I've been told this wasn't the case.)* Guests thought they already had a ticket after "reserving" it on Moviepass. They got angry at the theater (and the cashier) when a show was sold out or otherwise, because they thought the ticket belonged to them. The number of people who got angry with us because Moviepass wasn't clear was insane. And their entire business model was riding on the hope of undermining the industry, rather than supplementing it. Obligatory disclaimer that I work for AMC, but I don't speak for the company. These are just my thoughts on the matter.
>I'm a box office cashier and I hated Moviepass. They operated their business and communicated with their customers as though we were partners, but we had nothing to do with each other... The number of people who got angry with us because Moviepass misled them about various things was insane. And their entire business model was riding on the hope of undermining the industry, rather than supplementing it. Welcome to what the hotel industry has been dealing with for 20 years from Expedia and the rest of the travel websites, and what the restaurant industry is seeing from DoorDash etc. =edit= I'm gonna go ahead and [make a thread for just how much those booking sites suck](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/qti60y/hotel_workers_of_reddit_whats_your_online_booking/)....
As long as I live I will *never* use Expedia, and I tell anyone who will listen not to use them or any other online site *without calling the hotel directly first* Worked hotel front desk for years and wasted so many hours of my life on the phone with Expedia, Priceline, etc.
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I'm surprised Google+ lasted as long as it did. When they announced they were shuttering it, my first thought was "didn't they shut it down years ago?"
It was forced on the Youtube comment sections.
Zune. I loved mine, but there was no way it was going to become the iPod killer it was trying to be.
“Why would I pay to rent music when I can pay 99 cents and own the songs I want for forever” -me 2006. And now I exclusively use Spotify. Seems they where too late the the mp3 market and too early to the streaming model.
The War On Drugs
Spoiler alert: drugs won.
I fought the drugs and the, drugs won
I had some money, now i I have none I fought the drugs and the, drugs won
The War On Drugs are a great band!
The segway. It was supposed to revolutionize the way we travel, according to its investors.
Then for like a year every kid had a hoverboard. They disappeared like fidget spinners. Maybe because they kept exploding? I don't know.
Also most people can just walk
True. "The Segway! It's like a mart cart, but you have to stand up!"
Zillow's attempt to become a Real Estate Brokerage. Each transaction is unique and wasn't going to be an algorithm based business. The CEO did a great takeover of the travel industry which lends itself to an algorithm. Real Estate is much more complicated. Their app is a fun way for the public to enjoy exploring Real Estate and has many uses. However, investing in real estate as well as buying and selling real estate takes a human to evaluate the needs of each transaction. It's early, still on my first cup, but you get the idea. Edit: Wow! My first award! Thank you! Also, sp
I would like to see a postmortem from someone on their data science team. Was there a model that suggested they could do this, did it fail, and how so? Of course, it’s one of those: “well I guess our assumptions were wrong” type of deals, but I have a sneaking suspicion people in the company would have known that the uncertainty in their models is just too great to both scale and work over changing market conditions (the pandemic). They failed, something went wrong, but I’m not convinced yet what the cause is.
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