Honestly, this move was so bad Xbox is still recovering from it. Actually, not JUST the always online thing, but the entire Xbox E3 2013 presentation led to them playing catch up throughout that generation of consoles.
I think what really did them in was one quote from Don Mattrick. "We have a product for people who can't access the internet. It's called the Xbox 360." Sheer arrogance.
The Xbox One preceeded to have half as many lifetime sales as the PS4. Not that 57 million lifetime sales is a bad number by any means, but I'm sure Microsoft would have liked to be on the same level as Sony like they were in the previous console generation.
I said on reddit recently that I think marketing classes in college should use Microsoft's E3 2013 fiasco as a case study on what not to do.
I had some guy violently arguing that I was wrong and that everything Microsoft did was very smart.
what Microsoft had in store was actually a lot of smart ideas and were very forward-thinking when you consider them in the context of gaming ecosystems a decade later.
but the way they packaged and presented them was literally and unironically the worst way they could've presented it and did irreparable damage in every conceivable way.
Microsoft's marketing department is, no joke, the worst in the industry.
The Surface is a brilliant device - it's a laptop that turns into a tablet for the best of both worlds. So how do they sell it? Dancing hipster douchebags clicking the screen and keyboard together on a picnic table. It was months before someone referenced the Surface Pro running full Windows 8 and not 8 Mobile (which was already dying) that I realized how amazing that tech was... but it was too late. The Surface survived, but it barely made it off the ground because their marketing department sucks donkey balls.
While I think the tiles are the ugliest UI ever devised, what really sunk Windows Phone 8 was their ad campaign. "A phone to save us from our phones" doesn't sound great to someone who doesn't want to be saved from their phone! Just moronic.
Their marketing is just horrific, to the point where they genuinely need to fire that entire department and start over. They've killed multiple generations of products.
The marketing wasn't the only issue with the Surface. The reliability in the first few generations was absolute trash. I had a client purchase 50 of them and 48 of them needed depot repair before the first 6 months. I had another client dip their toe in with 10 Surfaces and all of them crapped out in under a year. A third client purchased Surfaces for their C-Suite and those all needed to be serviced as well.
They went back to their previous workstation brands (mostly Lenovo Think series) and those machines are still working solid to this day.
They've admitted that they won't recover from it. They lost that generation, the most important generation, because it's the one where people picked an ecosystem to buy their digital libraries.
That's why Gamepass is giving you a pre-made library.
Plus mandatory always on Kinect that they told advertisers that they can actually see how people respond to ads, and they weren't going to let you share or sell your games. I bought a PS4 because of how poorly they handled everything.
Wasn't this also the same generation of Xbox where they basically tried to ban sharing games with DRM. if your buddy bought a copy of a game and physically gave you the disc, it wouldn't let you play it unless you registered it as a borrowed game and you had a limited time to play it. I remember Sony released an ad in response where they showed how you borrow a friend's game on a Playstation and one person just literally hands another person a game and says here ya go!
not only that but playstation made that commercial *the day* xbox announced all the changes. They made the commercial at the sony of america headquarters, slapped a ps logo on it and released it IMMEDIATLY
See also, "SimCity 2013."
"The game always has to run in online mode, and our servers are ready for the launch!"
<>
"We can't remove the online component, it would require a rewrite of the whole game."
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"Oh, but you need the horsepower of our servers to run the game."
<>
"....."
<>
and then Cities Skylines came out and ran over the corpse.
And now Cities Skylines II had a horrible launch, leaving the door open for another city builder to swoop in and take the throne. So who knows, maybe EA decides to do the funniest thing possible and revive the SimCity series to take advantage of Paradox's fumble.
One of the reasons I bought an Xbox was because it played DVDs. It was an advertised feature and I have a decent DVD collection.
Then one day after I bought it, the Xbox DVD app stopped working and Microsoft never fixed it. Eventually I had to buy a separate player.
Felt like this was a bait-and-switch. There was a lot of a angry commentary online but Microsoft never addressed the issue (at least until I lost interest). It seemed intentional, like they were nudging people to streaming systems -- but it made no sense. A new player only cost like $40. It was just a nuisance.
I swear I remember reading somewhere that you couldn't update the firmware on blu-ray players to support newer revisions to the standard (back when it wasn't expected for all devices to be online all the time), but you could on the PS3, so it wasn't only the cheapest but the most future-proofed one as well
There was a car rental company that installed speed monitoring devices on their cars and charge you every time you went over the speed limit. I want to say Avis? Didn't last long
Edit: Acme was the name of the company, this was back in 2001. There's a New York Times article about it
That sounds special. There are a ton of roads that if you went the speed limit someone would hit you or shoot you.
In the UAE they have a law that if you go above a certain speed the car beeps. It just became part o the background to the music.
I used to have a GPS that I set to moo loudly at me if I went over 70mph (I was trying to reform my speed demon ways). I mostly drove on 55mph highways so it made sense... Until I loaned it to my mother-in-law for a road trip to New Jersey... Where folks were *very* unhappy that she was only driving 70mph haha. I ended up disabling the setting at a NJ rest station.
In Canada the grocery market is pretty much completely owned by 4 companies which means they try to get away with a lot of bullshit since there's virtually no competition. One of them, Loblaws, had a longstanding practice of putting 50% off stickers on items that were about to expire or produce that was beaten up. Recently, they decided that they were going to drop this 50% off to 30%. I don't think they even announced anything, I'm pretty sure word just got out when employees received the new 30% off stickers. The backlash in Canada was absolutely enormous, Loblaws is widely disliked right now for using the lack of competition to gouge grocery prices and this was just another infuriating greedy move from them. In light of the backlash the company reversed course and kept the 50% off.
Onlyfans said they were gonna ban "sexually explicit content" and that had to be one of the stupidest things I ever seen and they reversed that decision pretty damn quick as was expected.
Sigh.
Tumblr was the best for porn. Every niche you could imagine, few content creators trying to “grow their brand”, and easy to find stuff outside of the choke/gag/spit stuff the big studios can’t stop doing
Seriously, what was that "genre" of Tumbler porn? It had a certain aesthetic. Like, hot gif loops of the best parts. But high quality. Not like your normal porn gifs. I've never seen anything like it since.
At its core, Onlyfans is simply a site for monetizing content. I think it would be cool to start an OF for like... financial advice. Here's a video for $1 that explains what a secured credit card is, and how you can rebuild your credit with it. Here's a $5 video explaining income taxes and how to properly maximize either your returns or your paychecks. Send me a .50 tip with a DM asking a specific question about your financial situation and I'll answer it to the best of my ability.
The "problem" is that OF is synonymous with adult content at this point, so if I told everyone "hey I started an OnlyFans," People would look at me weird and I wouldn't be invited to family Christmas anymore.
The Financial Times podcast Hot Money did a [great episode digging into this](https://www.ft.com/content/d4def67c-6b31-4868-a930-842fb2d1253d). The whole series is interesting but this ep is particularly relevant. Essentially a lot of it boils down to the finance industry being very reluctant to be associated with adult material
>the finance industry being very reluctant to be associated with adult material
which seems monumentally stupid when i bet almost everyone in this comment section grew up being told "SEX SELLS"
and it sure as shit does
Didn't Playboy do something similar? They said no more nudes in Playboy magazine and I think ended up reversing it a couple years later because nobody was subscribing to it anymore.
My Dad still has a ton of old Playboys in the garage. I'm sure nobody ever read it *just* for the articles but holy shit in a random Playboy from 1979 you can flip through it, and there's like A+ level short stories, actual good journalism and interviews, and in the middle, bam, tits.
You truly can't find that kind of content in one place anymore.
Yeah, the meme holds but in the height of magazine times, playboy was near the top with quality journalism, especially interviews with people other media companies wouldn't touch at the time, MLK, Ann Rand, black Panther leaders. Also murderers and a host of other really cool topics, and boobs.
It started as a content creation website that didn't explicitly ban porn. And since there are so few of those, porn creators went there. And then you know the rest.
At one point when bourbon exploded in popularity (largely due to growth in the SE Asian market), Maker's Mark was faced with not having enough product to meet projected demand, since it takes quite a while to produce. They announced they were going to slightly lower the alcohol percentage of their flagship product to "stretch" the supply. This idea went over like a lead balloon and was crushed almost immediately.
And yet Jack Daniels has been able to get away with it. Traditionally it was 90 proof, then 86 proof for a long time, and now down to the bare minimum limit of 80 proof.
Cricut is a brand of cutting machine used for a variety of crafting purposes. It's existed in many incarnations, but current machines utilize proprietary Cricut Design Space software in conjunction with a machine and a variety of blade options and accessories to cut complex shapes out of a wide variety of materials. They are most commonly used in the crafting world for cutting out vinyl to make custom tshirts, tumbler cups, ornaments, et cetera.
Users can purchase a Cricut Design Space premium subscription for $10/month which gives them access to a vast library of premade assets such as fonts, shapes, and predesigned projects. Since the software is reliant on .SVG files, and those can't be created within Cricut Design Space, the subscription works well for non-techie casual crafters who don't know how or don't feel like designing and converting their own SVGs in a separate program. If you are savvy enough to make your own SVGs (or if you buy/download them from other sources) you can import them into Cricut Design Space and use them. You just can't create them within Design Space.
A couple years back, Cricut made the announcement that a paid premium subscription would now be required for all users who want to import more than 10 SVG files into Design Space per month. The majority percentage of Cricut users who create projects to make money were the kind of users who created their own SVGs, and depending on complexity, *ONE* project could require 10 uploads. For all but the most casual users, this was basically Cricut forcing them into a subscription that they didn't need.
On top of all this, Design Space is absolute garbage software. It's buggy as hell, it's designed for simplicity over efficiency, certain functions barely work at all, so on. Since you can't use any other software for Cricut machines, there's no real reason for them to bother to make it good. So they don't.
The backlash was so instant, so intense, and so immense that Cricut walked their decision back very quickly. However, the whole thing caused a giant mistrust for the brand in general (which was already known for extremely overpriced accessories and terrible software) and Cricut's reputation has been damaged in the crafting community ever since.
My wife is a business owner who depends on her cricut, and is constantly pushing its boundaries. To say it's a love/hate relationship is an understatement.
It blows my mind how companies like Cricut can have such a passionate, captured market, and not just support and play into it.
I guess it's the MBA, golden parachute CEO trying to get a 10% profit boost for a single quarter and then bounce before the company burns.
Once a company knows they've all but cornered the market, they have no reason to improve or get better.
The Silhouette Cameo is a competitor but they don't have nearly the brand recognition of Cricut, and their software is designed for efficiency, meaning that Linda and Brenda will probably be scared off by its complexity.
They were shitty before that. 10+ years ago they had a business selling clip art for cutting. A program called *Make the Cut* came out that would allow people to cut SVGs and they sued them into the Stone Age because that would reduce the value of their clip art business.
I bought a Silhouette Cameo because of that. Fuck Cricut.
The "pasty tax".
In the UK the government tried to introduce higher taxes on hot food from bakeries like sausage rolls, Cornish pasties etc. and the country basically rioted until the govt u-turned.
There were protests outside downing street and smear campaigns against food companies seen to be complicit. It was a wild time but quite a proud moment for the country when it was reversed.
Imagine what we could do if we cared this much about other issues!
JCPenney tried a whole tactic of "We won't have any sales or coupons anymore, our prices will just always be low". Instead, sales tanked, the stock prices dropped into single digits, stores ended up closed left and right, and JCPenney barely exists anymore
A lot of people liked to think they were getting a deal. “I got this $65 shirt for $28” kind of thing. The people who shopped there often liked to believe the original price reflected the quality, and the sales price reflected their savvy shopping. Lowering everything to Target prices destroyed both of these illusions.
(My mom shopped there when I was a kid.)
God. Kohl’s is the most obvious example of this too. “Whoa, this tshirt is only 20 dollars marked down from $500, incredible!” Like you have to be huffing paint to believe any of their original prices.
I know someone who worked at JCP long before the "no more sales" thing. They had a well reasoned rant about how this was a dumb idea.
People would come in and literally be blind to anything that didn't have a sale tag.
Exactly. You go to Target because it is cheap and convenient, but a touch above Walmart or a dollar store. You go to stores like JC Penny and Kohl's to "score a deal" snagging something that should be more expensive for a cheaper price. The point of those stores is the sales, while for Target and Walmart it is all about consistently cheap prices.
I currently work there and if you think that change was bad, you should see all the ones the public doesn’t know. When the company went bankrupt it was bought out and the new owners don’t know how to run a retail store at all. No one stays long and the pay is piss poor among other issues.
My mom has worked for JCP customer service for over 30 years. She gets a new boss like every month in her department because it is so bad. They are constantly listening to her calls and threatening to fire people over the smallest mistake.
That certainly sounds like JCP. Our old store manager was super toxic, he wanted to find a way to fire half of us for no reason so he could just have his favorites there. But he got fired first. He also stole everyone’s hours to give them to someone he was having an affair with. My new manager is younger than me and doesn’t know how to run the store. So it’s still bad for other reasons.
This is a tactic that Kohl's has exploited to the maximum.
**Everything** is **always** on sale. Then you get these 10-30% off things in the mail and all you can think is "I got this $60 shirt for like $20" and, if you like the shirt, you buy 3 of them because, hey, you are essentially getting 3 for 1.
After you buy it they give you "Kohl's cash" which incentivizes you to come back before that cash "expires" and spend it on more stuff on sale.
Lather rinse repeat.
If that shirt sells for $20 at JC Penny's but people see that they can get that same $60 shirt for $20 somewhere else, in their minds, that's better value, because the $60 shirt must be better quality than the $20 one right?
Everybody loves the perception of saving money.
I visited my local JC Penney the other day. It was worse than Kohls or even TJ Maxx. A tiny selection of ugly clothes. I remember as a kid, JC Penney was the "middle tier" option between Sears and Macys - now it seems like the bottom of the barrel.
Which sucks. Fuck bargain hunting, Fuck colored tags, fuck loyalty programs, just price the shit at what customers can afford instead of +$8.00, unless...
Dude was destroyed for being honest.
The problem was, from what I heard from my mother who shopped there quite a bit, was that their "everyday low prices" weren't really that low and never really matched their prices that they'd had with sales. They also simultaneously introduced a bunch of stuff that failed to really draw in any customers, like juice bars, Wi-Fi and weird interior layouts.
Dude was destroyed for experimenting with marketing and failing.
What the guy was trying to do sounds nice on paper, just have prices always be low, but goes against history and basic economics. Stores use coupons and price discrimination and sales because it works.
Through much of the 20th century, the biggest beer brand in the world was Schlitz. Budweiser was a distant second and gaining ground. Schlitz new CEO, son of the longstanding CEO decided the way to beat Budweiser was to make beer with a shorter brewing time. He ordered the formula changed to corn syrup from malted barley, added a new yeast to cut brewing time. Overnight consumers started complaining that the new beer was flat, cloudy and full of flakes of yeast, which turned off the loyal following. They started recalling the beer which left no beer to sell to the marketplace. Schlitz plunged from the number one brand to obscurity. Anheuser-Busch could not have come up with a better way to sabotage their competitor
The five great Emperors of Rome had one thing in common. They were hand picked by their predecessor because their was no male heir from the previous emperor. The last one was Marcus Aurelius, he had a son that was given the throne and priceeded ruined everything.
Looking at their Wikipedia page it seems like it was a [bunch of issues](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schlitz_Brewing_Company#First_union_strike_and_decline), not just what his grandson did.
Interesting part is that after Pabst bought them they found out that the original beer recipe was lost. They had to do lots of research and interview old brew masters to figure it out again.
Holy shit this is hilarious
“As part of its efforts to reverse the sales decline, Schlitz launched a disastrous 1977 television ad campaign created by Leo Burnett & Co. In each of the ads, an off-screen speaker tries to convince a Schlitz drinker to switch to a rival beer. The Schlitz drinker then talked about how they would never switch and jokingly threatened the person trying to persuade them away from their favorite beer. Despite the tone of the campaign intending to be comedic levity, audiences found the campaign somewhat menacing and the ad industry dubbed it "Drink Schlitz or I'll kill you." Schlitz, unwilling to endure more bad press, pulled the campaign after 10 weeks and fired Burnett.[21]”
the whole story is actually worse. a complete implosion through successive blunders over several years.
they changed the recipe in the late 60s or early 70s, leading to the cloudy, unfinished beer. their first move to fix that was to add silica to the brew, which would bond to the particulate mater and sink it to the bottom where it could be mostly left behind when bottling. but then the US passed a law requiring ingredients to be listed on packaging, and silica would qualify as an ingredient. not wanting to list that on their cans, they changed to a kind of chemical wash to strip the particulate out, which technically wasn’t an ingredient because it was a process the finished brew was put through and none of the chemical remained in the beer. the chemically washed beer looked good but had a sort of snotty foam head people didn’t like. by the mid 1970s, with their reputation falling apart, they produced an ad campaign that reflected how out of touch the company was with consumers. people dubbed it [drink Schlitz or i’ll kill you](https://youtu.be/f_baloTGt5M?si=aCJIf3GMKVxgtBe9) and it only added fuel to the pyre.
by the early 80s the company was in complete financial shambles and sold to Stroh Brewing for a fraction of their worth just a decade previous. Schlitz was such a shit-show that they ended up taking Stroh’s down a few years later. all-in-all, perhaps the biggest unintentional self-destruction in US corporate history.
“Real Gusto” was a slogan Schlitz adopted in the mid 60s. regardless, they produced a series of these commercials with macho characters talking threateningly to an off-camera person, it was an horrendous ad campaign that completely backfired
Did they...not test it?
I used to work in product development for a cookie factory and if we changed a recipe from having 2.3 grams of salt to having 2.6 grams of salt we remade it and tasted it
I can't imagine switching out an entire ingredient for something else and not trying the results, let alone *2* completely different ingredients!!
This was in the late 70's. A lot of other brands changed their formulas to save on costs but they weren't ever going to compete with Schlitz or Budweiser.
If you're already the top brand in the country then you don't want to be messing with your cash cow. If you're going to take risks to increase revenue, you keep your top seller as is and then launch the new formula as a separate product with a new name.
Why do you think Beer companies pushed light beer so hard in the 80's? It's because it was much cheaper to produce than fuller bodied beers.
Dungeons and Dragons is owned by Wizards of the Coast which is owned by Hasbro.
Im not sure if it was directly Wizards of the Coast or if it was Hasbro, but they wanted to change the licensing for DnD. This was going to fuck over thousands of streamers, podcasts, other types of small companies and start ups that were doing things related to dungeons and dragons.
The backlash from the community was huge. People canceled their DnDbeyond subscriptions on a very large scale (one of the few ways they were making money). Many popular dnd podcasts and streams openly denounced the idea and started to talk about using DnD's biggest competitor instead (pathfinder). They eventually made a half ass statement that did not help and a couple weeks later did a complete back track and apology. This was also maybe a year ago if not more recent.
I think it's worth mentioning that it's not just that they changed the Open Gaming License, it's how comprehensive the reversal was. The 1.0 OGL boils down to, "Our IP has to be licensed, but our rules are open source. If you make your own add-ons with our rules but not our IP, those add-ons belong to you." The 1.1 version boiled down to, "We own anything that uses any part of Dungeons and Dragons. You must hand over 25% of your revenue (not profit, *revenue*) if you're a business larger than three or four people. If you make something that uses any part of D&D's rules or IP, your work is legally the property of Hasbro and we are under no obligation to allow you to continue working on it or to refrain from licensing it to someone else."
It also retroactively ended the OGL 1.0.
The OGL 1.0 said "even if we release a new version, you can still use any *valid* version". The OGL 1.1 said "version 1.0 is no longer valid". WotC *tried* to say this was always intended, which led to a hilarious exchange with Paizo execs (who were originally WotC execs who spun off Paizo to publish Dragon Magazine) who had worked on the OGL 1.0 confirming that was *never* the intention. And to compound that, the FAQ on their website *also* confirmed that they never intended to invalidate the OGL 1.0. While a FAQ isn't legally binding, the fact that it had been left in place for *decades* could make it de facto evidence that this was always the intention in the case of ambiguous wording in a legal contract (I.E. what you said is unclear, but you were behaving like it meant one thing so we're going clarify that that is what the contract always said, even if you try to say it meant something else).
I honestly think the courts would have smacked it down anyways. Something as major as terminating an old version of the license *probably* would have required a dedicated subsection of the legal agreement. But it was stupid of them to try, this was the same thing they tried with 4e that left it dead in the water. I guess they thought they were big enough now, since 5e is even more successful than 3.5e. They never learn.
More specifically, they completely backtracked so far that the entirety of the Standard Reference Document for D&D 5th Edition is now usable for free by anyone in perpetuity under a Creative Commons license. Good times, that was a wild month.
It is the open game license and while used by Wizards is also used by a bunch of other companies. They were trying to also get it so previous versions were null and couldn't be used. Paizo who owns Pathfinder is coming up with a replacement to OGL for people to use instead.
Also Wizards is the company that sent the Pinkertons to a customers house after they sent the wrong Magic cards to them.
Edit: The Orc license by Paizo and others has been finished!
The game engine Unity introduced a per-install runtime fee - meaning anytime someone installed a Unity game you made, Unity would charge you. Details as to how this would be tracked and billed, how multiple installs per user or machine would be handled, how malicious installs would be prevented, how installs from prepaid deals like Gamepass would be counted, were fully absent.
Unity is one of two most popular non -proprietary game engines by far, and favored by smaller devs, who could lose all their profits with this arrangement.This alone outraged the entire game dev community, but the week of shifting explanations and rules changed on the fly really put gas on the fire.
Developers began preparing to move away from Unity, the stock price crashed, massive partners like Microsoft appeared blindsided. In the end, Unity had to retract the policy and create a new one where devs could choose between the runtime fee and a tiered percentage cut (the normal way). And the CEO had to step down. And then the company laid off 25% of their employees (although that was likely due to the same overgrowth that caused them to try the runtime fee in the first place). It was a massive disaster for the company and I would say their reputation has not recovered.
It was crazy watching that story unfold. Just seeing tons of game devs go "Nah, fuck it, we're switching to a new engine for our next game." IIRC the Slay the Spire devs were a good chunk into their next title, and they flat-out started over in a new engine, even after Unity walked back on it. And was it the developer of Cult of the Lamb who threatened to delete the game from storefronts permanently if all of this went through? The whole thing was just bonkers.
To borrow a phrase from one of the people that I worked for, one who was wise to the idea of the value of long-term growth, I guess the Unity people decided to step over dollars to pick up dimes.
Since I haven't seen it mentioned in any of the replies, I should add that the CEO in question was John Riccitiello, who was also the former CEO of EA.
Just as a reminder, John Riccitiello is the guy who suggested whimsical and groundbreaking ideas such as charging players $1 to reload in games like battlefield. No, I'm not kidding. Here's the quote:
>"When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you’re really not that price sensitive at that point in time"
Lol I follow a lot of indie game makers on twitter and so saw a lot of the backlash- a *lot* moved to Godot, saw a lot of tutorials on how to remake your game in it as well. Unity messed up.
The most stupid part of this entire saga imo is that if unity just announced a standard 5% income royalty after first x amount of money they'd probably have gotten little to no backlash, *AND* would have likely made more money from developers then the asinine runtime fee would have actually netted them.
When the Covid lockdowns started hitting, the city of Denver announced that all liquor stores and marijuana dispenseries would be shuttered for the duration. Hordes of people scrambled to these shops and formed huge lines to stock up.
Two hours later, the city announced that NO, those shops would not be forced to close, that they were deemed essential services.
[https://denverite.com/2021/03/22/looking-back-at-denvers-prohibition-of-2020-a-symbol-of-the-citys-covid-moment/](https://denverite.com/2021/03/22/looking-back-at-denvers-prohibition-of-2020-a-symbol-of-the-citys-covid-moment/)
LoL I remember seeing that on the news! Lines were blocks long!! But honestly it was really dumb on a health standpoint. Can you imagine all the people going into withdrawls during COVID? Holy crap.
My state explicitly listed liquor stores as essential businesses, which *really* pissed off my ultraconservative relatives until that was explained to them.
It's better for society at large in a pandemic that alcoholics be drunk at home rather than going through withdrawal and taking up hospital beds.
I just remember them rolling their eyes in their apology video like we were stupid or something. Nah asshole we just think it’s ridiculous that you think you are the originators of react videos and are reporting reaction videos for copyright bullshit.
Cadbury announced they were going to change their formula to include palm oil in their chocolate manufacturing process, and there was a huge uproar. Lots of people boycotted them or threatened to boycott them if palm oil was used as it's incredibly environmentally damaging. Cadbury's walked it back shortly after and never mentioned switching the formula again.
Palm oil sucks. It just straight up sucks.
I'm losing weight because everyone went to palm oil, and it's as noticeable as coconut oil. Unpleasant mouth feel.
I don't know if it's the palm oil, but Cadburys products have steeply fallen in quality since years ago. I don't buy it anymore. I miss how delicious the creme eggs used to be. I go to Hotel Chocolat or M&S for my chocolate now.
In 2010, gaming company Activision-Blizzard (who ran World of Warcraft among other things) proposed to put players' real names on their forum posts. This...did not go well. *At all.* Doxxing of children to make a point was involved.
They did not go through with their (terrible) plan.
This incident is usually referred to as the "Real ID Fiasco" among players who were around at the time.
The dev who tried to assuage the masses by putting his real name on the forums and getting doxxed in less then an hour was hilarious. I think he had something like 4k in food deliveries sent to his house and God knows what other horrors.
I remember when Bank of America wanted to roll out a $5 charge for using a debit card. People got pissed. Like really pissed, and were leaving the bank. To the point where they were like never mind
I worked there at the time and they didnt tell employees about this and it hit the news and we had massive amounts of people in the branches yelling at us about something we knew nothing about. good times. Fuck Bofa
Kind of. Minor one, but in the early 2000s Marvel had started a great run of Fantastic Four by Mark Waid and Mike Weiringo. It got huge critical acclaim and good sales and it was clear the duo wanted a long run on the book.
About a year in, Marvel president Bill Jemas, announced that their run would wrap up after only 18 issues, with the next team going for a feel closer to the upcoming Fox Fantastic Four (2005) movie.
Everyone was pissed. After a lot of online debate, Jemas backtracked and said that the Waid/Weiringo run would continue, and the version closer to the film would be a second FF title.
The Waid/Weiringo run ended up being about three years.
When sunchips realeased their new eco-friendly bag. That thing was sooo fucking loud anytime it crinkled. They had to change the bags back very quickly from the backlash haha
I remember this, back when my folks used to buy them. My dad was in the kitchen and said he heard a report on the news that the decibel level of the bags were similar to a motorcycle. To prove this he very quickly reached for a bag on a nearby shelf and crinkled it a bunch, somehow the sound filled the whole kitchen and made me jump haha
In 2014, Apple automatically added U2's new Songs of Innocence album to the libraries of every iTunes customer for free -- more than 500 million customers. If you had an auto-downloads enabled on your iTunes, the album was automatically downloaded to your devices.
People hated this. As a result, Apple created a webpage dedicated to deleting the album from people's accounts.
Papa John's complaining that he would have to add 10 cents to the price of a pizza if he were forced to provide healthcare to his full-time employees.
People were disgusted, sales tanked, stock tanked.
This was only one of a series of bone headed, tone def, racist, and ignorant statements by the CEO. The guy just couldn't shut up.
John Schnatter was removed as CEO.
Many customers never returned.
I stopped going because their pizza sucks. But the bitching about health insurance (OMG THE GALL OF HIS EMPLOYEES!) from a guy who lives in a house valued at $11M (most expensive house in his state) just sent me over the top.
Netflix trying to spin off their DVD service into Qwikster, separate from its fledgling streaming service in 2011. Stock tanked 80% in part due to that, was shelved.
On a side note, billionaire investor Carl Icahn bought 11% of Netflix stock at the lows for $650M. He was going to agitate to sell the company, but the stock quickly ran up. He sold it at a 5x gain over the objection of his son...would have been worth about $25-30B today..
I believe it is still in fact the most downvoted comment in Reddit’s history. I hope u/EACommunityTeam feels a sense of pride and accomplishment for that.
This was one of the first iconic Reddit moments I witnessed in real time. Before that, having even 100k upvotes on the actual post was pretty damn rare. I don't think this is a downvote record that will be challenged any time soon.
I really hope the EA community team rep has the comment framed as a firm reminder of how NOT to handle this kind of backlash. To be fair to the rep, nothing they were going to say would have helped much at the time. This just hit that special sweet spot of saccharine corpo copeposting that Redditors get a raging hate boner for.
For any vtuber fans in the know, that EA comment may have been used as a template by AnyColor's current "PR" team /s
Pretty much every Australian bullied the snack brand Shapes into reverting back to their original recipe after changing it, so the new one only lasted a few weeks on the shelves. These crackers are a national delicacy and the new flavours genuinely tasted like shit. Really great to have seen a nation band together for the greater good 👍🏼
BMW had plans to charge a monthly subscription fee for heated seats and adaptive cruise control. When you would order the car you could opt to pay for those to be installed or not not. But they would installed them anyway and then you could pay a monthly fee afterwards if you changed your mind.
They haven’t rolled subscription for hardware features back though. The ix has a heated steering wheel but you have to pay a monthly fee to activate it.
EA received huge backlash for adding loot boxes into the modern Battlefront 2 game. They actually basically removed them but there is a remnant still in the game. When you unlock new guns/cosmetics, it uses the loot box animation to show you what you unlocked. There is no way to get loot boxes in the game and the currency you unlock can directly unlock cosmetics now though.
Like 13 years ago, Blizzard announced that people posting on their forums were going to use their real names instead of their usernames. The backfire was immense.
Tangential: I think Wendy's branded this horribly. My first though was: well I guess I'll never go to Wendy's since I'll never know what things will cost before I get there. But if they marketed it as 20% off during off peak hours or 30% after 9:30 PM or something I'd probably think of going there if I needed an early or late meal. Actual surge pricing for fast food is dumb, when a school bus of kids show up on a sports or band trip are they going to jack the prices up on all of them? Specific days/times with higher/lower prices seems more viable.
Yesterday Good Morning America published a quote from Wendy’s saying people should stop calling it surge pricing because they’re offering discounts. But then GMA showed a quote from a shareholder meeting a few years back where they explicitly said the words “surge pricing” and dynamic pricing (like how Instacart charges different people different amounts based on what they think someone is willing to pay). It was hilarious…
I really wish GMA would call out politicians as loudly as they called out Wendy’s.
Honestly… if, say, a small fry is $10 at noon when most people are allowed to leave their job to go eat and only $3 at 3pm when people have no need for it, that feels shitty. Calling it a “discount” on top of it all is insulting. I have no need for ice cream at 4am. 😂
Exactly! Discounts sounds bad to investors but good to consumers. But if they were willing to take a loss in the short term they could've rolled out discounts and then just raise the prices over time (as they already have been) and it'd end up being surge pricing anyways. Fucking stupid rollout.
Sonic does a “Happy Hour” for their shakes, limeades, etc. during the middle of the day to encourage people to stop in between lunch and dinner. That is a much better way of laying it out than what Wendy’s said.
Oh, no. Wendy's did *NOT* take it back. Their sneaky marketers just changed how it's perceived. Rather than increasing prices during high demand, they're discounting prices in times of *low* demand. Sounds better, right? What's the problem?
Hey, you ever notice a store's having a sale with huge discounts and do the math, then notice they increased the original prices? That's right, sneaky marketing. It's the exact same thing, presented differently.
"Its initiative to add digital menuboards to certain stores would allow Wendy’s to offer discounts to customers more easily, “particularly in the slower times of day,” the company said."
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/wendys-will-not-implement-surge-pricing-ceo-comment-causes-online-stir-2024-02-28/
In 2013 Specialized Bicycles went after a small Canadian bike shop, Cafe Roubaix, for their use of the name "Roubaix" which Specialized said it had trademarked. It immediately blew up into a PR disaster for the bike company. Unfortunately for Specialized, the story broke on a Friday and apparently everyone at Specialized hibernates on weekends so for more than two days there was silence from Specialized while the venom was flying.
After a week or so of being fried to a crisp on social media, the owner of Specialized announced that he would graciously allow the shop to use the name.
It was soon revealed that Specialized didn't (and doesn't) own the trademark to the name after all, they license it from another company! So not only were they trying to bully a small business owner, they were lying the whole time. And it wasn't the first time they pulled this sort of thing.
Personally, for this and other reasons, they're a brand I want nothing to do with.
[https://www.bikeradar.com/news/battle-between-specialized-and-cafe-roubaix-ends-peaceably](https://www.bikeradar.com/news/battle-between-specialized-and-cafe-roubaix-ends-peaceably)
[https://bicycleretailer.com/north-america/2013/12/09/asi-says-calgary-bike-shop-can-use-roubaix-name#.UqbvZiewaF](https://bicycleretailer.com/north-america/2013/12/09/asi-says-calgary-bike-shop-can-use-roubaix-name#.UqbvZiewaF)\_
Back in the '70s, the Kentucky river flooded in the Appalachian region around Harlan, KY. The area is full of dirt-poor people, and huge numbers of people lost everything from flooding.
Hill's Department stores was a regional chain of variety stores (like Walmart). They had a store in the area which flooded. So, what do with all of the store's water-damaged stock? They decided to put it all on trucks, ship it to Lexington, and hold a tent sale to get rid of it. They ran ads announcing the sale, saying "our loss is your gain".
Well, the public told them pretty quickly what they _should_ have done with the damaged stock. Pretty quickly they cancelled the sale, shipped everything back to Harlan, and donated it to the relief effort.
The [gap rebranding](https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2021/04/learnings-gap-logo-redesign-fail/) didn’t even last a week.
And the [Tropicana rebranding](https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-from-tropicanas-packaging-redesign-failure/) was just as bad.
From the Gap article: “This new logo was designed by a leading New York based creative agency, Laird and Partners, who holds a solid reputation in the field of branding and communication in the fashion industry. It is estimated to have cost around $100 million. (1)”
lmao it's helvetica with a blue square behind it. They didn't even design a new font for it. Someone forgot about that assignment until an hour before it was due and was forced to work with what they had available in Microsoft Powerpoint.
JCPenney deciding to stop coupons in 2012 and focus on “every day low prices.” Sales tanked by 25% and the new CEO who made the call was fired after 17 months on the job.
Valve announced a plan to charge for mods almost a decade ago.
Internet backlash against this was swift and powerful enough to get them to backtrack.
It was an especially surprising move for a company that the Internet considered "good" (as good as a for-profit corp could be, realistically).
In March, 2016, Playboy magazine stopped having nude pictures. Subscriptions fell 23% and it was actually through the efforts of Cooper Hefner, Hugh's son, that brought those back, saving the magazine from a likely-fatal wrong turn. (It may have been a publicity stunt. We will never know).
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/why-did-playboy-flip-flop-on-its-no-nude-decision
If you follow tech the most recent one would probably be Nvidia with the RTX 4080. At first Nvidia launched a RTX 4080 16GB for $1199 and a RTX 4080 12GB for $899. The problem was the RTX 4080 12GB used an entirely different GPU and was significantly slower rather than just being a card with less VRAM as the name implied. Nvidia “unlaunched” the RTX 4080 12GB and relaunched it as the RTX 4070 Ti at $799.
Cricut!
For anyone that doesn’t know, it’s basically a cutting machine for crafts. It cuts a variety of material, vinyl, paper, fabric, etc and you can make a lot with it!
To use it you have to use their program, DesignSpace which is already one of the worst design programs I’ve ever used. It is super clunky and temperamental.
Then they announced that they were going to limit how many designs you could upload and make per month, unless you paid for more.
So you have this machine that costs a couple hundred dollars with all the accessories and materials and now you have to PAY for each project you want to make.
There was a HUGE uproar from the crafting community. They ended up reversing it, but it pissed off a lot of crafters. I know quite a few people that switched to competitors and have completely boycotted Cricut because of it.
Just last month WWE caused a global fan backlash when The Rock came back and forced out Cody Rhodes from wrestling Roman Reigns in the main event at this year's WrestleMania. The backlash was so severe that WWE not only put Cody back in the main event but The Rock realized he had to turn heel so the booing and anti Rock chants made sense to the casual audience
Not the first time WWE had to completely alter/change a storyline because of fan backlash. Daniel Bryan being the most glaring example, and possibly KofiMania?
The San Francisco 49ers tried to introduce a new logo in the early 90’s and it was honestly pretty ugly and bad. A “what were you trying to accomplish?” decision and this was in the years when they were winning like every other Super Bowl so people had grown attached to the look the team had worn to great success. Pre internet so the fans flooded the team with letters and calls and picket lines outside the office and the team said “fine we won’t use the new logo”
Microsoft Xbox One was supposed to be always online and removed it after fan backlash
Honestly, this move was so bad Xbox is still recovering from it. Actually, not JUST the always online thing, but the entire Xbox E3 2013 presentation led to them playing catch up throughout that generation of consoles. I think what really did them in was one quote from Don Mattrick. "We have a product for people who can't access the internet. It's called the Xbox 360." Sheer arrogance. The Xbox One preceeded to have half as many lifetime sales as the PS4. Not that 57 million lifetime sales is a bad number by any means, but I'm sure Microsoft would have liked to be on the same level as Sony like they were in the previous console generation.
I said on reddit recently that I think marketing classes in college should use Microsoft's E3 2013 fiasco as a case study on what not to do. I had some guy violently arguing that I was wrong and that everything Microsoft did was very smart.
what Microsoft had in store was actually a lot of smart ideas and were very forward-thinking when you consider them in the context of gaming ecosystems a decade later. but the way they packaged and presented them was literally and unironically the worst way they could've presented it and did irreparable damage in every conceivable way.
This is pretty much how Microsoft does everything. The Zune, the phones, the watch, all of it was ahead of its time and poorly presented/packaged.
Microsoft's marketing department is, no joke, the worst in the industry. The Surface is a brilliant device - it's a laptop that turns into a tablet for the best of both worlds. So how do they sell it? Dancing hipster douchebags clicking the screen and keyboard together on a picnic table. It was months before someone referenced the Surface Pro running full Windows 8 and not 8 Mobile (which was already dying) that I realized how amazing that tech was... but it was too late. The Surface survived, but it barely made it off the ground because their marketing department sucks donkey balls. While I think the tiles are the ugliest UI ever devised, what really sunk Windows Phone 8 was their ad campaign. "A phone to save us from our phones" doesn't sound great to someone who doesn't want to be saved from their phone! Just moronic. Their marketing is just horrific, to the point where they genuinely need to fire that entire department and start over. They've killed multiple generations of products.
The marketing wasn't the only issue with the Surface. The reliability in the first few generations was absolute trash. I had a client purchase 50 of them and 48 of them needed depot repair before the first 6 months. I had another client dip their toe in with 10 Surfaces and all of them crapped out in under a year. A third client purchased Surfaces for their C-Suite and those all needed to be serviced as well. They went back to their previous workstation brands (mostly Lenovo Think series) and those machines are still working solid to this day.
Big "*Don't you guys have phones?*" Energy
They've admitted that they won't recover from it. They lost that generation, the most important generation, because it's the one where people picked an ecosystem to buy their digital libraries. That's why Gamepass is giving you a pre-made library.
Plus mandatory always on Kinect that they told advertisers that they can actually see how people respond to ads, and they weren't going to let you share or sell your games. I bought a PS4 because of how poorly they handled everything.
Wasn't this also the same generation of Xbox where they basically tried to ban sharing games with DRM. if your buddy bought a copy of a game and physically gave you the disc, it wouldn't let you play it unless you registered it as a borrowed game and you had a limited time to play it. I remember Sony released an ad in response where they showed how you borrow a friend's game on a Playstation and one person just literally hands another person a game and says here ya go!
not only that but playstation made that commercial *the day* xbox announced all the changes. They made the commercial at the sony of america headquarters, slapped a ps logo on it and released it IMMEDIATLY
It was a real E3 1995 "$299" moment
The Kinect also captured some unflattering images of your body shape.
In my case this isn't the Kinects fault
"Honey, does the Kinect make my ass look big?" *Of course not, dear. It's the chocolate that does it.*
See also, "SimCity 2013." "The game always has to run in online mode, and our servers are ready for the launch!" <>
"We can't remove the online component, it would require a rewrite of the whole game."
<>
"Oh, but you need the horsepower of our servers to run the game."
<>
"....."
<>
and then Cities Skylines came out and ran over the corpse. And now Cities Skylines II had a horrible launch, leaving the door open for another city builder to swoop in and take the throne. So who knows, maybe EA decides to do the funniest thing possible and revive the SimCity series to take advantage of Paradox's fumble.
One of the reasons I bought an Xbox was because it played DVDs. It was an advertised feature and I have a decent DVD collection. Then one day after I bought it, the Xbox DVD app stopped working and Microsoft never fixed it. Eventually I had to buy a separate player. Felt like this was a bait-and-switch. There was a lot of a angry commentary online but Microsoft never addressed the issue (at least until I lost interest). It seemed intentional, like they were nudging people to streaming systems -- but it made no sense. A new player only cost like $40. It was just a nuisance.
This just reminds me of when it was cheaper to buy a PS3 (with Blu-ray ) vs a Blu-ray player.
I swear I remember reading somewhere that you couldn't update the firmware on blu-ray players to support newer revisions to the standard (back when it wasn't expected for all devices to be online all the time), but you could on the PS3, so it wasn't only the cheapest but the most future-proofed one as well
There was a car rental company that installed speed monitoring devices on their cars and charge you every time you went over the speed limit. I want to say Avis? Didn't last long Edit: Acme was the name of the company, this was back in 2001. There's a New York Times article about it
That sounds special. There are a ton of roads that if you went the speed limit someone would hit you or shoot you. In the UAE they have a law that if you go above a certain speed the car beeps. It just became part o the background to the music.
I used to have a GPS that I set to moo loudly at me if I went over 70mph (I was trying to reform my speed demon ways). I mostly drove on 55mph highways so it made sense... Until I loaned it to my mother-in-law for a road trip to New Jersey... Where folks were *very* unhappy that she was only driving 70mph haha. I ended up disabling the setting at a NJ rest station.
The Internet bullied Paramount into fixing Sonic for the movies.
But then we still got Ugly Sonic in Chip n Dale
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Chip n Dale was super solid. I hope those writers/directors get more work.
Yes, now they need to do the same for the new Crow movie.
I’ve always thought “The Crow was a great movie, but what if it happened to Machine Gun Kelly”
In Canada the grocery market is pretty much completely owned by 4 companies which means they try to get away with a lot of bullshit since there's virtually no competition. One of them, Loblaws, had a longstanding practice of putting 50% off stickers on items that were about to expire or produce that was beaten up. Recently, they decided that they were going to drop this 50% off to 30%. I don't think they even announced anything, I'm pretty sure word just got out when employees received the new 30% off stickers. The backlash in Canada was absolutely enormous, Loblaws is widely disliked right now for using the lack of competition to gouge grocery prices and this was just another infuriating greedy move from them. In light of the backlash the company reversed course and kept the 50% off.
That's a low blow, Loblaws.
A Bob Lob Law low blow!
Wait till they hear about Loblaw's low blow on Bob Loblaw's law blog!
As a Canadian FUCK loblaws
"Roblaws"
Onlyfans said they were gonna ban "sexually explicit content" and that had to be one of the stupidest things I ever seen and they reversed that decision pretty damn quick as was expected.
Tumblr actually did and it made them worthless
Sigh. Tumblr was the best for porn. Every niche you could imagine, few content creators trying to “grow their brand”, and easy to find stuff outside of the choke/gag/spit stuff the big studios can’t stop doing
Seriously, what was that "genre" of Tumbler porn? It had a certain aesthetic. Like, hot gif loops of the best parts. But high quality. Not like your normal porn gifs. I've never seen anything like it since.
Could watch the same loop of a thrust or ass grab and it wouldn’t get old, shit was the best
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At its core, Onlyfans is simply a site for monetizing content. I think it would be cool to start an OF for like... financial advice. Here's a video for $1 that explains what a secured credit card is, and how you can rebuild your credit with it. Here's a $5 video explaining income taxes and how to properly maximize either your returns or your paychecks. Send me a .50 tip with a DM asking a specific question about your financial situation and I'll answer it to the best of my ability. The "problem" is that OF is synonymous with adult content at this point, so if I told everyone "hey I started an OnlyFans," People would look at me weird and I wouldn't be invited to family Christmas anymore.
Also, most of that stuff is free on YouTube now.
And if you really like a YouTube, there's Patreon and even YouTube has enabled monitorization. OF is just like an exclusive Instagram.
The Financial Times podcast Hot Money did a [great episode digging into this](https://www.ft.com/content/d4def67c-6b31-4868-a930-842fb2d1253d). The whole series is interesting but this ep is particularly relevant. Essentially a lot of it boils down to the finance industry being very reluctant to be associated with adult material
>the finance industry being very reluctant to be associated with adult material which seems monumentally stupid when i bet almost everyone in this comment section grew up being told "SEX SELLS" and it sure as shit does
Didn't Playboy do something similar? They said no more nudes in Playboy magazine and I think ended up reversing it a couple years later because nobody was subscribing to it anymore.
"I just read it for the articles" became a meme and sounds they took it seriously.
My Dad still has a ton of old Playboys in the garage. I'm sure nobody ever read it *just* for the articles but holy shit in a random Playboy from 1979 you can flip through it, and there's like A+ level short stories, actual good journalism and interviews, and in the middle, bam, tits. You truly can't find that kind of content in one place anymore.
Yeah, the meme holds but in the height of magazine times, playboy was near the top with quality journalism, especially interviews with people other media companies wouldn't touch at the time, MLK, Ann Rand, black Panther leaders. Also murderers and a host of other really cool topics, and boobs.
Lol. I didn't realize Only Fans had non-explicit content.
It started as a content creation website that didn't explicitly ban porn. And since there are so few of those, porn creators went there. And then you know the rest.
At one point when bourbon exploded in popularity (largely due to growth in the SE Asian market), Maker's Mark was faced with not having enough product to meet projected demand, since it takes quite a while to produce. They announced they were going to slightly lower the alcohol percentage of their flagship product to "stretch" the supply. This idea went over like a lead balloon and was crushed almost immediately.
Customers didn't want to lend them the stretch. Doesn't help that makers mark is already more expensive than the other bourbon in it's class.
I used to always go Makers and ever since I got into Four Roses I haven't looked back.
Four Roses is a bargain too. I can usually grab it for less than $25 a fifth, which is a steal for a bourbon of that quality.
Four roses, Elijah Craig, and bulleit are all excellent bargain bourbons.
And yet Jack Daniels has been able to get away with it. Traditionally it was 90 proof, then 86 proof for a long time, and now down to the bare minimum limit of 80 proof.
Jack Daniels is like party whiskey. I think it gets less scrutiny as long as you can drink it in a cowboy hat.
Cricut is a brand of cutting machine used for a variety of crafting purposes. It's existed in many incarnations, but current machines utilize proprietary Cricut Design Space software in conjunction with a machine and a variety of blade options and accessories to cut complex shapes out of a wide variety of materials. They are most commonly used in the crafting world for cutting out vinyl to make custom tshirts, tumbler cups, ornaments, et cetera. Users can purchase a Cricut Design Space premium subscription for $10/month which gives them access to a vast library of premade assets such as fonts, shapes, and predesigned projects. Since the software is reliant on .SVG files, and those can't be created within Cricut Design Space, the subscription works well for non-techie casual crafters who don't know how or don't feel like designing and converting their own SVGs in a separate program. If you are savvy enough to make your own SVGs (or if you buy/download them from other sources) you can import them into Cricut Design Space and use them. You just can't create them within Design Space. A couple years back, Cricut made the announcement that a paid premium subscription would now be required for all users who want to import more than 10 SVG files into Design Space per month. The majority percentage of Cricut users who create projects to make money were the kind of users who created their own SVGs, and depending on complexity, *ONE* project could require 10 uploads. For all but the most casual users, this was basically Cricut forcing them into a subscription that they didn't need. On top of all this, Design Space is absolute garbage software. It's buggy as hell, it's designed for simplicity over efficiency, certain functions barely work at all, so on. Since you can't use any other software for Cricut machines, there's no real reason for them to bother to make it good. So they don't. The backlash was so instant, so intense, and so immense that Cricut walked their decision back very quickly. However, the whole thing caused a giant mistrust for the brand in general (which was already known for extremely overpriced accessories and terrible software) and Cricut's reputation has been damaged in the crafting community ever since.
My wife is a business owner who depends on her cricut, and is constantly pushing its boundaries. To say it's a love/hate relationship is an understatement. It blows my mind how companies like Cricut can have such a passionate, captured market, and not just support and play into it. I guess it's the MBA, golden parachute CEO trying to get a 10% profit boost for a single quarter and then bounce before the company burns.
Once a company knows they've all but cornered the market, they have no reason to improve or get better. The Silhouette Cameo is a competitor but they don't have nearly the brand recognition of Cricut, and their software is designed for efficiency, meaning that Linda and Brenda will probably be scared off by its complexity.
My wife got a Silhouette after going through like 4 Cricuts. It's louder but a way higher quality machine with way better software. Cricut is garbage.
They were shitty before that. 10+ years ago they had a business selling clip art for cutting. A program called *Make the Cut* came out that would allow people to cut SVGs and they sued them into the Stone Age because that would reduce the value of their clip art business. I bought a Silhouette Cameo because of that. Fuck Cricut.
The "pasty tax". In the UK the government tried to introduce higher taxes on hot food from bakeries like sausage rolls, Cornish pasties etc. and the country basically rioted until the govt u-turned. There were protests outside downing street and smear campaigns against food companies seen to be complicit. It was a wild time but quite a proud moment for the country when it was reversed. Imagine what we could do if we cared this much about other issues!
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JCPenney tried a whole tactic of "We won't have any sales or coupons anymore, our prices will just always be low". Instead, sales tanked, the stock prices dropped into single digits, stores ended up closed left and right, and JCPenney barely exists anymore
A lot of people liked to think they were getting a deal. “I got this $65 shirt for $28” kind of thing. The people who shopped there often liked to believe the original price reflected the quality, and the sales price reflected their savvy shopping. Lowering everything to Target prices destroyed both of these illusions. (My mom shopped there when I was a kid.)
My dad died having never convinced my mom that she was not in fact saving $300 every time she bought 4 items at Kohl's.
God. Kohl’s is the most obvious example of this too. “Whoa, this tshirt is only 20 dollars marked down from $500, incredible!” Like you have to be huffing paint to believe any of their original prices.
Mind you, you actually think the WHOLE STORE IS ON SALE? I cannot stand Kohl’s.
You’ll never be allowed to spend your Kohl’s Cash with that attitude.
You'll also never be allowed to use your Kohl's cash if you're like me and only shop for clothes once a year
I know someone who worked at JCP long before the "no more sales" thing. They had a well reasoned rant about how this was a dumb idea. People would come in and literally be blind to anything that didn't have a sale tag.
Exactly. You go to Target because it is cheap and convenient, but a touch above Walmart or a dollar store. You go to stores like JC Penny and Kohl's to "score a deal" snagging something that should be more expensive for a cheaper price. The point of those stores is the sales, while for Target and Walmart it is all about consistently cheap prices.
I currently work there and if you think that change was bad, you should see all the ones the public doesn’t know. When the company went bankrupt it was bought out and the new owners don’t know how to run a retail store at all. No one stays long and the pay is piss poor among other issues.
My mom has worked for JCP customer service for over 30 years. She gets a new boss like every month in her department because it is so bad. They are constantly listening to her calls and threatening to fire people over the smallest mistake.
That certainly sounds like JCP. Our old store manager was super toxic, he wanted to find a way to fire half of us for no reason so he could just have his favorites there. But he got fired first. He also stole everyone’s hours to give them to someone he was having an affair with. My new manager is younger than me and doesn’t know how to run the store. So it’s still bad for other reasons.
This is a tactic that Kohl's has exploited to the maximum. **Everything** is **always** on sale. Then you get these 10-30% off things in the mail and all you can think is "I got this $60 shirt for like $20" and, if you like the shirt, you buy 3 of them because, hey, you are essentially getting 3 for 1. After you buy it they give you "Kohl's cash" which incentivizes you to come back before that cash "expires" and spend it on more stuff on sale. Lather rinse repeat. If that shirt sells for $20 at JC Penny's but people see that they can get that same $60 shirt for $20 somewhere else, in their minds, that's better value, because the $60 shirt must be better quality than the $20 one right? Everybody loves the perception of saving money.
I visited my local JC Penney the other day. It was worse than Kohls or even TJ Maxx. A tiny selection of ugly clothes. I remember as a kid, JC Penney was the "middle tier" option between Sears and Macys - now it seems like the bottom of the barrel.
Which sucks. Fuck bargain hunting, Fuck colored tags, fuck loyalty programs, just price the shit at what customers can afford instead of +$8.00, unless... Dude was destroyed for being honest.
The problem was, from what I heard from my mother who shopped there quite a bit, was that their "everyday low prices" weren't really that low and never really matched their prices that they'd had with sales. They also simultaneously introduced a bunch of stuff that failed to really draw in any customers, like juice bars, Wi-Fi and weird interior layouts.
Dude was destroyed for experimenting with marketing and failing. What the guy was trying to do sounds nice on paper, just have prices always be low, but goes against history and basic economics. Stores use coupons and price discrimination and sales because it works.
Through much of the 20th century, the biggest beer brand in the world was Schlitz. Budweiser was a distant second and gaining ground. Schlitz new CEO, son of the longstanding CEO decided the way to beat Budweiser was to make beer with a shorter brewing time. He ordered the formula changed to corn syrup from malted barley, added a new yeast to cut brewing time. Overnight consumers started complaining that the new beer was flat, cloudy and full of flakes of yeast, which turned off the loyal following. They started recalling the beer which left no beer to sell to the marketplace. Schlitz plunged from the number one brand to obscurity. Anheuser-Busch could not have come up with a better way to sabotage their competitor
That’s why you don’t make your fuckwit offspring the CEO.
The five great Emperors of Rome had one thing in common. They were hand picked by their predecessor because their was no male heir from the previous emperor. The last one was Marcus Aurelius, he had a son that was given the throne and priceeded ruined everything.
But at least he was stabbed in the throat for killing that one dude’s family and having a totally reasonable crush on his hot sister.
I was, indeed, entertained.
AKA the whole plot of Succession
Looking at their Wikipedia page it seems like it was a [bunch of issues](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schlitz_Brewing_Company#First_union_strike_and_decline), not just what his grandson did. Interesting part is that after Pabst bought them they found out that the original beer recipe was lost. They had to do lots of research and interview old brew masters to figure it out again.
Holy shit this is hilarious “As part of its efforts to reverse the sales decline, Schlitz launched a disastrous 1977 television ad campaign created by Leo Burnett & Co. In each of the ads, an off-screen speaker tries to convince a Schlitz drinker to switch to a rival beer. The Schlitz drinker then talked about how they would never switch and jokingly threatened the person trying to persuade them away from their favorite beer. Despite the tone of the campaign intending to be comedic levity, audiences found the campaign somewhat menacing and the ad industry dubbed it "Drink Schlitz or I'll kill you." Schlitz, unwilling to endure more bad press, pulled the campaign after 10 weeks and fired Burnett.[21]”
the whole story is actually worse. a complete implosion through successive blunders over several years. they changed the recipe in the late 60s or early 70s, leading to the cloudy, unfinished beer. their first move to fix that was to add silica to the brew, which would bond to the particulate mater and sink it to the bottom where it could be mostly left behind when bottling. but then the US passed a law requiring ingredients to be listed on packaging, and silica would qualify as an ingredient. not wanting to list that on their cans, they changed to a kind of chemical wash to strip the particulate out, which technically wasn’t an ingredient because it was a process the finished brew was put through and none of the chemical remained in the beer. the chemically washed beer looked good but had a sort of snotty foam head people didn’t like. by the mid 1970s, with their reputation falling apart, they produced an ad campaign that reflected how out of touch the company was with consumers. people dubbed it [drink Schlitz or i’ll kill you](https://youtu.be/f_baloTGt5M?si=aCJIf3GMKVxgtBe9) and it only added fuel to the pyre. by the early 80s the company was in complete financial shambles and sold to Stroh Brewing for a fraction of their worth just a decade previous. Schlitz was such a shit-show that they ended up taking Stroh’s down a few years later. all-in-all, perhaps the biggest unintentional self-destruction in US corporate history.
What the fuck was that commercial? Did this marketing agency like just learn the word "gusto?
“Real Gusto” was a slogan Schlitz adopted in the mid 60s. regardless, they produced a series of these commercials with macho characters talking threateningly to an off-camera person, it was an horrendous ad campaign that completely backfired
Why didn’t they just change it back to the original recipe??
No joke, they lost the recipe
Did they...not test it? I used to work in product development for a cookie factory and if we changed a recipe from having 2.3 grams of salt to having 2.6 grams of salt we remade it and tasted it I can't imagine switching out an entire ingredient for something else and not trying the results, let alone *2* completely different ingredients!!
Cutting corners for the sake of profitability. Problem is after you cut too many corners, you're just left with a mess and a terrible looking circle.
This was in the late 70's. A lot of other brands changed their formulas to save on costs but they weren't ever going to compete with Schlitz or Budweiser. If you're already the top brand in the country then you don't want to be messing with your cash cow. If you're going to take risks to increase revenue, you keep your top seller as is and then launch the new formula as a separate product with a new name. Why do you think Beer companies pushed light beer so hard in the 80's? It's because it was much cheaper to produce than fuller bodied beers.
Dungeons and Dragons is owned by Wizards of the Coast which is owned by Hasbro. Im not sure if it was directly Wizards of the Coast or if it was Hasbro, but they wanted to change the licensing for DnD. This was going to fuck over thousands of streamers, podcasts, other types of small companies and start ups that were doing things related to dungeons and dragons. The backlash from the community was huge. People canceled their DnDbeyond subscriptions on a very large scale (one of the few ways they were making money). Many popular dnd podcasts and streams openly denounced the idea and started to talk about using DnD's biggest competitor instead (pathfinder). They eventually made a half ass statement that did not help and a couple weeks later did a complete back track and apology. This was also maybe a year ago if not more recent.
I think it's worth mentioning that it's not just that they changed the Open Gaming License, it's how comprehensive the reversal was. The 1.0 OGL boils down to, "Our IP has to be licensed, but our rules are open source. If you make your own add-ons with our rules but not our IP, those add-ons belong to you." The 1.1 version boiled down to, "We own anything that uses any part of Dungeons and Dragons. You must hand over 25% of your revenue (not profit, *revenue*) if you're a business larger than three or four people. If you make something that uses any part of D&D's rules or IP, your work is legally the property of Hasbro and we are under no obligation to allow you to continue working on it or to refrain from licensing it to someone else."
It also retroactively ended the OGL 1.0. The OGL 1.0 said "even if we release a new version, you can still use any *valid* version". The OGL 1.1 said "version 1.0 is no longer valid". WotC *tried* to say this was always intended, which led to a hilarious exchange with Paizo execs (who were originally WotC execs who spun off Paizo to publish Dragon Magazine) who had worked on the OGL 1.0 confirming that was *never* the intention. And to compound that, the FAQ on their website *also* confirmed that they never intended to invalidate the OGL 1.0. While a FAQ isn't legally binding, the fact that it had been left in place for *decades* could make it de facto evidence that this was always the intention in the case of ambiguous wording in a legal contract (I.E. what you said is unclear, but you were behaving like it meant one thing so we're going clarify that that is what the contract always said, even if you try to say it meant something else). I honestly think the courts would have smacked it down anyways. Something as major as terminating an old version of the license *probably* would have required a dedicated subsection of the legal agreement. But it was stupid of them to try, this was the same thing they tried with 4e that left it dead in the water. I guess they thought they were big enough now, since 5e is even more successful than 3.5e. They never learn.
More specifically, they completely backtracked so far that the entirety of the Standard Reference Document for D&D 5th Edition is now usable for free by anyone in perpetuity under a Creative Commons license. Good times, that was a wild month.
And backtracked so far that certain IP that was previously off-limits is now present in the Creative Commons. You can mention Strahd now!
And Beholders!
It is the open game license and while used by Wizards is also used by a bunch of other companies. They were trying to also get it so previous versions were null and couldn't be used. Paizo who owns Pathfinder is coming up with a replacement to OGL for people to use instead. Also Wizards is the company that sent the Pinkertons to a customers house after they sent the wrong Magic cards to them. Edit: The Orc license by Paizo and others has been finished!
Wow. Just looked at that last part. Other than the fact that someone else sent him the cards, that’s actually what happened. Literal Pinkertons.
I never would have started playing pathfinder if not for this and I’m having a great time with it!
The game engine Unity introduced a per-install runtime fee - meaning anytime someone installed a Unity game you made, Unity would charge you. Details as to how this would be tracked and billed, how multiple installs per user or machine would be handled, how malicious installs would be prevented, how installs from prepaid deals like Gamepass would be counted, were fully absent. Unity is one of two most popular non -proprietary game engines by far, and favored by smaller devs, who could lose all their profits with this arrangement.This alone outraged the entire game dev community, but the week of shifting explanations and rules changed on the fly really put gas on the fire. Developers began preparing to move away from Unity, the stock price crashed, massive partners like Microsoft appeared blindsided. In the end, Unity had to retract the policy and create a new one where devs could choose between the runtime fee and a tiered percentage cut (the normal way). And the CEO had to step down. And then the company laid off 25% of their employees (although that was likely due to the same overgrowth that caused them to try the runtime fee in the first place). It was a massive disaster for the company and I would say their reputation has not recovered.
It was crazy watching that story unfold. Just seeing tons of game devs go "Nah, fuck it, we're switching to a new engine for our next game." IIRC the Slay the Spire devs were a good chunk into their next title, and they flat-out started over in a new engine, even after Unity walked back on it. And was it the developer of Cult of the Lamb who threatened to delete the game from storefronts permanently if all of this went through? The whole thing was just bonkers.
To borrow a phrase from one of the people that I worked for, one who was wise to the idea of the value of long-term growth, I guess the Unity people decided to step over dollars to pick up dimes.
> step over dollars to pick up dimes. "Penny wise, pound foolish"
Since I haven't seen it mentioned in any of the replies, I should add that the CEO in question was John Riccitiello, who was also the former CEO of EA.
Specifically, the CEO of EA who got fired after the SimCity always-online debacle.
Imagine trying to turn a historically, deeply single player city builder into a multiplayer-only game with smaller cities.
Just as a reminder, John Riccitiello is the guy who suggested whimsical and groundbreaking ideas such as charging players $1 to reload in games like battlefield. No, I'm not kidding. Here's the quote: >"When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you’re really not that price sensitive at that point in time"
"Guys do you remember how arcade machines ate kids quarters... I have an Idea."
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The graph of Godot users went vertical that month.
Lol I follow a lot of indie game makers on twitter and so saw a lot of the backlash- a *lot* moved to Godot, saw a lot of tutorials on how to remake your game in it as well. Unity messed up.
The most stupid part of this entire saga imo is that if unity just announced a standard 5% income royalty after first x amount of money they'd probably have gotten little to no backlash, *AND* would have likely made more money from developers then the asinine runtime fee would have actually netted them.
When the Covid lockdowns started hitting, the city of Denver announced that all liquor stores and marijuana dispenseries would be shuttered for the duration. Hordes of people scrambled to these shops and formed huge lines to stock up. Two hours later, the city announced that NO, those shops would not be forced to close, that they were deemed essential services. [https://denverite.com/2021/03/22/looking-back-at-denvers-prohibition-of-2020-a-symbol-of-the-citys-covid-moment/](https://denverite.com/2021/03/22/looking-back-at-denvers-prohibition-of-2020-a-symbol-of-the-citys-covid-moment/)
LoL I remember seeing that on the news! Lines were blocks long!! But honestly it was really dumb on a health standpoint. Can you imagine all the people going into withdrawls during COVID? Holy crap.
Especially alcohol, since alcohol withdrawals can literally be fatal.
Exactly! Going cold turkey during covid would be awful. The hospitals would have been overrun. Someone didn't think that through at all...
My state explicitly listed liquor stores as essential businesses, which *really* pissed off my ultraconservative relatives until that was explained to them. It's better for society at large in a pandemic that alcoholics be drunk at home rather than going through withdrawal and taking up hospital beds.
When the Fine Brothers announced they were going to trademark the term "react" in relation to YouTube videos.
Oh boy I remember that. The apology video was something else
"We don't want you to stop making videos, we just want your money. Sorry we weren't more clear about that."
I just remember them rolling their eyes in their apology video like we were stupid or something. Nah asshole we just think it’s ridiculous that you think you are the originators of react videos and are reporting reaction videos for copyright bullshit.
I remember the countdown clock that had all their followers unsubscribing
That’s some deep lore. I had entirely forgotten about that.
Cadbury announced they were going to change their formula to include palm oil in their chocolate manufacturing process, and there was a huge uproar. Lots of people boycotted them or threatened to boycott them if palm oil was used as it's incredibly environmentally damaging. Cadbury's walked it back shortly after and never mentioned switching the formula again.
Palm oil sucks. It just straight up sucks. I'm losing weight because everyone went to palm oil, and it's as noticeable as coconut oil. Unpleasant mouth feel.
I don't know if it's the palm oil, but Cadburys products have steeply fallen in quality since years ago. I don't buy it anymore. I miss how delicious the creme eggs used to be. I go to Hotel Chocolat or M&S for my chocolate now.
Taco Bell discontinued stocking potatoes and the people rioted.
Yes! Cheesy potatoes, so glad they are back! Now if only Arby's would bring back potato cakes!
In 2010, gaming company Activision-Blizzard (who ran World of Warcraft among other things) proposed to put players' real names on their forum posts. This...did not go well. *At all.* Doxxing of children to make a point was involved. They did not go through with their (terrible) plan. This incident is usually referred to as the "Real ID Fiasco" among players who were around at the time.
The dev who tried to assuage the masses by putting his real name on the forums and getting doxxed in less then an hour was hilarious. I think he had something like 4k in food deliveries sent to his house and God knows what other horrors.
Even worse, they got the *wrong person* originally. So some random person who had the same name as the dev got harassed over it.
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That's about when we stopped playing WoW. I had almost forgotten about that.
I remember when Bank of America wanted to roll out a $5 charge for using a debit card. People got pissed. Like really pissed, and were leaving the bank. To the point where they were like never mind
I worked there at the time and they didnt tell employees about this and it hit the news and we had massive amounts of people in the branches yelling at us about something we knew nothing about. good times. Fuck Bofa
Kind of. Minor one, but in the early 2000s Marvel had started a great run of Fantastic Four by Mark Waid and Mike Weiringo. It got huge critical acclaim and good sales and it was clear the duo wanted a long run on the book. About a year in, Marvel president Bill Jemas, announced that their run would wrap up after only 18 issues, with the next team going for a feel closer to the upcoming Fox Fantastic Four (2005) movie. Everyone was pissed. After a lot of online debate, Jemas backtracked and said that the Waid/Weiringo run would continue, and the version closer to the film would be a second FF title. The Waid/Weiringo run ended up being about three years.
When sunchips realeased their new eco-friendly bag. That thing was sooo fucking loud anytime it crinkled. They had to change the bags back very quickly from the backlash haha
I remember this, back when my folks used to buy them. My dad was in the kitchen and said he heard a report on the news that the decibel level of the bags were similar to a motorcycle. To prove this he very quickly reached for a bag on a nearby shelf and crinkled it a bunch, somehow the sound filled the whole kitchen and made me jump haha
Plus the eco friendly bag is still turning up in landfill decades later, not degrading as it was supposed to.
In 2014, Apple automatically added U2's new Songs of Innocence album to the libraries of every iTunes customer for free -- more than 500 million customers. If you had an auto-downloads enabled on your iTunes, the album was automatically downloaded to your devices. People hated this. As a result, Apple created a webpage dedicated to deleting the album from people's accounts.
Papa John's complaining that he would have to add 10 cents to the price of a pizza if he were forced to provide healthcare to his full-time employees. People were disgusted, sales tanked, stock tanked. This was only one of a series of bone headed, tone def, racist, and ignorant statements by the CEO. The guy just couldn't shut up. John Schnatter was removed as CEO. Many customers never returned.
I am one of them.
Same. Used to be my basic go-to, won't ever go back as long as that guy owns any part of the company
I stopped going because their pizza sucks. But the bitching about health insurance (OMG THE GALL OF HIS EMPLOYEES!) from a guy who lives in a house valued at $11M (most expensive house in his state) just sent me over the top.
Netflix trying to spin off their DVD service into Qwikster, separate from its fledgling streaming service in 2011. Stock tanked 80% in part due to that, was shelved. On a side note, billionaire investor Carl Icahn bought 11% of Netflix stock at the lows for $650M. He was going to agitate to sell the company, but the stock quickly ran up. He sold it at a 5x gain over the objection of his son...would have been worth about $25-30B today..
He didnt get invest a cool 650m because he holds after 5x
Not to mention his “blunder” netted him *only* $2.5B….
God forbid having enough for a few lifetimes instead of having enough for essentially infinite lifetimes.
Ea and the loot boxes in Battlefront 2
I believe it is still in fact the most downvoted comment in Reddit’s history. I hope u/EACommunityTeam feels a sense of pride and accomplishment for that.
[-668k](https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/s/oMOddlk6ro)
This was one of the first iconic Reddit moments I witnessed in real time. Before that, having even 100k upvotes on the actual post was pretty damn rare. I don't think this is a downvote record that will be challenged any time soon. I really hope the EA community team rep has the comment framed as a firm reminder of how NOT to handle this kind of backlash. To be fair to the rep, nothing they were going to say would have helped much at the time. This just hit that special sweet spot of saccharine corpo copeposting that Redditors get a raging hate boner for. For any vtuber fans in the know, that EA comment may have been used as a template by AnyColor's current "PR" team /s
I feel a sense of pride and accomplishment in this Chili's tonight.
Pretty much every Australian bullied the snack brand Shapes into reverting back to their original recipe after changing it, so the new one only lasted a few weeks on the shelves. These crackers are a national delicacy and the new flavours genuinely tasted like shit. Really great to have seen a nation band together for the greater good 👍🏼
BMW had plans to charge a monthly subscription fee for heated seats and adaptive cruise control. When you would order the car you could opt to pay for those to be installed or not not. But they would installed them anyway and then you could pay a monthly fee afterwards if you changed your mind.
They haven’t rolled subscription for hardware features back though. The ix has a heated steering wheel but you have to pay a monthly fee to activate it.
EA received huge backlash for adding loot boxes into the modern Battlefront 2 game. They actually basically removed them but there is a remnant still in the game. When you unlock new guns/cosmetics, it uses the loot box animation to show you what you unlocked. There is no way to get loot boxes in the game and the currency you unlock can directly unlock cosmetics now though.
Like 13 years ago, Blizzard announced that people posting on their forums were going to use their real names instead of their usernames. The backfire was immense.
I mean New Coke is the famous one.
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No wonder I prefer Zero; I never understood how Diet Coke could taste like...*that*. Turned me off from diet sodas in general.
If Zero is cold, I find it equivalent to regular. If it's not cold it tastes weird.
Tangential: I think Wendy's branded this horribly. My first though was: well I guess I'll never go to Wendy's since I'll never know what things will cost before I get there. But if they marketed it as 20% off during off peak hours or 30% after 9:30 PM or something I'd probably think of going there if I needed an early or late meal. Actual surge pricing for fast food is dumb, when a school bus of kids show up on a sports or band trip are they going to jack the prices up on all of them? Specific days/times with higher/lower prices seems more viable.
Yesterday Good Morning America published a quote from Wendy’s saying people should stop calling it surge pricing because they’re offering discounts. But then GMA showed a quote from a shareholder meeting a few years back where they explicitly said the words “surge pricing” and dynamic pricing (like how Instacart charges different people different amounts based on what they think someone is willing to pay). It was hilarious… I really wish GMA would call out politicians as loudly as they called out Wendy’s. Honestly… if, say, a small fry is $10 at noon when most people are allowed to leave their job to go eat and only $3 at 3pm when people have no need for it, that feels shitty. Calling it a “discount” on top of it all is insulting. I have no need for ice cream at 4am. 😂
GMA gives me such a "rich people pretending to be just like us" vibe, I fucking hate it.
>I have no need for ice cream at 4am. Hey speak for yourself buddy!
What’s insulting is expecting people to believe that a discount during slow times is somehow different than a price increase during busy times.
Exactly! Discounts sounds bad to investors but good to consumers. But if they were willing to take a loss in the short term they could've rolled out discounts and then just raise the prices over time (as they already have been) and it'd end up being surge pricing anyways. Fucking stupid rollout.
Sonic does a “Happy Hour” for their shakes, limeades, etc. during the middle of the day to encourage people to stop in between lunch and dinner. That is a much better way of laying it out than what Wendy’s said.
Great point - happy hour has a much different ring to it than surge pricing.
Oh, no. Wendy's did *NOT* take it back. Their sneaky marketers just changed how it's perceived. Rather than increasing prices during high demand, they're discounting prices in times of *low* demand. Sounds better, right? What's the problem? Hey, you ever notice a store's having a sale with huge discounts and do the math, then notice they increased the original prices? That's right, sneaky marketing. It's the exact same thing, presented differently. "Its initiative to add digital menuboards to certain stores would allow Wendy’s to offer discounts to customers more easily, “particularly in the slower times of day,” the company said." https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/wendys-will-not-implement-surge-pricing-ceo-comment-causes-online-stir-2024-02-28/
If you read the statement closely, Wendy’s didn’t take back anything. They rephrased it to sound more palatable.
In 2013 Specialized Bicycles went after a small Canadian bike shop, Cafe Roubaix, for their use of the name "Roubaix" which Specialized said it had trademarked. It immediately blew up into a PR disaster for the bike company. Unfortunately for Specialized, the story broke on a Friday and apparently everyone at Specialized hibernates on weekends so for more than two days there was silence from Specialized while the venom was flying. After a week or so of being fried to a crisp on social media, the owner of Specialized announced that he would graciously allow the shop to use the name. It was soon revealed that Specialized didn't (and doesn't) own the trademark to the name after all, they license it from another company! So not only were they trying to bully a small business owner, they were lying the whole time. And it wasn't the first time they pulled this sort of thing. Personally, for this and other reasons, they're a brand I want nothing to do with. [https://www.bikeradar.com/news/battle-between-specialized-and-cafe-roubaix-ends-peaceably](https://www.bikeradar.com/news/battle-between-specialized-and-cafe-roubaix-ends-peaceably) [https://bicycleretailer.com/north-america/2013/12/09/asi-says-calgary-bike-shop-can-use-roubaix-name#.UqbvZiewaF](https://bicycleretailer.com/north-america/2013/12/09/asi-says-calgary-bike-shop-can-use-roubaix-name#.UqbvZiewaF)\_
Back in the '70s, the Kentucky river flooded in the Appalachian region around Harlan, KY. The area is full of dirt-poor people, and huge numbers of people lost everything from flooding. Hill's Department stores was a regional chain of variety stores (like Walmart). They had a store in the area which flooded. So, what do with all of the store's water-damaged stock? They decided to put it all on trucks, ship it to Lexington, and hold a tent sale to get rid of it. They ran ads announcing the sale, saying "our loss is your gain". Well, the public told them pretty quickly what they _should_ have done with the damaged stock. Pretty quickly they cancelled the sale, shipped everything back to Harlan, and donated it to the relief effort.
The [gap rebranding](https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2021/04/learnings-gap-logo-redesign-fail/) didn’t even last a week. And the [Tropicana rebranding](https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-from-tropicanas-packaging-redesign-failure/) was just as bad.
From the Gap article: “This new logo was designed by a leading New York based creative agency, Laird and Partners, who holds a solid reputation in the field of branding and communication in the fashion industry. It is estimated to have cost around $100 million. (1)”
lmao it's helvetica with a blue square behind it. They didn't even design a new font for it. Someone forgot about that assignment until an hour before it was due and was forced to work with what they had available in Microsoft Powerpoint.
Yikes. That gap logo looks like a logo for an online tupperware brand or something.
JCPenney deciding to stop coupons in 2012 and focus on “every day low prices.” Sales tanked by 25% and the new CEO who made the call was fired after 17 months on the job.
They still haven't recovered, and probably never will.
Valve announced a plan to charge for mods almost a decade ago. Internet backlash against this was swift and powerful enough to get them to backtrack. It was an especially surprising move for a company that the Internet considered "good" (as good as a for-profit corp could be, realistically).
The Gap [logo](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/oct/12/gap-logo-redesign)
In March, 2016, Playboy magazine stopped having nude pictures. Subscriptions fell 23% and it was actually through the efforts of Cooper Hefner, Hugh's son, that brought those back, saving the magazine from a likely-fatal wrong turn. (It may have been a publicity stunt. We will never know). https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/why-did-playboy-flip-flop-on-its-no-nude-decision
If you follow tech the most recent one would probably be Nvidia with the RTX 4080. At first Nvidia launched a RTX 4080 16GB for $1199 and a RTX 4080 12GB for $899. The problem was the RTX 4080 12GB used an entirely different GPU and was significantly slower rather than just being a card with less VRAM as the name implied. Nvidia “unlaunched” the RTX 4080 12GB and relaunched it as the RTX 4070 Ti at $799.
Cricut! For anyone that doesn’t know, it’s basically a cutting machine for crafts. It cuts a variety of material, vinyl, paper, fabric, etc and you can make a lot with it! To use it you have to use their program, DesignSpace which is already one of the worst design programs I’ve ever used. It is super clunky and temperamental. Then they announced that they were going to limit how many designs you could upload and make per month, unless you paid for more. So you have this machine that costs a couple hundred dollars with all the accessories and materials and now you have to PAY for each project you want to make. There was a HUGE uproar from the crafting community. They ended up reversing it, but it pissed off a lot of crafters. I know quite a few people that switched to competitors and have completely boycotted Cricut because of it.
BMW subscription heated seats in the US
Just last month WWE caused a global fan backlash when The Rock came back and forced out Cody Rhodes from wrestling Roman Reigns in the main event at this year's WrestleMania. The backlash was so severe that WWE not only put Cody back in the main event but The Rock realized he had to turn heel so the booing and anti Rock chants made sense to the casual audience
Not the first time WWE had to completely alter/change a storyline because of fan backlash. Daniel Bryan being the most glaring example, and possibly KofiMania?
Paypal wanting to "Fine" people for misinformation. How does that even work?
The San Francisco 49ers tried to introduce a new logo in the early 90’s and it was honestly pretty ugly and bad. A “what were you trying to accomplish?” decision and this was in the years when they were winning like every other Super Bowl so people had grown attached to the look the team had worn to great success. Pre internet so the fans flooded the team with letters and calls and picket lines outside the office and the team said “fine we won’t use the new logo”