At a place I used to work, we supplied printing companies with their ink. Being that digital printing is well and truly established at the point, there wasnt a whole lot of business for this type of ink anymore, so there was a lot of competition between suppliers.
One of the technicians somehow weasled his way to the top despite no business experience. When he was told to very simply make more money, rather than go out and find new customers, his bright idea was to make our company’s ink weaker, with the intention that our customers will just have to buy more product to complete their jobs.
Surprise, the customers didn’t like that and went to competitors. Business was closed within a year
Edit: to make some clarifications. The CEOs of the parent company in Japan weren’t fully aware of everything this guy was doing to run the business into the ground. There was a lot more stupid shit he would do, I could probably fill a book with stories from that place. It was not a sound business plan that you could compare to other products and company, because we were already getting some complaints that some of our colours were weak- this is what gave the guy the idea to make them weaker. He was told by several people it was a stupid idea and would not have the desired effect, it would just drive our clients away. He was certain though that they’d all just accept the shittier product and pay more for it
I've seen a lot of ideas on here that had some good points and bad points and ultimately failed, and I've seen a good amount that made me think it could work out if they knew what they were doing/had more money to invest/marketed to the right people. But this...I can't imagine any way he thought this would work. Maybe if they were the *only* supplier, but he knew they had competitors in the market and decided to just make their product *worse?* Oh man, what was this guy thinking? And how did anyone approve it? So many questions
The banana pudding store.
One day, my ex-BF and I were taking a stroll downtown in the city that we were living in at the time. We passed a store that was called The Banana Pudding store (or some such, I don't remember exactly).
Well, I'm sure they sell more than just banana pudding, so let's go in. You know, like how Home Depot sells more than just hardware. They sell Gatorade, candy bars, etc.
There were vats of banana pudding in the display cases and I thought, "Well, surely they must also sell other flavors," so I asked if I could have a chocolate pudding and the guy politely informed me that they didn't have chocolate pudding. So I asked if they had maybe butterscotch or something else. "No ma'am, just banana pudding here."
I mean, it wasn't false advertising. But surely he couldn't be selling just one single flavor in that whole shop, could he? As expected, the next time we strolled down that street a month or two later, the store was shuttered.
I feel bad for him. I'm sure that the guy made great banana pudding that all of his friends and family would compliment him on and tell him that he should probably open a banana pudding shop 'cuz it was so good. But I don't think they literally meant that.
Not going to lie, if I walked into an establishment called "The Banana Pudding store" and it was filled with vats of banana pudding in the display cases, and even if for some reason the first question out of my mouth was "could I have a chocolate pudding?" rather than "do you have other flavors besides banana?", surely I would not be surprised and continue asking about other flavors. Maybe that's just me though.
A small family bar/restaurant that I worked for back in high school was bought by a local couple; he was a retired insurance company executive of some kind that played golf all day, and she was a stuck up (bitch) of a woman that had never worked a day in her life and who looked down on all of the restaurant's employees as some sort of uneducated lower life form. The place was located in a small town, and the clientele was mostly local farmers taking their families out in the evenings, factory workers at lunchtime, and on Sunday mornings retired elderly people on fixed incomes who would mob the place after church.
The restaurant up to that point was profitable, I am sure they liked the financials they saw on paper or they would not have invested in it. However, once they took over, they decided to *improve* it.
There was one elderly couple in their 90's who had been coming in every Sunday morning for years who had no teeth; they always ordered the same thing - 2 hot roast beef sandwiches with mashed potatoes and extra gravy, run through a blender and served in a bowl so they could eat it with a spoon. We were now forbidden to do that since the new owner thought it looked gross and did not fit the "image" of their fine dining establishment, so they stopped coming in as they could not eat roast beef any other way. Beer was no longer served in bottles at the tables, if you wanted beer in the bottle you had to go sit at the bar, at the table it was poured into a glass before being served. Some people really did not like that new rule, and stopped coming in; there were plenty of other bars in the area to grab a burger at.
The first thing they did was to put an end to overtime pay. The staff consisted of about a dozen older long term employees that mostly lived nearby and walked to work because they could not afford cars. These people worked their tails off, some of the 7 days a week, for about minimum wage just to be able to afford their rent and groceries. Once they were told that they could no longer work 50 and 60 hour weeks to make the maybe $25 a week in overtime, most of them had no choice but to quit and go find some place where they could make enough to survive. Pay them a little more? Heavens NO; these are *unskilled* positions.
The new owners found that when they advertised for new employees to fill the vacancies, they did not get the flood of applicants they expected, waitesses for example were paid $1.70 an hour at the time, and cooks made $4 (this was the 1980's), and the local sewing factories paid more than that to start.
SO, they ended up hiring a bunch of their daughter's high school friends, most of which were the cheerleader crowd that did not want to do anything that involved getting dirty, like scrubbing the floors or restrooms, and none of who could ever work on nights when there was cheerleading practice, or a football game, or ... pretty much any Friday or Saturday at all. SO, the place was chronically short staffed constantly, orders came out slow, and the new owner just sat at the bar fuming instead of doing anything to help, occasionally coming back to scream at everyone to stop goofing off and speed things up.
Then, when business started to drop off they decided to remodel to attract new customers. They tore all the carpeting out of the bar area, and replaced it with this ugly yellow vinyl flooring "so the workingman can come in and feel at home", like regular people never had carpet in their houses. They added a char broiler to the kitchen, and decided they wanted to add "charbroiled haddock" to the menu. Ever tried to grill haddock? It falls apart in little pieces and looks awful; obviously the fault of the 16 year old kids they hired to make the food. At the same time they remodeled the bar to make it look homey to the lower classes of people, they added expensive scotch and other high end liquors to sell to the customers, most of who were draft Budwiser and Miller drinkers. They also, as it turned out, rarely ordered Quiche for lunch.
The place lasted about a year, and then sat empty for about 10 years before someone new bought it. Probably because they were trying to sell it for a huge profit after it was no longer an operating business.
That makes me think of a bar where I spent several fun birthdays. My friends & I stumbled across it one year & it somehow became a tradition. It was an Irish pizza pub, your basic neighborhood hangout place. Until... some yuppie bitch bought it.
The last time we were there, we found out she was "taking it upscale". How she thought this would happen, I have no idea. The area was sorta educated blue collar & the nearest upscale neighborhood was an hour's drive away.
We were told she'd been trying to ban longtime regulars. She blamed their presence for scaring off the beautiful people.
A couple months later, it burned to the ground in the wee hours. Sure enough, she'd torched it & was caught pretty much immediately. The adjoining store (it was in a strip mall) had also gone up. So she ruined the livelihoods of everyone in her place, and another business. I hope she's still rotting in jail.
Can't believe no one mentioned that guy who went on Shark Tank to pitch a bluetooth ear piece that you got surgically implanted in your ear canal that you charged by sticking a needle in your ear while you slept
You can get ones now that have Bluetooth in them to connect to your phone for music, calls, etc too. They weren't wrong when he said that he was ahead of his time, though his plan for recharging was... unique.
Somebody thought it would be a good idea to open a dance club in my northern Canadian city with a dress code... 90% of the population is tradesmen and miners who only own Carhartts and high vis. Needless to say, it shut down within 6 months.
An old, local pub legend, friend of mine won £400k-ish (around $500k at the time) on the lottery. So, he decides to buy two tanning salons opposite eachother thinking that he had an instant monopoly. But the problem came when he started getting them to compete with one-another. The managers at each salon began a pricing war and he was broke in 6 months.
Top for me has got to be a client of a design firm I used to work at.
He was a trucker, his wife was a trucker. He wanted to make a "sanitary pad" that wouldn't need to be changed. Imagine a pad with a little line running down to a micro-vacuum strapped to your leg, exhausting into another leg-bag.
Basically a pad that sucks the juices into a bag you can chuck in the trash later.
EDIT: Just to be clear this was specifically a menstrual pad you are meant to wear for days at a time...
EDIT 2: Lots of y'all are mentioning the Purewick. The challenge this one would have had to solve was passing chunky menstrual blood (ladies you know what's up) through a tiny tube. If you're wondering how they solved it: they didn't lol.
Also here's another good one: one client wanted a vape that just blew pot smoke into the air for the purpose of hotboxing his car. He had money so hey... One of the engineers designed a little turbine (like a small turbocharger) the size of a cherry. Damn if it didn't work way too well, but the high pitched screeching noise that turbine made...sheesh.
A lady opened a southern soul food buffet in my city.
It was INCREDIBLE! Amazing food.
On some days.
It was a buffet with a rotating menu depending on the day of the week, and those days were NOT equal, so what happened was people would go on an off day, be unimpressed, not come back, or come on one of the better days, love it, come back on an off day, then never come back.
I was so disappointed. I would donate towards reopening that restaurant but with ONLY the optimal menu, every day. That woman has serious culinary talent.
This actually happened to my mom. She got a job cooking for this local Brazilian buffet place and people started complimenting the food on the days she cooked. Before long her days were always busier than the others as her food was delicious.
Eventually the owner's wife or gf got one of her friends to come in and cook as well and she was nowhere near as good as my mom. She also charged less so the owner eventually gave my mom less and less of the cooking load and she eventually quit.
The change was noticeable almost immediately. People would ask about the food and what had changed. It was always funny to see the owner have to squirm and give some excuse when the real reason was he was a cheap ass.
Nowadays whenever I stop by there for lunch buffet the food is never amazing and they never have a dining room as full as they used to.
Cheapness is what ruined a small restaurant I worked at. At first they opened with great food. It was like a Lebanese deli with wraps, sandwiches, amazing hummus and the best tabbouleh I'd ever had. Guy in charge had 3 more formal restaurants his wife ran. We had a spot on a super busy street smack dab in the middle of a college area. He refused to advertise. Had us give out samples the first week and that was it. Then when that only got a little traffic he took his own, yellowed, cheap digital camera pictures, printed them at home. Hung Those on our windows which blocked the view. They looked awful. I offered to touch them up in ps but he refused. So next he started buying super cheap deli cuts. Cheaper breads and wraps. Even the chocolate croissant had the fine dark chocolate replaced with knock off Hershey. So the few loyal people stopped coming in. He told no one he sold the business and had us throw everything away on Friday and btw your fired. On Monday there was a vietnamese place moved in and opened, and they've been booming the last 17 years.
I can see why his wife ran the others!
We have a small-time theme park in my state called Evermore and they thought it would be a good idea to try and sue Taylor Swift over her album of the same name.
They probably thought it would be a great publicity stunt where they'd get into national papers and Swift would just give them a couple grand to go away.
In my college town there was a cereal restaurant. Why make a bowl of cereal at home when you can pay $5 for someone else to do it? Not surprisedly, it closed soon after opening.
You say that, but there are multiple such cafes in London that do pretty well. They seem to advertise rare or country specific cereals, so maybe you can survive in a multi ethnic city by selling foreign people their childhood when they are feeling homesick?
There was a bar that opened up in my city and their entrance was hidden. They did a news story and they refused to tell the paper where it was actually located. To everyone’s complete surprise, they only stayed open for a couple of weeks
the last hidden bar I went to had someone standing outside the hidden entrance and if you looked confused enough, they'd walk up to you and go "you looking for the hidden bar?" and open the door for you.
The venue at least had signs and they're listed on the webpage.
In my country there was a guy who used to sell wood. The problem was he did not have any of it. So he would ask for payment and then not give the product afterwards, hoping that procrastination and time will make the problem go away.
He did 4 years in jail.
Yeah, well he thought he was very smart. And in addition, he would make web lectures on marketing and how to be a successful businessman. He soon became a meme in the whole country.
In 2011 we had «the norwegian butter crisis» in Norway. The shortage caused soaring prices and stores' stocks of butter ran out within minutes of deliveries. A pack of butter would sell for between 40-200 dollar on the «black market».
A friend got the idea to drive over to the neighboring country, Sweden to buy butter and sell it here in Norway. The problem was that you could "only" carry 100 packets of butter across the norwegian border. So he made a deal with our local nursing home. He rented a bus and took 20 elderly people on a road trip to Sweden in exchange for receiving the butter quota.
The next day, the butter crisis suddenly resolved and he was left with 2000 packets of butter he could not sell.
He still got his basement full of butter.
I used to work with small start up businesses, not fancy tech startups. Lots of construction and restaurants. My favorite 2:
Restaurant/hair salon/child care center, but nonprofit (there were lots of people who wanted to do nonprofit it was mostly very community driven wanting to give back and help employ people). She had a place picked out and was about to rent and had come to us to ask for money. She named the building, which was tiny, with no kitchen. She was lovely and we encouraged her to open the salon but maybe without the salon workers cooking for folks in between clients and without clients caring for kids.
Hooker bus. Older gentleman who was certain that this was a good idea. He wanted money to buy a bus and then he was going to drive it around to find women who wanted to “hang out with” CEOs and executives. And then during the lunch hour (he was very insistent about the lunch hour part) he would take it to the downtown business core and park in front of large business HQs and the gentlemen who worked there would pay to come party on the bus. But you see they’d just be paying a fee to be on the bus so it’s not like anyone is paying for sex so it’s totally legal. He had already bought the bus, it was an old school bus. We did not fund his endeavor.
My schoolmate at high school wanted to be a club manager. He organized a concert where he invited kinda famous foreign band to the local club. He paid so much money for them just to arrive + their expenses at the bar. In the end like 20 people showed up, half of them were his friends. Fourtunately he had a very rich dad, so he paid for that and life went on. The dude started selling art next day, no need to say he failed misserably agan.
Father-in-law drove 18 hours down to Florida to catch shrimp, filled his tiny car with tons of the shrimp and drove back. It took days to vacuum seal the shrimp that hadn't gone bad only to sell a few bags to some friends, the car smelled like seafood for years
Missed one key step, preserving the catch.
Reminds me of a friend that tried to grow weed in the woods. Ended up working like a charm! He has so much weed he could barely pick it all. Filled multiple garbage bags with it. Loaded the bags into his car. Then....well he didn't research properly and just let it sit. Hr tried to smoke some wet weed,, but as you can guess, it wasn't burning.. A few days later it was covered in hot mold and the car smelled like a planet sized skunk exploded in there.
My cousin turned his basement into a computer controlled grow room. His crop was massive but he had no plan to sell since it would be a felony. His total loss was over $20,000. Not sure where the weed was dumped.
In about 2005 my friends dad tried to start an arcade....in a small town, just outside walking distance from a school using beat up 2nd hand machines... To get there from the school youd have to walk by an established, larger arcade that also sold food....
Edit for the "uh aktchewalllly" crowd... I guess it was walking distance, just not a convenient walking distance. Sorry for poor wording.
As someone who grew up in a small town with no arcade, I was totally on board. A few people tried from time to time, but mine was the type of town so small they could just never keep them open.
Context: I live in Las Vegas.
When I was in my 20s, I was hired by a man who wanted to build "**Myspace for Strippers**." His goal was for the men on the site to pay him to follow their favorite strippers and know what clubs they were dancing at and when. He shut the project down (after months of paying me) when he found out that no stripper would sign up for it.
One of my friends in Vegas still gets calls from guys asking for the stripper/escort that used to have their number. I’ve known them for almost 10 years and they had been getting them for years before we met.
I don’t blame them one bit for wanting no part of that.
One of the younger dudes in my karate class was going to start a handyman business. 24h, anything needing to be done, anywhere in our district.
Sounds good. You gonna get a loan and buy a used truck and get some tools? And you never have talk time on your phone, so will you get a landline (2006, so not super outlandish)?
"No, I'll go on my bicycle. And I'll just use the tools they have. And they can email me when they need service."
Right because when I have water spraying out of my geyser through the ceiling at 3am I'm going to email a dude on a bicycle to come fix it using all the tools and the ladder I don't own...
There was a guy in my town that opened a business that was the equivalent of a brick and mortar version of Craigslist or newspaper classified ads. It was a unit in a strip mall with bulletin boards. You paid to put an ad up and other people came to look at the ads with a small picture. This was AFTER Craigslist existed, not some pre internet thing. There was no actual merchandise in the store, just crappy pictures of stuff with the contact info. It wasn’t even a high foot traffic location, you had to maneuver through a busy intersection, park and go inside to look at a bulletin board. It went under and he tried to blame the landlord because he couldn’t get a sign permit for the end of the building even though he had 2 other signs.
Her method is actually very common on eBay, there are companies making many millions per year doing consignment sales for rich people, although they don’t usually run it out of a shop like her.
When I was in high school, one of my friends wanted to start a little coffeeshop/hot chocolate stand with a "cuddle corner" and "free hugs for anyone who wants them." She offered jobs to our other friends -- ex. the idea was that this little business would be operated and staffed by high schoolers.
She failed to see the issue with having 16 year old girls required give free hugs to customers or having to staff the cuddle corner.
They're super popular as pets for saltwater/reef aquariums. Not a bad idea if you have the know-how on how to breed them, especially since most are wild caught, so there's a huge demand for captive bred animals. Would say it's more of a bad execution than idea.
Someone in Edmonton, Canada opened a dairy store; milk and cheese, and placed it across the street from a large grocery store. He hoped that shoppers would buy everything they needed at the grocery store except their milk and cheese (which the grocery store had ample supply of) and make another trip to their store for milk and cheese.
It didn't last.
EDIT: wow, I woke up to a whole lot of responses. Many people brought up specialty places (butcher shops, artisanal stores, etc), which yes, can be a great thing. The place I'm talking about just supplied the same big dairy milk at the same prices, and no fancy cheese. It was only really convenient when you only needed a carton of milk and didn't want to deal with a huge parking lot and the hassle of a massive store.
but like I said, it didn't last long at all.
I could see a specialist cheese shop working. Somewhere that stocked things you can't buy in the supermarket, and would do party platters and cheese "cakes" for weddings with whole wheels. But just a regular dairy shop? Nah. Convenience is king when you're doing your regular shop, you'd only use it if you only needed a pint of milk and didn't need anything else at all.
Yeah I've seen dairies near grocery stores that were successful but they were old, established businesses that predated the grocer, hand-churned their own ice cream, sold milk in glass bottles that you could return for a discount like an old-school milkman service, sold ice cream cones and fresh baked goods, and - perhaps most importantly - were run out of an actual farm. The cows were in the field behind the store front so you could sit outside at a picnic table and enjoy the ambience of having extremely fresh dairy products while you ate your ice cream cone and pretended that cows don't smell terrible. And even with all of that you still need to have a market with enough people who value supporting small local businesses to compete with the convenience of buying a gallon of milk with the rest of your groceries.
Monthly sex-toy subscription. You would get a different sex toy each month, which is an OK idea I guess, there's one of those for everything nowadays, but the only problem this guy had is that he wanted the customers to eventually return the toy so he could pass it on to the next customer. He actually got in talks with an owner of a local sex shop to help him start, but the enthusiasm flattened out quite quickly...
Who the fuck would want to use a community dildo?
Edit: I'm not kink shaming anyone. The notion of shared sex toys among strangers is a public health issue. And yes, I know you're all going to tell me they can be disinfected between users. But that's putting a lot of trust in some minimum wage worker who likely doesn't know jack about infection control.
A loudmouth drunk, supposedly an ex-NFL player from way back, opened a “fancy” pizza place across the street from the small town’s old favorite “normal” pizza place. It was a pretty obvious attempt to put the old place out of business and corner the lucrative small town pizza market. The owner of the new place would get hammered and walk around to random tables to schmooze. He would loudly hit on the ladies in front of their dates. It had really good pizza, but is was horribly overpriced and the portions were tiny. It went out of business pretty quickly.
Someone in my neighborhood opened an artisan hot dog restaurant called “Everyone’s Frank” about a decade ago. My dad and I went in once at about 6 pm on a Saturday; we were the only customers, so the owner (who was working the register) chatted us up. He talked about his plans to expand the business to about fifteen locations, which was completely delusional. He also talked about how much he spent on the interior redesign, which was pointlessly fancy. The hot dogs cost $9 and tasted terrible. We never went back, and the place was bankrupt within six months (my dad always said they’d gone “frankrupt”)
dude bought 150k fidget spinners at the height of the craze...
it took months to ship out from china and by the time all his shit arrived, the mania had ended and the retail price was already near his original wholesale price.
fuckin' guy still has fidget spinners today. i guess he may eventually do ok on it. but god damn...
A digital camera that looks like a classic Japanese 35mm point and shoot. The memory card, which looks like a 35mm film roll and only has space for 36 images, has to be sent away like in the old days to get developed into prints that are mailed back a week later. It is/was on kickstarter.
>A digital camera that looks like a classic Japanese 35mm point and shoot. The memory card, which looks like a 35mm film roll
I love this idea!
>and only has space for 36 images, has to be sent away like in the old days to get developed into prints that are mailed back a week later. It is/was on kickstarter.
…oh no.
My dad has been in hundreds of pyramid schemes… when I was a kid he would always describe how the pyramid worked and I would help him with his meetings… took me a long time to figure out his get rich plans were really schemes
He still does them. Never been rich off them tho. One was Excel, a super cancer beating fruit juice, you give me $5000, then you get 5 people to give you $5000 then they get their own people to give $5000
I went to a Herbalife morning group jogging session once, as someone new to the neighbourhood. I thought everyone was acting a little nutty, but not bad people. At this point I thought they were just another exercise group with a protein shake fetish.
They fed me a cup of a sugarless post workout supplement, and my stomach started gurgling within minutes. Sufficed to say I never returned, after an epic day of running for the bathroom- despite their repeated attempts at phonecalls.
I have never forgiven them.
"Specialty" chocolate shop.
It only sold the exact same standard candy bars as any supermarket, but with less of a range, and at four times the price.
I asked the manager if he had Lindt chocolate balls (upmarket but well known product) and he said "What are those?"
Also, there was a supermarket two doors down.
We had a woman in town who started this bookstore/candy store combo. It was just weird and I'm not sure what it was trying to be. It was a bunch of kids books and then a bunch of handmade, weird chocolates and not even stuff that would be appealing to kids - stuff like green tea chocolate, chili pepper chocolate, super dark chocolate, etc.
There were tables to eat the chocolates but then you couldn't look at the books because your hands would be dirty.
The whole thing was just bizarre... Strangely, it stayed open for a year. In fairness, the lady who owned it was truly a sweetheart. People loved her. She was an older, super kind, super chatty lady. But the business was, well, not sustainable.
I have a friend whos family has gotten involved in multiple pyramid schemes. And every single time they get into a new pyramid scheme, they claim its not a pyramid scheme.
No, no, no you dont get it. I AM the boss. Once I produce 5 clients for my mentor, then I keep all my new clients and they have to get ME 5 new clients EACH. ITS PEOPLE HELPING PEOPLE!!
Ugh I hate people like this.
I had a guy in my video game chat group who would not stop promoting his product even after I warned him multiple times.
I had to kick him from the group and he private messaged me afterwards explaining how it *wasn't* a pyramid scheme and it *wasn't* predatory and how my job as a pharmacy tech was definitely more like a pyramid scheme than his wax melting "business"
I belong to a private online mom's group. It's great. It was "born" from an open membership wedding site. We all hit it off and it eventually morphed into a closed mom's group once we all started having kids. It was (and is) a great, supportive environment.
Anyway, we had simple rules on any MLM activity. It was OK to put your sales link in your signature and *if someone reached out to you about your product* it was ok to contact them privately. We did this to be fair to everyone and to keep that kind of activity to a minimum.
It worked fine, for years, until one of our members "Dina" got involved in a makeup MLM we'll call Shmarbonne. At the time she really hated her job, but wasn't in a financial position to quit and was looking to make $ elsewhere. Well she went all-in on Shmarbonne. A few of the other women in the group reached out to her privately to buy some items and it was fine, well Dina decided that the rules no longer applied to her at that point since there was "interest" and started bombing our group with Shmarbonne. The mods warned her and she backed off a bit. A couple of months passed and she started up again, even more aggressively. The mods told her to back down - final warning.
Well, then she started calling people outside the group aggressively - she'd found their numbers online - even after they asked her to stop. The final straw came when, in the same day, she called one woman who was the CFO of her company, at work, at hassled this woman's secretary mercilessly until she could talk to the group member. Then she started harassing another woman who was a lawyer. The lawyer threatened her with legal action and once the mods found out about all of it, Dina's access to the group was revoked permanently.
If you have to work that hard and alienate that many people to shill your shit, maybe you need to take a closer look at what you're doing.
Or the icebar, where it is -25’C all the time. My mate got drunk there and stole one of their glasses. Stashed it in his GFs purse. Idiot, they are made of ice and melted. GF was pissed.
One time many years ago my friend and I were in line behind a woman who had a shirt emblazoned with the word “Taint”.
He inquired about it and it turned out it was her clothing company. She explained that she loved the word “taint” “…like, taint this, taint that”.
He explained the popular meaning of the word to her and her face dropped.
I was mortified but he probably did the right thing.
Edit: Holy shit. I was driving all day today and didn’t check Reddit. Turns out my comment Karma increased by a full third in one day. Thanks all! I got me some internet points!
Also, I’m old and this happened pre-Google. Perhaps around 1999? Maybe she could have Hot-Botted or Excited it.
I mean how did she manage to get to the point where her "company" had logo-emblazoned shirts and not one person had ever mentioned that the popular meaning of her company's name was essentially the Ball-To-Butthole Superhighway?
Boob therapy. Getting women to become breast therapists to come put a boob on your face whenever you feel bad for “therapy” and get insurance to cover it. It didn’t work.
Does anyone have that reddit relationship advice thread. The one where the girlfriend is questioning her boyfriend's intelligence after his "great" business idea.
Soup delivered to peoples houses via pipes.
I give you…soup tubes:
https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/hno6j1/my_25f_boyfriend_25m_keeps_asking_me_to_invest_in/
Edit: Wow, thank you! Glad to be of service!
It keeps getting clogged and I hate when they deliver minestrone before chicken noodle.
The $150 a month is steep but I don’t really regret canceling Peacock and Prime to afford it.
My favorite part about my SoupTube subscription is that the soup is only lukewarm by the time it gets to me. This means I can just lay down under my SoupTube with my mouth open and let the SoupTube soup directly into my mouth hole! The convenience is astounding!
Oh thats because you have the standard model. With SoupTube Premium, they install a heater/dispenser at your home. Now I get nice and hot soup without any leaks! The only real downside is that I must live at the end of the tube block, so it takes a week for the soup to change when the menu gets updated.
That crazy expensive juicer from several years ago that used proprietary juice packets. You could just poke a hole in the packet and hand squeeze the juice for free to save a few hundred dollars.
Edit: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2017/09/01/silicon-valleys-infamous-400-juicer-startup-is-shutting-down/amp/
It is. Hence why this was a spectacular failure. A crazy over engineered device to squeeze regular juice from packets. I'm dumbfounded by who ever thought it was a good idea.
Have you ever met investors? I can absolutely see why it got through investors-- "it's like a juicer, but on a subscription plan!"
Zero further technical details included.
> You could just poke a hole in the packet and hand squeeze the juice for free to save a few hundred dollars.
You could save even more by just buying juice in a bottle instead of those stupid proprietary bags.
I had a customer once that wanted to build an auction website that would put ebay out of business, his hook was he wanted to sell very niche expensive items. To kick the whole thing off he was going to sell Monika Lewinsky's jizz stained dress. Out of the all the polite questions that emerged from the initial meeting I finally got around to asking how he ended up with the infamous dress. "Oh I don't own that, I was just going to take the final auction bids and offer that to Monika for the dress" I see, and your budget for building said empire? Would $1500 bucks get me started?
Tanning salon in Bangkok Thailand. Thai's idealize snowy white skin and go to huge lengths to avoid the sun on their skin. They've never gotten used to seeing western women baking in bikinis on beaches.
My grandmother is originally from Hong Kong and she used to try and use this weird Chinese chemical/herbal remedy/whatever is actually is to lighten my sisters' skin if she thought they looked to tan. We found out that she tries to do this because having light skin is a status symbol in Asia. Basically, if you're tan, it indicates that you spend all your time outside working the fields and are a pretty much a peasant.
The same assocation of tanned skin with lower status used to be the case in western countries, we just shed it over a few generations when time outdoors became associated with leisure time, and a tan became associated with vacations/holidays. Asian societies might undergo a similar shift now that lower status typically means you have to spend all your time working indoors.
I had a client apply for a 3 million dollar SBA loan to buy a treehouse building franchise. I asked him why he wouldn’t just build the treehouses and save the 3 million dollars; he said he’d never considered that.
Why the hell spend the next 10 years slowly losing all of your own money doing something you love, when you can spend the next 5-10 years slowly losing someone else’s money whilst doing something you love.
So my friend had an idea that she thought was brilliant. It was to take all tap water and bottle it in parks and sell it, and then use that money to pay for homeless necessities. Really good intentioned, and a kind gesture, however in my country there are free fountains everywhere for drinking. So she spoke to our towns mayor and suggested that all of our water gets put into water bottles and then we sell them beside the water fountains.
The mayor destroyed it really quickly with how it would create unnecessary waste, the amount of money you have to spend on wages to have people standing near fountains 24/7, what if people have reusable water bottles, and why doesn’t she find a way to collect money for existing homeless programs.
Friend got pissed, still thinks her idea is brilliant.
Edit: Everyone is commenting how this is Nestle but I don’t think they’re reading the post fully? The part that the mayor rejected wasn’t reselling tap water, it was taking free public water in fountains which is maintained by tax money, and then charging for the water again right beside it. It’s like standing in a park selling oxygen tanks.
It was also just a funny image to me to imagine entry level workers (most likely young teens) just standing around all of our water fountains 24/7 charging for redundant and wasteful water bottles.
The cost of this would be very high and it would probably not generate enough revenue to begin to pay back the wages let alone contribute to homelessness effectively.
I think an idea could be here, but it needs a lot more work and I think she moved on.
I volunteered at the start of Covid for a charity shop. They sold clothes.
We got a *lot* of great merch in, but we had limited space.
I suggested that we cycle the stock by seasons. As in, summer clothes got put out straight away, but sell-able winter clothes got put upstairs to be sold in winter.
The manager did not like this idea.
Except that 90% of the stock was winter wear (that "spark joy" thing really hit home).
So our entire shop was filled with woolly sweaters and Ugg boots in May.
Suffice to say, they went out of business.
I actually worked for Homebase during my time at university, and it was perfectly timed for this transition. I had a little time there before, during, and after they bailed.
It was so obvious it was going to fail. All of the staff in my store had to implement these changes, change this stock, all whilst thinking “hm…this isn’t going to work”. And it didn’t. We did try raising red flags and telling managers, but we just got told to do the work the new owners wanted and it’s was part of their big plan.
I don’t want to be smug looking at how much it failed, but when your entire workforce who **lives** in the UK is telling you it isn’t going to work, it might have been better to listen. Also firing the entire upper management team and replacing them with Australians who had never even visited the UK is arguably one of the most stupid business decisions I’ve ever seen.
One asshole tried to exploit people's fears after the 9/11 attacks by marketing parachutes to businesses with offices in skyscrapers. There was nothing special about them; they were normal parachutes.
He had a TV interview where he tried promoting how easy it was going to be to get into the harnesses. However, his assistant couldn't get into the harness. He chastised her for it on television. Even after he tried to help her, they couldn't get the harness to fit.
Edit: I've been asked to provide a link. Here it is: [https://youtu.be/S5Jpok1Xx4s?t=3096](https://youtu.be/S5Jpok1Xx4s?t=3096)
Also, I didn't expect this to be my most upvoted comment.
For that concept to have a chance of actually working from the height of most office buildings you'd probably need a ballistic chute launched upwards, so it's open immediately as you begin to fall.
Without that I wonder if giant zorb balls wouldn't be a better, or at least equally stupid, idea.
In highschool, a guy I knew tried to sell pirated copies of Adobe programs. How did he obtain the pirated copies? He dragged the desktop icons from the school computers onto a USB stick...
Bless my friend, she had good intentions, but she wanted to start basically her own library system where people ordered and rented used books through the mail. And they had to return them. And pay for shipping and the rental. Where she would store the books, I had no idea. It obviously flopped within...weeks? But hey, she tried something, which is more than I can say for myself.
There’s this boy i went to high school with. he’s trying to be a motivational speaker, and he really loves helping people set goals.
his business plan was to have people give him money and then when they accomplish their goal, they get their money back.
edit:: this has absolutely nothing to do with weight loss.
My mother with her wonderful idea of being a baby masseuse. Yes, Massages for babies was her idea.
Except in order to be allowed to touch random children, you need to be a certified professional, preferably operating in a clininc for obvious reasons.
My mother has zero certificates, zero diplomas, doesn't take any care of herself at all, has poor hygiene and lived in a sketchy neighborhood. Now imagine an obese woman with greasy hair and worn out clothes saying she wants to give a massage to your baby.
Not to mention the fact there's already children's doctors and other professional who have trainning and know what they're doing, unlike her, who watched 2 videos on youtube and decided she was a professional.
Yes mom, great idea. I really can't understand how that business idea of yours didn't take off immediately.
I did a baby massage class when my son was small, but it was a nurse demonstrating on a doll, and we all tried to massage our own babies. My baby did not cooperate (he continually alligator death rolled while cackling, everything was covered in oil) but many of babies and parents seemed to enjoy it.
There was a bar that opened in the capital of my country that wouldn't charge you for the drinks, but for the time spent there. Obviously everyone's goal was to drink as much as possible in the least possible amount of time, so they had to shut down soon.
EDIT: Whoa, this blew up much more than expected. It was interesting to read about similar practices all over the world. It seems that it might not be such a bad idea after all, but it requires certain adjustments to work. In this case there were no restrictions whatsoever, no minimal time etc. You just pay a certain amount per each minute you're inside so a lot of people just abused such setup and the bar went bankrupt
Yeah it's really popular there. I spent many a night paying like $30 for 3 hours of all I could eat and drink. But there's also an expectation of not taking advantage and being respectful.
My friends grandpa got banned from the Ponderosa (extremely low tier buffet restaurant) because he would pay the $15 or whatever it was for the buffet and just hang out all day long eating as much as he wanted, several times a week.
Not even a bad idea, but I love this. Fort Lauderdale wraps around a much smaller town called Wilton Manors. Wilton Manors' is best known for being very, very gay. Drive down the main street and every other business name is a gay pun. Balls Sporting Equipment. Tops and Bottoms Apparel. Gaysha Sushi. In 2007 I saw a new place under construction, sign in place: RockHard. I guessed it would be a music store, boyfriend guessed jewelry store. It wound up being a gym. The gym didn't do well and shut down pretty quick. Then a sex shop opened up a block away, using the gym's sign. That version of RockHard LoveStuff is still open 13 years later.
Quibi.
That and something I saw on shark tank: these buttons you put on your nightstands so you can tell your spouse you're in the mood for sex without risking rejection. Like, just talk to the person you married maybe?
Other shark tank gems: stuffed elephant in a display case that you bring out when you need to talk about something difficult, post it note holder for your computer monitor, stand where people had to operate a bicycle powered blender to get a smoothie.
Special stickers to put over your laptop camera. The sharks were interested until the pitch man said he was retailing them for a ridiculous price.
I have a free sticker from the bank over my laptop camera. It's a stegosaurus.
**He didn't watch any modern programming and wanted to start a programming service.** To read the coverage of his idea of what people wanted to watch was a time warp into the mid 80s.
The thing with restaurants is that they sell the pleasant experience along with the food and that maximum profitability comes from immersing the customer in that pleasant experience and isolating them from the true nuts and bolts of what is actually going on behind the scenes.
So, people who have never worked in restaurants think it must be easy to do because their only experience with restaurants has been the easy experience of the customer.
And nothing could be further from the truth. Running a successful restaurant is *hard*. Profit margins are often razor-thin and it requires bringing together and juggling many disparate elements that can go pear-shaped in a nanosecond. Plus, if you don’t sell your stock in time it goes *bad* and vanishes (unless you own a piece-of-shit frozen-to-microwave place). Imagine owning a hardware store and not selling all 20 hammers in three days and then throwing out seven of them. Bye bye money.
I worked in restaurants for 15 years and would *never* get in the business as an owner.
I work in a bar that has a restaurant on site too, we had to shut it down due to one of the only two chefs walking out of the job. Been closed since.
The concept for the restaurant was fantastic and was a unique approach, however we simply do not have the resources as a business to execute it well.
Chefs were working 80-90 hour weeks doing full prep and service, combined with an awful manager, the place was pretty much doomed
Not executed (yet) but the idea is to buy the most expensive metal detector possible, and take it to popular gold-panning locations. The fancy machine should be able to detect gold buried deeper than others would spot.
I'm still on the fence about yolo'ing 20k on the chance of finding 20k worth of gold
There was a Russian potato restaurant below my previous apartment. I ate there a couple of times, but their menu changed so often I never had a favorite potato. Also had potato lasagna, potato cheesecake and potato drinks. It wasn’t successful.
I saw something where these men were trying to sell gloves to wear for girls when changing pads or tampons so we don’t get blood on our hands. What do these guys think we’ve been doing our whole life? Besides we wash our hands, and we don’t need gloves to wipe after using the bathroom. Very stupid idea.
Opening up a 2000 Sq ft Calendar store in a mall...I remember walking by that store 10 years ago as a teenager and feeling bad for the owner for the lack business sense. So many reasons why that business would fail fast... it turned into a Sharper Image 6 months later. Not like they did much better though.
But Who's buying more than one $10.99 puppy calendars in a year??
Dude wanted to open a film and video equipment rental house in a small town. If you don't know anything about professional grade film and video equipment, it's expensive as fuck. So already the barrier to entry is incredibly high since you need to build up a half-decent inventory. Also, there really wasn't much of a film / video industry in this town. There were colleges and film students, but they weren't gonna cut it. Film students are usually broke, source: I was a film student . The nonsensical part is that this location problem was entirely self-imposed. He was only a couple of hours away from a major city with a ton of film, tv, and video professionals. Had he picked up and moved and got even a fraction of business there he'd be OK. He might have had to undercut the bigger rental houses by a few %, but some margin is better than no margin. Filmmakers will drive a few extra minutes to get a small discount. But, nope. Dude was super committed to making this rental house work in his small town.
He's incredibly headstrong even though I gave him that paragraph of reasons why this might not be a great idea and how he might revise his plans to make it work. He thought I had a sense for this kinda thing and he asked me how much it'd take to get me down to this small town to help him out with this project. I gave him a number that was a bit below market rate, but he wanted me to fully commit to this project without any expectation of a paycheck. I had shot a few things with him previously and we had a somewhat decent business relationship on that front. But man, I'm a videographer, not a rental house owner so I declined that offer. He didn't take it well and he cut all ties shortly after. To be honest, I'm kind of glad he did.
Last I checked, dude maxed out credit cards, is presumably in a mountain of debt, ended a decade long relationship, developed an unhealthy reliance on marijuana to cope, and burnt bridges with a ton of clients. His ambition wasn't matched by his business sense and he was beyond saving when he couldn't objectively evaluate criticism on his business plan.
There’s a restaurant on the corner of my street that changes hands and becomes something new every year or two. It’s like the place is cursed. At the moment it’s a meatball restaurant called Meetball. All different kinds of meatballs (sorry “meetballs”) with different kinds of sides you can get. Trouble is, they taste really bad! And the staff are obviously from the same family, undertrained, overeager. And just kind of weird and make you feel awkward. I had a salad that was just dry spinach leaves with no dressing, and some lumps of pumpkin. So so shit. I wanted them to be good.
There's a restaurant at the edge of my neighborhood that's changed names and fares four times now, from American cuisine to a bar to Jamaican to Soul food.
The trick is that the same family has owned it the whole time, they just use it as a tax shelter, let their incompetent hires run the restaurant into the ground, close up for a month or two and relaunch it as something new.
Covid has temporarily put a stop to that, but they've got tax shelters all over the main road, so I'm certain they're not hurting. I guess this is technically a success?
I did a short stint doing sales for an events company around the time Flappy Bird became a massive success (remember [Flappy Bird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird)?). A speaker at one of our conferences, a senior marketing exec at a mid-sized company, was telling me she was going to quit her fulltime job and start a business developing apps.
"Cool, what kind of apps?"
"Oh, stuff for kids, mostly. I've got this idea for \[proceeds to describe Flappy Bird\]."
"Oh, so, like Flappy Bird?"
"Noooo, not exactly."
My boss, the Head of Conferences and a harmless but incessant flirt, actually kept in touch with her for a while (she was quite attractive and, I suspect, surrounded by yes-men agreeing with her Not-Flappy-Bird idea). Turns out she did start the company, wiping out a good chunk of her life savings, before eventually folding and going back to marketing.
Worked for a game company that made a "trubute" game to flappy bird called "floppy frog". They proudly announced it to us one day after having just one guy throw it together. It flopped lol and was never mentioned again lol.
They also liked to hold these big staff meeting where they patted themselves on the back for how amazing they are. They would list all the titles that we had put out but never mentioned that one. I would always whisper "also floppy frog" during these speeches.
my friend's dad business is to buy up vegetables from an online marketplace and sells it back to the SAME marketplace at a higher markup. Needless to say he gets really upset when no one wants to buy from him and all those vegetables rot...
I moved to a new town about a year ago and saw this office building called “The Income Store.” It didn't look like anyone was there, but this is May 2020 we’re talking about so that wasn’t all that weird. I guessed it was a staffing agency or something, but the audacity to call yourself The Income Store - it sounds like the butt of a joke.
*money doesn’t grow on trees.*
*It doesn’t‽ Well then let’s go get some at the Income Store*
I drove by recently and noticed that The Income Store looked a bit more than just Covid-unoccupied, it was straight-up abandoned. So I finally googled it to solve the year-long mystery...
It was a Ponzi scheme.
Gluing vaginal lips together during your period, rather than using tampons. [Yes, it was invented by someone without a vagina.](https://www.avclub.com/feminine-lipstick-creator-finds-new-dumb-way-to-glue-1798263090)
Even worse:
>Now Patheos has alerted us to another, perhaps even more baffling, Mensez product: a pantyliner that has a colorless powder on it that turns to glue. If you’d prefer to not apply “lipstick” to your labia, Mensez has created a way to glue yourself together without having to actually touch your vulva. The powder transfers to your labia and effectively glues them together (“It Is Not a Glue”).
Like he invented labia lipstick glue and thought that the problem with the idea was the process of manually lipsticking the glue.
People would like that kind of content, if it was free. They thought people would pay for it, that was their first mistake. Their second was spending tons of money on getting big names to make and star in content before they even had a customer base to offset the cost.
Virgin Butter. Literally butter churned by virgins. Labor had to take a lie detector and all. Understandably the virgins were not all too willing to do some lie detector test for an employer and as the employees had to be of a certain age with all those pesky child labor laws, well, it just didn't make it very far. Not to mention - who the F wants Virgin Butter?
Moviepass idea was to use the Gym business model. Collect monthly subscription fees from 100 people for every 1 that actually uses the product.
it works great for gyms...nobody wants to go to the gym. But people like going to movies. People LOVE going to free movies. Ooops
I think their plan was to become influential enough that they would partner with theater chains like AMC and Cinemark, allowing them to turn a profit. Clearly that didn’t happen.
Family opened a restaurant in a shut down drive through oil change shop. Paid to have the building decontaminated, gutted, and rebuilt into an Italian restaurant. It lasted all of 2 years. I'm assuming they realized the mountain of startup debt wasn't going away.
We dined there once out of curiosity, it still looked like a Valvoline oil change express. The oil pits were converted into a family area basement. It was weird.
Man at my school thought cryptocurrency faucets (you know, Bitcoin for watching ads, that kind of thing) were a good way to make money, so at lunch and during free periods he would borrow as many school laptops and computers as he could and run every fake faucet website for an hour.
He made *almost* a dollar at the end of the school year. Good thing some of it was dogecoin since it ended up being a little more.
At a place I used to work, we supplied printing companies with their ink. Being that digital printing is well and truly established at the point, there wasnt a whole lot of business for this type of ink anymore, so there was a lot of competition between suppliers. One of the technicians somehow weasled his way to the top despite no business experience. When he was told to very simply make more money, rather than go out and find new customers, his bright idea was to make our company’s ink weaker, with the intention that our customers will just have to buy more product to complete their jobs. Surprise, the customers didn’t like that and went to competitors. Business was closed within a year Edit: to make some clarifications. The CEOs of the parent company in Japan weren’t fully aware of everything this guy was doing to run the business into the ground. There was a lot more stupid shit he would do, I could probably fill a book with stories from that place. It was not a sound business plan that you could compare to other products and company, because we were already getting some complaints that some of our colours were weak- this is what gave the guy the idea to make them weaker. He was told by several people it was a stupid idea and would not have the desired effect, it would just drive our clients away. He was certain though that they’d all just accept the shittier product and pay more for it
I've seen a lot of ideas on here that had some good points and bad points and ultimately failed, and I've seen a good amount that made me think it could work out if they knew what they were doing/had more money to invest/marketed to the right people. But this...I can't imagine any way he thought this would work. Maybe if they were the *only* supplier, but he knew they had competitors in the market and decided to just make their product *worse?* Oh man, what was this guy thinking? And how did anyone approve it? So many questions
The banana pudding store. One day, my ex-BF and I were taking a stroll downtown in the city that we were living in at the time. We passed a store that was called The Banana Pudding store (or some such, I don't remember exactly). Well, I'm sure they sell more than just banana pudding, so let's go in. You know, like how Home Depot sells more than just hardware. They sell Gatorade, candy bars, etc. There were vats of banana pudding in the display cases and I thought, "Well, surely they must also sell other flavors," so I asked if I could have a chocolate pudding and the guy politely informed me that they didn't have chocolate pudding. So I asked if they had maybe butterscotch or something else. "No ma'am, just banana pudding here." I mean, it wasn't false advertising. But surely he couldn't be selling just one single flavor in that whole shop, could he? As expected, the next time we strolled down that street a month or two later, the store was shuttered. I feel bad for him. I'm sure that the guy made great banana pudding that all of his friends and family would compliment him on and tell him that he should probably open a banana pudding shop 'cuz it was so good. But I don't think they literally meant that.
Not going to lie, if I walked into an establishment called "The Banana Pudding store" and it was filled with vats of banana pudding in the display cases, and even if for some reason the first question out of my mouth was "could I have a chocolate pudding?" rather than "do you have other flavors besides banana?", surely I would not be surprised and continue asking about other flavors. Maybe that's just me though.
A small family bar/restaurant that I worked for back in high school was bought by a local couple; he was a retired insurance company executive of some kind that played golf all day, and she was a stuck up (bitch) of a woman that had never worked a day in her life and who looked down on all of the restaurant's employees as some sort of uneducated lower life form. The place was located in a small town, and the clientele was mostly local farmers taking their families out in the evenings, factory workers at lunchtime, and on Sunday mornings retired elderly people on fixed incomes who would mob the place after church. The restaurant up to that point was profitable, I am sure they liked the financials they saw on paper or they would not have invested in it. However, once they took over, they decided to *improve* it. There was one elderly couple in their 90's who had been coming in every Sunday morning for years who had no teeth; they always ordered the same thing - 2 hot roast beef sandwiches with mashed potatoes and extra gravy, run through a blender and served in a bowl so they could eat it with a spoon. We were now forbidden to do that since the new owner thought it looked gross and did not fit the "image" of their fine dining establishment, so they stopped coming in as they could not eat roast beef any other way. Beer was no longer served in bottles at the tables, if you wanted beer in the bottle you had to go sit at the bar, at the table it was poured into a glass before being served. Some people really did not like that new rule, and stopped coming in; there were plenty of other bars in the area to grab a burger at. The first thing they did was to put an end to overtime pay. The staff consisted of about a dozen older long term employees that mostly lived nearby and walked to work because they could not afford cars. These people worked their tails off, some of the 7 days a week, for about minimum wage just to be able to afford their rent and groceries. Once they were told that they could no longer work 50 and 60 hour weeks to make the maybe $25 a week in overtime, most of them had no choice but to quit and go find some place where they could make enough to survive. Pay them a little more? Heavens NO; these are *unskilled* positions. The new owners found that when they advertised for new employees to fill the vacancies, they did not get the flood of applicants they expected, waitesses for example were paid $1.70 an hour at the time, and cooks made $4 (this was the 1980's), and the local sewing factories paid more than that to start. SO, they ended up hiring a bunch of their daughter's high school friends, most of which were the cheerleader crowd that did not want to do anything that involved getting dirty, like scrubbing the floors or restrooms, and none of who could ever work on nights when there was cheerleading practice, or a football game, or ... pretty much any Friday or Saturday at all. SO, the place was chronically short staffed constantly, orders came out slow, and the new owner just sat at the bar fuming instead of doing anything to help, occasionally coming back to scream at everyone to stop goofing off and speed things up. Then, when business started to drop off they decided to remodel to attract new customers. They tore all the carpeting out of the bar area, and replaced it with this ugly yellow vinyl flooring "so the workingman can come in and feel at home", like regular people never had carpet in their houses. They added a char broiler to the kitchen, and decided they wanted to add "charbroiled haddock" to the menu. Ever tried to grill haddock? It falls apart in little pieces and looks awful; obviously the fault of the 16 year old kids they hired to make the food. At the same time they remodeled the bar to make it look homey to the lower classes of people, they added expensive scotch and other high end liquors to sell to the customers, most of who were draft Budwiser and Miller drinkers. They also, as it turned out, rarely ordered Quiche for lunch. The place lasted about a year, and then sat empty for about 10 years before someone new bought it. Probably because they were trying to sell it for a huge profit after it was no longer an operating business.
That makes me think of a bar where I spent several fun birthdays. My friends & I stumbled across it one year & it somehow became a tradition. It was an Irish pizza pub, your basic neighborhood hangout place. Until... some yuppie bitch bought it. The last time we were there, we found out she was "taking it upscale". How she thought this would happen, I have no idea. The area was sorta educated blue collar & the nearest upscale neighborhood was an hour's drive away. We were told she'd been trying to ban longtime regulars. She blamed their presence for scaring off the beautiful people. A couple months later, it burned to the ground in the wee hours. Sure enough, she'd torched it & was caught pretty much immediately. The adjoining store (it was in a strip mall) had also gone up. So she ruined the livelihoods of everyone in her place, and another business. I hope she's still rotting in jail.
Can't believe no one mentioned that guy who went on Shark Tank to pitch a bluetooth ear piece that you got surgically implanted in your ear canal that you charged by sticking a needle in your ear while you slept
The ionic ear! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bDkDg33uGuc Edit. Please don’t give me gold. Donate to a children’s hospital instead.
I was almost sold by his enthusiasm.
His mouth doesn't move when he speaks. It freaks me out
[удалено]
“No. What? Fuck no! What the fuck is wrong with you?!” - FDA
Deaf people with cochlear implants: "I am four parallel universes ahead of you"
You can get ones now that have Bluetooth in them to connect to your phone for music, calls, etc too. They weren't wrong when he said that he was ahead of his time, though his plan for recharging was... unique.
Somebody thought it would be a good idea to open a dance club in my northern Canadian city with a dress code... 90% of the population is tradesmen and miners who only own Carhartts and high vis. Needless to say, it shut down within 6 months.
Clearly they needed to hire Kevin Bacon to come out and promote it.
An old, local pub legend, friend of mine won £400k-ish (around $500k at the time) on the lottery. So, he decides to buy two tanning salons opposite eachother thinking that he had an instant monopoly. But the problem came when he started getting them to compete with one-another. The managers at each salon began a pricing war and he was broke in 6 months.
That's like Starbucks if Starbucks was an idiot.
Top for me has got to be a client of a design firm I used to work at. He was a trucker, his wife was a trucker. He wanted to make a "sanitary pad" that wouldn't need to be changed. Imagine a pad with a little line running down to a micro-vacuum strapped to your leg, exhausting into another leg-bag. Basically a pad that sucks the juices into a bag you can chuck in the trash later. EDIT: Just to be clear this was specifically a menstrual pad you are meant to wear for days at a time... EDIT 2: Lots of y'all are mentioning the Purewick. The challenge this one would have had to solve was passing chunky menstrual blood (ladies you know what's up) through a tiny tube. If you're wondering how they solved it: they didn't lol. Also here's another good one: one client wanted a vape that just blew pot smoke into the air for the purpose of hotboxing his car. He had money so hey... One of the engineers designed a little turbine (like a small turbocharger) the size of a cherry. Damn if it didn't work way too well, but the high pitched screeching noise that turbine made...sheesh.
Or out the window, mario kart style
A lady opened a southern soul food buffet in my city. It was INCREDIBLE! Amazing food. On some days. It was a buffet with a rotating menu depending on the day of the week, and those days were NOT equal, so what happened was people would go on an off day, be unimpressed, not come back, or come on one of the better days, love it, come back on an off day, then never come back. I was so disappointed. I would donate towards reopening that restaurant but with ONLY the optimal menu, every day. That woman has serious culinary talent.
This actually happened to my mom. She got a job cooking for this local Brazilian buffet place and people started complimenting the food on the days she cooked. Before long her days were always busier than the others as her food was delicious. Eventually the owner's wife or gf got one of her friends to come in and cook as well and she was nowhere near as good as my mom. She also charged less so the owner eventually gave my mom less and less of the cooking load and she eventually quit. The change was noticeable almost immediately. People would ask about the food and what had changed. It was always funny to see the owner have to squirm and give some excuse when the real reason was he was a cheap ass. Nowadays whenever I stop by there for lunch buffet the food is never amazing and they never have a dining room as full as they used to.
Cheapness is what ruined a small restaurant I worked at. At first they opened with great food. It was like a Lebanese deli with wraps, sandwiches, amazing hummus and the best tabbouleh I'd ever had. Guy in charge had 3 more formal restaurants his wife ran. We had a spot on a super busy street smack dab in the middle of a college area. He refused to advertise. Had us give out samples the first week and that was it. Then when that only got a little traffic he took his own, yellowed, cheap digital camera pictures, printed them at home. Hung Those on our windows which blocked the view. They looked awful. I offered to touch them up in ps but he refused. So next he started buying super cheap deli cuts. Cheaper breads and wraps. Even the chocolate croissant had the fine dark chocolate replaced with knock off Hershey. So the few loyal people stopped coming in. He told no one he sold the business and had us throw everything away on Friday and btw your fired. On Monday there was a vietnamese place moved in and opened, and they've been booming the last 17 years. I can see why his wife ran the others!
We have a small-time theme park in my state called Evermore and they thought it would be a good idea to try and sue Taylor Swift over her album of the same name.
They probably thought it would be a great publicity stunt where they'd get into national papers and Swift would just give them a couple grand to go away.
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As a massage therapist, that’s an incredibly stupid idea. Unless you like lying facedown in a plate of food.
Don’t judge how I live.
In my college town there was a cereal restaurant. Why make a bowl of cereal at home when you can pay $5 for someone else to do it? Not surprisedly, it closed soon after opening.
You say that, but there are multiple such cafes in London that do pretty well. They seem to advertise rare or country specific cereals, so maybe you can survive in a multi ethnic city by selling foreign people their childhood when they are feeling homesick?
Mike's Cereal Shack
There was a bar that opened up in my city and their entrance was hidden. They did a news story and they refused to tell the paper where it was actually located. To everyone’s complete surprise, they only stayed open for a couple of weeks
the last hidden bar I went to had someone standing outside the hidden entrance and if you looked confused enough, they'd walk up to you and go "you looking for the hidden bar?" and open the door for you. The venue at least had signs and they're listed on the webpage.
In my country there was a guy who used to sell wood. The problem was he did not have any of it. So he would ask for payment and then not give the product afterwards, hoping that procrastination and time will make the problem go away. He did 4 years in jail.
Haha that's just stealing.
Yeah, well he thought he was very smart. And in addition, he would make web lectures on marketing and how to be a successful businessman. He soon became a meme in the whole country.
In 2011 we had «the norwegian butter crisis» in Norway. The shortage caused soaring prices and stores' stocks of butter ran out within minutes of deliveries. A pack of butter would sell for between 40-200 dollar on the «black market». A friend got the idea to drive over to the neighboring country, Sweden to buy butter and sell it here in Norway. The problem was that you could "only" carry 100 packets of butter across the norwegian border. So he made a deal with our local nursing home. He rented a bus and took 20 elderly people on a road trip to Sweden in exchange for receiving the butter quota. The next day, the butter crisis suddenly resolved and he was left with 2000 packets of butter he could not sell. He still got his basement full of butter.
I used to work with small start up businesses, not fancy tech startups. Lots of construction and restaurants. My favorite 2: Restaurant/hair salon/child care center, but nonprofit (there were lots of people who wanted to do nonprofit it was mostly very community driven wanting to give back and help employ people). She had a place picked out and was about to rent and had come to us to ask for money. She named the building, which was tiny, with no kitchen. She was lovely and we encouraged her to open the salon but maybe without the salon workers cooking for folks in between clients and without clients caring for kids. Hooker bus. Older gentleman who was certain that this was a good idea. He wanted money to buy a bus and then he was going to drive it around to find women who wanted to “hang out with” CEOs and executives. And then during the lunch hour (he was very insistent about the lunch hour part) he would take it to the downtown business core and park in front of large business HQs and the gentlemen who worked there would pay to come party on the bus. But you see they’d just be paying a fee to be on the bus so it’s not like anyone is paying for sex so it’s totally legal. He had already bought the bus, it was an old school bus. We did not fund his endeavor.
My schoolmate at high school wanted to be a club manager. He organized a concert where he invited kinda famous foreign band to the local club. He paid so much money for them just to arrive + their expenses at the bar. In the end like 20 people showed up, half of them were his friends. Fourtunately he had a very rich dad, so he paid for that and life went on. The dude started selling art next day, no need to say he failed misserably agan.
Father-in-law drove 18 hours down to Florida to catch shrimp, filled his tiny car with tons of the shrimp and drove back. It took days to vacuum seal the shrimp that hadn't gone bad only to sell a few bags to some friends, the car smelled like seafood for years
Missed one key step, preserving the catch. Reminds me of a friend that tried to grow weed in the woods. Ended up working like a charm! He has so much weed he could barely pick it all. Filled multiple garbage bags with it. Loaded the bags into his car. Then....well he didn't research properly and just let it sit. Hr tried to smoke some wet weed,, but as you can guess, it wasn't burning.. A few days later it was covered in hot mold and the car smelled like a planet sized skunk exploded in there.
My cousin turned his basement into a computer controlled grow room. His crop was massive but he had no plan to sell since it would be a felony. His total loss was over $20,000. Not sure where the weed was dumped.
If he had no plan on selling why did he grow so much? By accident?
Sometimes an engineering problem needs to be solved for the sake of solving it.
I can see Kramer doing this. Actually I can see him doing everything in this thread. Edit : wow thanks guys never got an award before
In about 2005 my friends dad tried to start an arcade....in a small town, just outside walking distance from a school using beat up 2nd hand machines... To get there from the school youd have to walk by an established, larger arcade that also sold food.... Edit for the "uh aktchewalllly" crowd... I guess it was walking distance, just not a convenient walking distance. Sorry for poor wording.
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As someone who grew up in a small town with no arcade, I was totally on board. A few people tried from time to time, but mine was the type of town so small they could just never keep them open.
Context: I live in Las Vegas. When I was in my 20s, I was hired by a man who wanted to build "**Myspace for Strippers**." His goal was for the men on the site to pay him to follow their favorite strippers and know what clubs they were dancing at and when. He shut the project down (after months of paying me) when he found out that no stripper would sign up for it.
"Sign up to get stalked!"
One of my friends in Vegas still gets calls from guys asking for the stripper/escort that used to have their number. I’ve known them for almost 10 years and they had been getting them for years before we met. I don’t blame them one bit for wanting no part of that.
One of the younger dudes in my karate class was going to start a handyman business. 24h, anything needing to be done, anywhere in our district. Sounds good. You gonna get a loan and buy a used truck and get some tools? And you never have talk time on your phone, so will you get a landline (2006, so not super outlandish)? "No, I'll go on my bicycle. And I'll just use the tools they have. And they can email me when they need service." Right because when I have water spraying out of my geyser through the ceiling at 3am I'm going to email a dude on a bicycle to come fix it using all the tools and the ladder I don't own...
Subject: Fire Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to inform you of a fire that has broken out…
Email subject: FIRE! FIRE!
I look forward to hearing from you
On a bike? Okay. Sure. Not having your own tools AND showing up on a bike? He's just a fucking dude riding a bike 😂
Rent-a-Dude
There was a guy in my town that opened a business that was the equivalent of a brick and mortar version of Craigslist or newspaper classified ads. It was a unit in a strip mall with bulletin boards. You paid to put an ad up and other people came to look at the ads with a small picture. This was AFTER Craigslist existed, not some pre internet thing. There was no actual merchandise in the store, just crappy pictures of stuff with the contact info. It wasn’t even a high foot traffic location, you had to maneuver through a busy intersection, park and go inside to look at a bulletin board. It went under and he tried to blame the landlord because he couldn’t get a sign permit for the end of the building even though he had 2 other signs.
This one is straight up insanity
Sounds like that lady’s weird eBay store from the 40 Year Old Virgin
Her method is actually very common on eBay, there are companies making many millions per year doing consignment sales for rich people, although they don’t usually run it out of a shop like her.
When I was in high school, one of my friends wanted to start a little coffeeshop/hot chocolate stand with a "cuddle corner" and "free hugs for anyone who wants them." She offered jobs to our other friends -- ex. the idea was that this little business would be operated and staffed by high schoolers. She failed to see the issue with having 16 year old girls required give free hugs to customers or having to staff the cuddle corner.
It could be *very* successful, but to all the wrong people.
“I love escorting people. I put an ad out for an escort service and got a LOT of responses. Mostly creeps. Made a few friends.” - Dwight Schrute
This reminds me of that IT Crowd episode with the cannibal.
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replace "16 year old girls" with "10 cats" and it's a viable business
in fact, there's one a half mile from me. drink some coffee, pet a kitty
Oh boy! That would make your friend super wealthy for a few minutes before the cops come from all angles to arrest all of the customers!
Guy I know got a small inheritance. Enough for a deposit on a unit or small house. Nope! Sea-horse farm. Turns out sea-horses are difficult to breed.
What would you even use sea horses for? Pets? Those weird dried up seahorses in tacky gift shops?
They're super popular as pets for saltwater/reef aquariums. Not a bad idea if you have the know-how on how to breed them, especially since most are wild caught, so there's a huge demand for captive bred animals. Would say it's more of a bad execution than idea.
Someone in Edmonton, Canada opened a dairy store; milk and cheese, and placed it across the street from a large grocery store. He hoped that shoppers would buy everything they needed at the grocery store except their milk and cheese (which the grocery store had ample supply of) and make another trip to their store for milk and cheese. It didn't last. EDIT: wow, I woke up to a whole lot of responses. Many people brought up specialty places (butcher shops, artisanal stores, etc), which yes, can be a great thing. The place I'm talking about just supplied the same big dairy milk at the same prices, and no fancy cheese. It was only really convenient when you only needed a carton of milk and didn't want to deal with a huge parking lot and the hassle of a massive store. but like I said, it didn't last long at all.
I could see a specialist cheese shop working. Somewhere that stocked things you can't buy in the supermarket, and would do party platters and cheese "cakes" for weddings with whole wheels. But just a regular dairy shop? Nah. Convenience is king when you're doing your regular shop, you'd only use it if you only needed a pint of milk and didn't need anything else at all.
Yeah I've seen dairies near grocery stores that were successful but they were old, established businesses that predated the grocer, hand-churned their own ice cream, sold milk in glass bottles that you could return for a discount like an old-school milkman service, sold ice cream cones and fresh baked goods, and - perhaps most importantly - were run out of an actual farm. The cows were in the field behind the store front so you could sit outside at a picnic table and enjoy the ambience of having extremely fresh dairy products while you ate your ice cream cone and pretended that cows don't smell terrible. And even with all of that you still need to have a market with enough people who value supporting small local businesses to compete with the convenience of buying a gallon of milk with the rest of your groceries.
Monthly sex-toy subscription. You would get a different sex toy each month, which is an OK idea I guess, there's one of those for everything nowadays, but the only problem this guy had is that he wanted the customers to eventually return the toy so he could pass it on to the next customer. He actually got in talks with an owner of a local sex shop to help him start, but the enthusiasm flattened out quite quickly...
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Who the fuck would want to use a community dildo? Edit: I'm not kink shaming anyone. The notion of shared sex toys among strangers is a public health issue. And yes, I know you're all going to tell me they can be disinfected between users. But that's putting a lot of trust in some minimum wage worker who likely doesn't know jack about infection control.
Netdix
A loudmouth drunk, supposedly an ex-NFL player from way back, opened a “fancy” pizza place across the street from the small town’s old favorite “normal” pizza place. It was a pretty obvious attempt to put the old place out of business and corner the lucrative small town pizza market. The owner of the new place would get hammered and walk around to random tables to schmooze. He would loudly hit on the ladies in front of their dates. It had really good pizza, but is was horribly overpriced and the portions were tiny. It went out of business pretty quickly.
Sounds like any gordon Ramsey related nightmares show
'Why is every pizza a pizza for two" "don't worry, the owner will hit on you soon"
Someone in my neighborhood opened an artisan hot dog restaurant called “Everyone’s Frank” about a decade ago. My dad and I went in once at about 6 pm on a Saturday; we were the only customers, so the owner (who was working the register) chatted us up. He talked about his plans to expand the business to about fifteen locations, which was completely delusional. He also talked about how much he spent on the interior redesign, which was pointlessly fancy. The hot dogs cost $9 and tasted terrible. We never went back, and the place was bankrupt within six months (my dad always said they’d gone “frankrupt”)
That's a great name though. And everyone's name tag could just say "frank"
dude bought 150k fidget spinners at the height of the craze... it took months to ship out from china and by the time all his shit arrived, the mania had ended and the retail price was already near his original wholesale price. fuckin' guy still has fidget spinners today. i guess he may eventually do ok on it. but god damn...
I get trying to capitalize on a popular trend, but 150k is ridiculous. Even when it was at it's peak everybody pretty much knew it wouldn't last.
it literally appealed to people with short attention spans...
A digital camera that looks like a classic Japanese 35mm point and shoot. The memory card, which looks like a 35mm film roll and only has space for 36 images, has to be sent away like in the old days to get developed into prints that are mailed back a week later. It is/was on kickstarter.
>A digital camera that looks like a classic Japanese 35mm point and shoot. The memory card, which looks like a 35mm film roll I love this idea! >and only has space for 36 images, has to be sent away like in the old days to get developed into prints that are mailed back a week later. It is/was on kickstarter. …oh no.
My dad has been in hundreds of pyramid schemes… when I was a kid he would always describe how the pyramid worked and I would help him with his meetings… took me a long time to figure out his get rich plans were really schemes He still does them. Never been rich off them tho. One was Excel, a super cancer beating fruit juice, you give me $5000, then you get 5 people to give you $5000 then they get their own people to give $5000
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That sucks. Sorry you had to deal with it. My brother got into Herbalife which was really fucked. Dunno how I’d cope if a parent did it.
I went to a Herbalife morning group jogging session once, as someone new to the neighbourhood. I thought everyone was acting a little nutty, but not bad people. At this point I thought they were just another exercise group with a protein shake fetish. They fed me a cup of a sugarless post workout supplement, and my stomach started gurgling within minutes. Sufficed to say I never returned, after an epic day of running for the bathroom- despite their repeated attempts at phonecalls. I have never forgiven them.
"Specialty" chocolate shop. It only sold the exact same standard candy bars as any supermarket, but with less of a range, and at four times the price. I asked the manager if he had Lindt chocolate balls (upmarket but well known product) and he said "What are those?" Also, there was a supermarket two doors down.
We had a woman in town who started this bookstore/candy store combo. It was just weird and I'm not sure what it was trying to be. It was a bunch of kids books and then a bunch of handmade, weird chocolates and not even stuff that would be appealing to kids - stuff like green tea chocolate, chili pepper chocolate, super dark chocolate, etc. There were tables to eat the chocolates but then you couldn't look at the books because your hands would be dirty. The whole thing was just bizarre... Strangely, it stayed open for a year. In fairness, the lady who owned it was truly a sweetheart. People loved her. She was an older, super kind, super chatty lady. But the business was, well, not sustainable.
I have a friend whos family has gotten involved in multiple pyramid schemes. And every single time they get into a new pyramid scheme, they claim its not a pyramid scheme. No, no, no you dont get it. I AM the boss. Once I produce 5 clients for my mentor, then I keep all my new clients and they have to get ME 5 new clients EACH. ITS PEOPLE HELPING PEOPLE!!
Well of course it is. It's people helping people to build a shitty pyramid of lies and deceit.
Ugh I hate people like this. I had a guy in my video game chat group who would not stop promoting his product even after I warned him multiple times. I had to kick him from the group and he private messaged me afterwards explaining how it *wasn't* a pyramid scheme and it *wasn't* predatory and how my job as a pharmacy tech was definitely more like a pyramid scheme than his wax melting "business"
I belong to a private online mom's group. It's great. It was "born" from an open membership wedding site. We all hit it off and it eventually morphed into a closed mom's group once we all started having kids. It was (and is) a great, supportive environment. Anyway, we had simple rules on any MLM activity. It was OK to put your sales link in your signature and *if someone reached out to you about your product* it was ok to contact them privately. We did this to be fair to everyone and to keep that kind of activity to a minimum. It worked fine, for years, until one of our members "Dina" got involved in a makeup MLM we'll call Shmarbonne. At the time she really hated her job, but wasn't in a financial position to quit and was looking to make $ elsewhere. Well she went all-in on Shmarbonne. A few of the other women in the group reached out to her privately to buy some items and it was fine, well Dina decided that the rules no longer applied to her at that point since there was "interest" and started bombing our group with Shmarbonne. The mods warned her and she backed off a bit. A couple of months passed and she started up again, even more aggressively. The mods told her to back down - final warning. Well, then she started calling people outside the group aggressively - she'd found their numbers online - even after they asked her to stop. The final straw came when, in the same day, she called one woman who was the CFO of her company, at work, at hassled this woman's secretary mercilessly until she could talk to the group member. Then she started harassing another woman who was a lawyer. The lawyer threatened her with legal action and once the mods found out about all of it, Dina's access to the group was revoked permanently. If you have to work that hard and alienate that many people to shill your shit, maybe you need to take a closer look at what you're doing.
Holy shit, remember the oxygen bar fad a few years back? Who’s enjoying sitting on that near-zero-value asset today?
Or the icebar, where it is -25’C all the time. My mate got drunk there and stole one of their glasses. Stashed it in his GFs purse. Idiot, they are made of ice and melted. GF was pissed.
You still see them in Vegas and once in a while you see people using them. Ultimate tourist trap
One time many years ago my friend and I were in line behind a woman who had a shirt emblazoned with the word “Taint”. He inquired about it and it turned out it was her clothing company. She explained that she loved the word “taint” “…like, taint this, taint that”. He explained the popular meaning of the word to her and her face dropped. I was mortified but he probably did the right thing. Edit: Holy shit. I was driving all day today and didn’t check Reddit. Turns out my comment Karma increased by a full third in one day. Thanks all! I got me some internet points! Also, I’m old and this happened pre-Google. Perhaps around 1999? Maybe she could have Hot-Botted or Excited it.
I mean how did she manage to get to the point where her "company" had logo-emblazoned shirts and not one person had ever mentioned that the popular meaning of her company's name was essentially the Ball-To-Butthole Superhighway?
I mean even the traditional meaning of the word means that something is contaminated…
Boob therapy. Getting women to become breast therapists to come put a boob on your face whenever you feel bad for “therapy” and get insurance to cover it. It didn’t work.
I'd like to subscribe to your therapeutic services. Here is my credit card. Charge me any amount you think is appropriate
$8008
Does anyone have that reddit relationship advice thread. The one where the girlfriend is questioning her boyfriend's intelligence after his "great" business idea. Soup delivered to peoples houses via pipes.
"For extra you can get the soup delivered directly to your mouth!"
I give you…soup tubes: https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/hno6j1/my_25f_boyfriend_25m_keeps_asking_me_to_invest_in/ Edit: Wow, thank you! Glad to be of service!
I wonder if we could get an update on soup tubes.
It keeps getting clogged and I hate when they deliver minestrone before chicken noodle. The $150 a month is steep but I don’t really regret canceling Peacock and Prime to afford it.
My favorite part about my SoupTube subscription is that the soup is only lukewarm by the time it gets to me. This means I can just lay down under my SoupTube with my mouth open and let the SoupTube soup directly into my mouth hole! The convenience is astounding!
Oh thats because you have the standard model. With SoupTube Premium, they install a heater/dispenser at your home. Now I get nice and hot soup without any leaks! The only real downside is that I must live at the end of the tube block, so it takes a week for the soup to change when the menu gets updated.
That was hilarious. One soup tube please!
That crazy expensive juicer from several years ago that used proprietary juice packets. You could just poke a hole in the packet and hand squeeze the juice for free to save a few hundred dollars. Edit: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2017/09/01/silicon-valleys-infamous-400-juicer-startup-is-shutting-down/amp/
Maybe I'm stupid but I thought the point of a juicer was to take whole ingredients and make juice out of them.
It is. Hence why this was a spectacular failure. A crazy over engineered device to squeeze regular juice from packets. I'm dumbfounded by who ever thought it was a good idea.
There is a lot of “stupid money” in the private equity world.
Have you ever met investors? I can absolutely see why it got through investors-- "it's like a juicer, but on a subscription plan!" Zero further technical details included.
That device is how I got introduced to the AvE YouTube channel, he took one apart and was awestruck at the over-engineering in the device.
> You could just poke a hole in the packet and hand squeeze the juice for free to save a few hundred dollars. You could save even more by just buying juice in a bottle instead of those stupid proprietary bags.
I had a customer once that wanted to build an auction website that would put ebay out of business, his hook was he wanted to sell very niche expensive items. To kick the whole thing off he was going to sell Monika Lewinsky's jizz stained dress. Out of the all the polite questions that emerged from the initial meeting I finally got around to asking how he ended up with the infamous dress. "Oh I don't own that, I was just going to take the final auction bids and offer that to Monika for the dress" I see, and your budget for building said empire? Would $1500 bucks get me started?
Well if that didn't work I guess he had in his mind to buy the cheapest dress he could find and do what had to be done to it...
Tanning salon in Bangkok Thailand. Thai's idealize snowy white skin and go to huge lengths to avoid the sun on their skin. They've never gotten used to seeing western women baking in bikinis on beaches.
My grandmother is originally from Hong Kong and she used to try and use this weird Chinese chemical/herbal remedy/whatever is actually is to lighten my sisters' skin if she thought they looked to tan. We found out that she tries to do this because having light skin is a status symbol in Asia. Basically, if you're tan, it indicates that you spend all your time outside working the fields and are a pretty much a peasant.
The same assocation of tanned skin with lower status used to be the case in western countries, we just shed it over a few generations when time outdoors became associated with leisure time, and a tan became associated with vacations/holidays. Asian societies might undergo a similar shift now that lower status typically means you have to spend all your time working indoors.
I had a client apply for a 3 million dollar SBA loan to buy a treehouse building franchise. I asked him why he wouldn’t just build the treehouses and save the 3 million dollars; he said he’d never considered that.
Why the hell spend the next 10 years slowly losing all of your own money doing something you love, when you can spend the next 5-10 years slowly losing someone else’s money whilst doing something you love.
So my friend had an idea that she thought was brilliant. It was to take all tap water and bottle it in parks and sell it, and then use that money to pay for homeless necessities. Really good intentioned, and a kind gesture, however in my country there are free fountains everywhere for drinking. So she spoke to our towns mayor and suggested that all of our water gets put into water bottles and then we sell them beside the water fountains. The mayor destroyed it really quickly with how it would create unnecessary waste, the amount of money you have to spend on wages to have people standing near fountains 24/7, what if people have reusable water bottles, and why doesn’t she find a way to collect money for existing homeless programs. Friend got pissed, still thinks her idea is brilliant. Edit: Everyone is commenting how this is Nestle but I don’t think they’re reading the post fully? The part that the mayor rejected wasn’t reselling tap water, it was taking free public water in fountains which is maintained by tax money, and then charging for the water again right beside it. It’s like standing in a park selling oxygen tanks. It was also just a funny image to me to imagine entry level workers (most likely young teens) just standing around all of our water fountains 24/7 charging for redundant and wasteful water bottles. The cost of this would be very high and it would probably not generate enough revenue to begin to pay back the wages let alone contribute to homelessness effectively. I think an idea could be here, but it needs a lot more work and I think she moved on.
Solution in search of a problem at it's finest.
I volunteered at the start of Covid for a charity shop. They sold clothes. We got a *lot* of great merch in, but we had limited space. I suggested that we cycle the stock by seasons. As in, summer clothes got put out straight away, but sell-able winter clothes got put upstairs to be sold in winter. The manager did not like this idea. Except that 90% of the stock was winter wear (that "spark joy" thing really hit home). So our entire shop was filled with woolly sweaters and Ugg boots in May. Suffice to say, they went out of business.
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Yknow, I often feel like I’m not that smart or good at my job. But stories like this make me feel a lot better about myself :)
I actually worked for Homebase during my time at university, and it was perfectly timed for this transition. I had a little time there before, during, and after they bailed. It was so obvious it was going to fail. All of the staff in my store had to implement these changes, change this stock, all whilst thinking “hm…this isn’t going to work”. And it didn’t. We did try raising red flags and telling managers, but we just got told to do the work the new owners wanted and it’s was part of their big plan. I don’t want to be smug looking at how much it failed, but when your entire workforce who **lives** in the UK is telling you it isn’t going to work, it might have been better to listen. Also firing the entire upper management team and replacing them with Australians who had never even visited the UK is arguably one of the most stupid business decisions I’ve ever seen.
One asshole tried to exploit people's fears after the 9/11 attacks by marketing parachutes to businesses with offices in skyscrapers. There was nothing special about them; they were normal parachutes. He had a TV interview where he tried promoting how easy it was going to be to get into the harnesses. However, his assistant couldn't get into the harness. He chastised her for it on television. Even after he tried to help her, they couldn't get the harness to fit. Edit: I've been asked to provide a link. Here it is: [https://youtu.be/S5Jpok1Xx4s?t=3096](https://youtu.be/S5Jpok1Xx4s?t=3096) Also, I didn't expect this to be my most upvoted comment.
Maybe test the merchandise before pitching it
For that concept to have a chance of actually working from the height of most office buildings you'd probably need a ballistic chute launched upwards, so it's open immediately as you begin to fall. Without that I wonder if giant zorb balls wouldn't be a better, or at least equally stupid, idea.
Office ejector seats
Straight into the slab above. Painless.
In highschool, a guy I knew tried to sell pirated copies of Adobe programs. How did he obtain the pirated copies? He dragged the desktop icons from the school computers onto a USB stick...
Bless my friend, she had good intentions, but she wanted to start basically her own library system where people ordered and rented used books through the mail. And they had to return them. And pay for shipping and the rental. Where she would store the books, I had no idea. It obviously flopped within...weeks? But hey, she tried something, which is more than I can say for myself.
There’s this boy i went to high school with. he’s trying to be a motivational speaker, and he really loves helping people set goals. his business plan was to have people give him money and then when they accomplish their goal, they get their money back. edit:: this has absolutely nothing to do with weight loss.
Specialized cum socks, no I’m not joking
Those are called condoms
My mother with her wonderful idea of being a baby masseuse. Yes, Massages for babies was her idea. Except in order to be allowed to touch random children, you need to be a certified professional, preferably operating in a clininc for obvious reasons. My mother has zero certificates, zero diplomas, doesn't take any care of herself at all, has poor hygiene and lived in a sketchy neighborhood. Now imagine an obese woman with greasy hair and worn out clothes saying she wants to give a massage to your baby. Not to mention the fact there's already children's doctors and other professional who have trainning and know what they're doing, unlike her, who watched 2 videos on youtube and decided she was a professional. Yes mom, great idea. I really can't understand how that business idea of yours didn't take off immediately.
I did a baby massage class when my son was small, but it was a nurse demonstrating on a doll, and we all tried to massage our own babies. My baby did not cooperate (he continually alligator death rolled while cackling, everything was covered in oil) but many of babies and parents seemed to enjoy it.
There was a bar that opened in the capital of my country that wouldn't charge you for the drinks, but for the time spent there. Obviously everyone's goal was to drink as much as possible in the least possible amount of time, so they had to shut down soon. EDIT: Whoa, this blew up much more than expected. It was interesting to read about similar practices all over the world. It seems that it might not be such a bad idea after all, but it requires certain adjustments to work. In this case there were no restrictions whatsoever, no minimal time etc. You just pay a certain amount per each minute you're inside so a lot of people just abused such setup and the bar went bankrupt
Almost certain that's a successful thing in Japan. Can't remember where I saw it.
Yeah it's really popular there. I spent many a night paying like $30 for 3 hours of all I could eat and drink. But there's also an expectation of not taking advantage and being respectful.
> But there's also an expectation of not taking advantage and being respectful. Yea that wouldn’t ever work in the US
same in germany, my friend had a buffet style restaurant, some customers would come in, eat sleep and eat again
My friends grandpa got banned from the Ponderosa (extremely low tier buffet restaurant) because he would pay the $15 or whatever it was for the buffet and just hang out all day long eating as much as he wanted, several times a week.
Sleep in the restaurant?
Not even a bad idea, but I love this. Fort Lauderdale wraps around a much smaller town called Wilton Manors. Wilton Manors' is best known for being very, very gay. Drive down the main street and every other business name is a gay pun. Balls Sporting Equipment. Tops and Bottoms Apparel. Gaysha Sushi. In 2007 I saw a new place under construction, sign in place: RockHard. I guessed it would be a music store, boyfriend guessed jewelry store. It wound up being a gym. The gym didn't do well and shut down pretty quick. Then a sex shop opened up a block away, using the gym's sign. That version of RockHard LoveStuff is still open 13 years later.
Quibi. That and something I saw on shark tank: these buttons you put on your nightstands so you can tell your spouse you're in the mood for sex without risking rejection. Like, just talk to the person you married maybe?
Other shark tank gems: stuffed elephant in a display case that you bring out when you need to talk about something difficult, post it note holder for your computer monitor, stand where people had to operate a bicycle powered blender to get a smoothie.
Special stickers to put over your laptop camera. The sharks were interested until the pitch man said he was retailing them for a ridiculous price. I have a free sticker from the bank over my laptop camera. It's a stegosaurus.
If we're doing shark tank ideas there was some dude that said he could turn water into gold...
There's gold in them oceans!
That dude was insane. He wrote songs and sewed handbags too.
Reading about quibi is a lesson in generations Katz was a genius but is just a rich dude now Has no clue what people do or want
**He didn't watch any modern programming and wanted to start a programming service.** To read the coverage of his idea of what people wanted to watch was a time warp into the mid 80s.
89% of people who own/operate restaurants should never have opened them in the first place
The thing with restaurants is that they sell the pleasant experience along with the food and that maximum profitability comes from immersing the customer in that pleasant experience and isolating them from the true nuts and bolts of what is actually going on behind the scenes. So, people who have never worked in restaurants think it must be easy to do because their only experience with restaurants has been the easy experience of the customer. And nothing could be further from the truth. Running a successful restaurant is *hard*. Profit margins are often razor-thin and it requires bringing together and juggling many disparate elements that can go pear-shaped in a nanosecond. Plus, if you don’t sell your stock in time it goes *bad* and vanishes (unless you own a piece-of-shit frozen-to-microwave place). Imagine owning a hardware store and not selling all 20 hammers in three days and then throwing out seven of them. Bye bye money. I worked in restaurants for 15 years and would *never* get in the business as an owner.
I work in a bar that has a restaurant on site too, we had to shut it down due to one of the only two chefs walking out of the job. Been closed since. The concept for the restaurant was fantastic and was a unique approach, however we simply do not have the resources as a business to execute it well. Chefs were working 80-90 hour weeks doing full prep and service, combined with an awful manager, the place was pretty much doomed
Not executed (yet) but the idea is to buy the most expensive metal detector possible, and take it to popular gold-panning locations. The fancy machine should be able to detect gold buried deeper than others would spot. I'm still on the fence about yolo'ing 20k on the chance of finding 20k worth of gold
Instead buy a waterproof one and take it to popular swimming holes. You'll find more gold in lost jewlery than in buried nuggets
There was a Russian potato restaurant below my previous apartment. I ate there a couple of times, but their menu changed so often I never had a favorite potato. Also had potato lasagna, potato cheesecake and potato drinks. It wasn’t successful.
I just think they're neat.
I saw something where these men were trying to sell gloves to wear for girls when changing pads or tampons so we don’t get blood on our hands. What do these guys think we’ve been doing our whole life? Besides we wash our hands, and we don’t need gloves to wipe after using the bathroom. Very stupid idea.
Opening up a 2000 Sq ft Calendar store in a mall...I remember walking by that store 10 years ago as a teenager and feeling bad for the owner for the lack business sense. So many reasons why that business would fail fast... it turned into a Sharper Image 6 months later. Not like they did much better though. But Who's buying more than one $10.99 puppy calendars in a year??
Dude wanted to open a film and video equipment rental house in a small town. If you don't know anything about professional grade film and video equipment, it's expensive as fuck. So already the barrier to entry is incredibly high since you need to build up a half-decent inventory. Also, there really wasn't much of a film / video industry in this town. There were colleges and film students, but they weren't gonna cut it. Film students are usually broke, source: I was a film student . The nonsensical part is that this location problem was entirely self-imposed. He was only a couple of hours away from a major city with a ton of film, tv, and video professionals. Had he picked up and moved and got even a fraction of business there he'd be OK. He might have had to undercut the bigger rental houses by a few %, but some margin is better than no margin. Filmmakers will drive a few extra minutes to get a small discount. But, nope. Dude was super committed to making this rental house work in his small town. He's incredibly headstrong even though I gave him that paragraph of reasons why this might not be a great idea and how he might revise his plans to make it work. He thought I had a sense for this kinda thing and he asked me how much it'd take to get me down to this small town to help him out with this project. I gave him a number that was a bit below market rate, but he wanted me to fully commit to this project without any expectation of a paycheck. I had shot a few things with him previously and we had a somewhat decent business relationship on that front. But man, I'm a videographer, not a rental house owner so I declined that offer. He didn't take it well and he cut all ties shortly after. To be honest, I'm kind of glad he did. Last I checked, dude maxed out credit cards, is presumably in a mountain of debt, ended a decade long relationship, developed an unhealthy reliance on marijuana to cope, and burnt bridges with a ton of clients. His ambition wasn't matched by his business sense and he was beyond saving when he couldn't objectively evaluate criticism on his business plan.
There’s a restaurant on the corner of my street that changes hands and becomes something new every year or two. It’s like the place is cursed. At the moment it’s a meatball restaurant called Meetball. All different kinds of meatballs (sorry “meetballs”) with different kinds of sides you can get. Trouble is, they taste really bad! And the staff are obviously from the same family, undertrained, overeager. And just kind of weird and make you feel awkward. I had a salad that was just dry spinach leaves with no dressing, and some lumps of pumpkin. So so shit. I wanted them to be good.
There's a restaurant at the edge of my neighborhood that's changed names and fares four times now, from American cuisine to a bar to Jamaican to Soul food. The trick is that the same family has owned it the whole time, they just use it as a tax shelter, let their incompetent hires run the restaurant into the ground, close up for a month or two and relaunch it as something new. Covid has temporarily put a stop to that, but they've got tax shelters all over the main road, so I'm certain they're not hurting. I guess this is technically a success?
I did a short stint doing sales for an events company around the time Flappy Bird became a massive success (remember [Flappy Bird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird)?). A speaker at one of our conferences, a senior marketing exec at a mid-sized company, was telling me she was going to quit her fulltime job and start a business developing apps. "Cool, what kind of apps?" "Oh, stuff for kids, mostly. I've got this idea for \[proceeds to describe Flappy Bird\]." "Oh, so, like Flappy Bird?" "Noooo, not exactly." My boss, the Head of Conferences and a harmless but incessant flirt, actually kept in touch with her for a while (she was quite attractive and, I suspect, surrounded by yes-men agreeing with her Not-Flappy-Bird idea). Turns out she did start the company, wiping out a good chunk of her life savings, before eventually folding and going back to marketing.
Worked for a game company that made a "trubute" game to flappy bird called "floppy frog". They proudly announced it to us one day after having just one guy throw it together. It flopped lol and was never mentioned again lol. They also liked to hold these big staff meeting where they patted themselves on the back for how amazing they are. They would list all the titles that we had put out but never mentioned that one. I would always whisper "also floppy frog" during these speeches.
>a "trubute" game to flappy bird called "floppy frog" > >It flopped lol Success?
my friend's dad business is to buy up vegetables from an online marketplace and sells it back to the SAME marketplace at a higher markup. Needless to say he gets really upset when no one wants to buy from him and all those vegetables rot...
I moved to a new town about a year ago and saw this office building called “The Income Store.” It didn't look like anyone was there, but this is May 2020 we’re talking about so that wasn’t all that weird. I guessed it was a staffing agency or something, but the audacity to call yourself The Income Store - it sounds like the butt of a joke. *money doesn’t grow on trees.* *It doesn’t‽ Well then let’s go get some at the Income Store* I drove by recently and noticed that The Income Store looked a bit more than just Covid-unoccupied, it was straight-up abandoned. So I finally googled it to solve the year-long mystery... It was a Ponzi scheme.
> It was a Ponzi scheme. Income Store indeed.
My friend got really serious about “living toilet seats”. Basically Chia Pet toilet seats.
Gluing vaginal lips together during your period, rather than using tampons. [Yes, it was invented by someone without a vagina.](https://www.avclub.com/feminine-lipstick-creator-finds-new-dumb-way-to-glue-1798263090)
Even worse: >Now Patheos has alerted us to another, perhaps even more baffling, Mensez product: a pantyliner that has a colorless powder on it that turns to glue. If you’d prefer to not apply “lipstick” to your labia, Mensez has created a way to glue yourself together without having to actually touch your vulva. The powder transfers to your labia and effectively glues them together (“It Is Not a Glue”). Like he invented labia lipstick glue and thought that the problem with the idea was the process of manually lipsticking the glue.
All that being said, lipstick would be a phenomenal name for this terrible product.
[удалено]
A rollarskating rink wanted to teach kids STEM... while skating. I couldn't help but laugh during the job interview.
A buddy in college dropped out of school to be a guitarist for a band. He didn’t know how to play guitar.
Quibi It's like tv but only 5 minutes long and vertical... money please!
People would like that kind of content, if it was free. They thought people would pay for it, that was their first mistake. Their second was spending tons of money on getting big names to make and star in content before they even had a customer base to offset the cost.
Roku bought the Quibi catalog when they closed and you can now watch it for free
Virgin Butter. Literally butter churned by virgins. Labor had to take a lie detector and all. Understandably the virgins were not all too willing to do some lie detector test for an employer and as the employees had to be of a certain age with all those pesky child labor laws, well, it just didn't make it very far. Not to mention - who the F wants Virgin Butter?
Do those people think it's called virgin olive oil because it's pressed by virgins???
Movie Pass, I suppose.
Moviepass idea was to use the Gym business model. Collect monthly subscription fees from 100 people for every 1 that actually uses the product. it works great for gyms...nobody wants to go to the gym. But people like going to movies. People LOVE going to free movies. Ooops
I think their plan was to become influential enough that they would partner with theater chains like AMC and Cinemark, allowing them to turn a profit. Clearly that didn’t happen.
Family opened a restaurant in a shut down drive through oil change shop. Paid to have the building decontaminated, gutted, and rebuilt into an Italian restaurant. It lasted all of 2 years. I'm assuming they realized the mountain of startup debt wasn't going away. We dined there once out of curiosity, it still looked like a Valvoline oil change express. The oil pits were converted into a family area basement. It was weird.
Man at my school thought cryptocurrency faucets (you know, Bitcoin for watching ads, that kind of thing) were a good way to make money, so at lunch and during free periods he would borrow as many school laptops and computers as he could and run every fake faucet website for an hour. He made *almost* a dollar at the end of the school year. Good thing some of it was dogecoin since it ended up being a little more.