38 Times Companies Faced Such Backlash From Customers It Became Historic

Tangential: I think Wendy's branded this horribly. My first though was: well I guess I'll never go to Wendy's since I'll never know what things will cost before I get there. But if they marketed it as 20% off during off peak hours or 30% after 9:30 PM or something I'd probably think of going there if I needed an early or late meal. Actual surge pricing for fast food is dumb, when a school bus of kids show up on a sports or band trip are they going to jack the prices up on all of them? Specific days/times with higher/lower prices seems more viable.

Taco Bell discontinued stocking potatoes and the people rioted. .

Valve announced a plan to charge for mods almost a decade ago.

Internet backlash against this was swift and powerful enough to get them to backtrack.

It was an especially surprising move for a company that the Internet considered "good" (as good as a for-profit corp could be, realistically).

Tesla is now putting normal round steering wheels into model s/x instead of the "yoke" they tried so hard to push onto people for about 2 years.

X box one was going to have only digital game sales.

They got beat up in the media so bad they quickly pivoted to also selling games on disc like before.

Netflix trying to spin off their DVD service into Qwikster, separate from its fledgling streaming service in 2011. Stock tanked 80% in part due to that, was shelved.

On a side note, billionaire investor Carl Icahn bought 11% of Netflix stock at the lows for $650M. He was going to agitate to sell the company, but the stock quickly ran up. He sold it at a 5x gain over the objection of his son...would have been worth about $25-30B today..

The San Francisco 49ers tried to introduce a new logo in the early 90’s and it was honestly pretty ugly and bad. A “what were you trying to accomplish?” decision and this was in the years when they were winning like every other Super Bowl so people had grown attached to the look the team had worn to great success. Pre internet so the fans flooded the team with letters and calls and picket lines outside the office and the team said “fine we won’t use the new logo” .

Just last month WWE caused a global fan backlash when The Rock came back and forced out Cody Rhodes from wrestling Roman Reigns in the main event at this year's WrestleMania. The backlash was so severe that WWE not only put Cody back in the main event but The Rock realized he had to turn heel so the booing and anti Rock chants made sense to the casual audience.

EA received huge backlash for adding loot boxes into the modern Battlefront 2 game. They actually basically removed them but there is a remnant still in the game. When you unlock new guns/cosmetics, it uses the loot box animation to show you what you unlocked. There is no way to get loot boxes in the game and the currency you unlock can directly unlock cosmetics now though.

If you follow tech the most recent one would probably be Nvidia with the RTX 4080. At first Nvidia launched a RTX 4080 16GB for $1199 and a RTX 4080 12GB for $899. The problem was the RTX 4080 12GB used an entirely different GPU and was significantly slower rather than just being a card with less VRAM as the name implied. Nvidia “unlaunched” the RTX 4080 12GB and relaunched it as the RTX 4070 Ti at $799.