34 Worst Decisions Made By Large Companies That Nearly, Or Did, Shut Them Down

Not shut down but special consideration should be given to Xerox.

They are the originators of both the mouse and the GUI interface every PC has been based on for almost 30 years. Both Jobs and Gates stole this technology.

Quiznos over franchised their stores and screwed over their own franchisees.

KMart for investing in more real estate instead of store and technology upgrades.
Still admire the slow burn nationwide closures.
I’ve never seen a corporation drag it out for that long.

Yellow trucking bought out a bunch of smaller companies, and never bothered to consolidate them into a single entity (each one would operate independently as a subsidiary). Not only did this force them to take on loads of debt, but it also put them at odds with the Teamsters, who had active agreements with each company prior to the buyouts.

They never recovered from this move, and relied heavily on the Teamsters to negotiate pay/benefit cuts for its members for the next decade and a half. When the union rejected the latest concession proposal earlier this year, the company shut down and blamed the union for it's own incompetence.

Canadians will remember this one

Eaton’s.

They were such a great place to shop and their catalogue was great. They connected people in very rural areas with the same merchandise they could get in the cities. They had such gorgeous stores that were well stocked and well staffed. You can still see the Eaton’s letter outlines on the former store here.

Poor management cost a once great company. I’m sure Timothy Eaton is still spinning in his grave.

I miss that company a lot.

Blitz USA Inc - they made gas cans, car ramps, that sort of thing. They refused to add a simple screen to their gas cans that would prevent flash over, even after multiple lawsuits. Even after not being able to use their own fuel containers on their own production floors due to OSHA regs. Now they don't exist. It's almost a case of corporate suicide.

I used to work for one of the biggest book distributors in the United States, called Pacific Pipeline. They decided to have our computer systems for the entire operation, redone right before the Christmas season. The system was full of flaws and messed up so many orders, which lost of tons of business. The bad decision was to let the people who installed the system, try to fix what they did, before trying to sue them. They never fixed it, and that was the end of that. Probably should have hired another company to do it when they failed originally. Or better yet, wait until after the holiday rush was over.

Sun Microsystems not embracing Linux until it was too late.

I worked there at the time, and Linux was seen as kind of a toy operating system with little margin. Just cheap small boxes.

Well, it turned out, cheap small boxes are now what runs in datacenters and Linux is everywhere.

Sun was making money hand over fist selling really high margin servers - and knew it would cannibalize its own sales. And since no exec was willing to sacrifice their own revenue (and bonuses) to help for a future where they may not be there (lots of Sun Execs /VPs left for more lucrative positions), it was a tough sell.

I know it was tough to disrupt the server business. I worked on the software side, and they would include our software to boost hardware sales (when in reality, every other company in the world viewed hardware as a commodity and software as the value add).

Once upon a time I worked at a Barkers department store. It was a lower mid level discount store chain a'la Kmart, occupying the mid-Atlantic states. They went under in the mid 80's or so, but in 1978 I could read the writing on the wall. I think they failed to catch the bus in not adopting some sort of scanning technology when everyone else was going there. They used a 9 digit inventory control system, compartmented by department number. This meant front cashiers had to punch in ELEVEN numbers before the price. This was an extraordinarily SLOW checkout process. I can remember standing at the register, fingers flying, sweating bullets with a line going back into the store with impatient people. I was one of the fastest on the register line. Ticked off customers along with the common mistakes of mis- entered (or purposeful mis-entering for speed) inventory numbers I'm sure had great deal to do with Barkers demise .

Barings Bank was around from the 1700s until the 1990s when some kid in Singapore made a trade that cost them >1 billion USD. I think that's my best example that comes to mind.

Someone in IT decided to deploy untested software. Knight Capital Group loses $445 million in 45 minutes. Knight Capital Group had to sell itself to another firm at a discounted price, and several of its top executives were fired 

MySpace… whatever they did with the servers that had all our old profiles, pics, and chats.

Not quite dead, but Miku released a bad firmware for their baby monitor which destroyed the onboard storage. They did the right thing and replaced all monitors out in the market, but then went bankrupt and recently got purchased and brought back to life with nearly every feature that used to be free now behind a paywall. I wonder how the QA/Engineer(s) working on that product feel about missing that bug...

Wework