30 Business Decisions That Ended Up Hurting Companies, As Shared In This Online Group

There was an Italian place in my hometown that was well liked for its pizza, among other things. The waitresses made the dough fresh in the kitchen, and the cooks made the sauce as close to being in-house as you can get short of actually steaming and straining tomatoes.

The owners eventually sold it, and the new owners turned it into a bar & grill. They still had the pizza, but it was all frozen dough and bland canned sauce. Meanwhile, a fan and regular of the original restaurant bought an old mechanic garage and fixed it up to be a spiritual successor to the old one -- he even got all the recipes he could from the original owners; surprise of all surprises, his is the one that succeeded while the bar & grill petered out after the novelty rush.

The bar & grill eventually sold to that guy, and now it's a new, different bar & grill, but with all the best food that the old Italian place served still on menu. It's been running strong for over a decade since.

Property management company I used to work for had a number of student properties and high-rises that were always a struggle to fill in the summer months when students went out of town.

Head office came up with an offer that anyone who signed for two years got the four summer months at 50% off. Sounds like a good deal, 50% rent is much better than zero. We signed tons of students.

However the lease templates that head office sent over showed the reduced rent rate on the lease rather than just adding the discount as a separate addendum. I noticed this discrepancy and reported it - and was subsequently ignored.

Which meant the students were signing a legal document that guaranteed them 50% rent for two years.

The company lost hundreds of thousands in revenue.

A developer my dad worked with sold off a beautiful piece of land next to a river in a very desirable area, he sold it to another developer. The new developer cut down every tree on the 6 acre site, as he said, "he wanted to see what he had". The land then started to slide into the river, rendering it worthless and ugly.

I used to work for a company that was bleeding money. In order to try and save money, they decided to stop honoring returns/refunds, but still advertised that they did.

Whenever someone would ask for a refund, you were supposed to tell the person that it would be processed in the next 6-8 weeks, then get them off the phone.

6-8 weeks later, when they ask where their money is, you were supposed to apologize and say their paperwork got put in the wrong stack, and that it would be put in the correct stack and would then be processed in the next 6-8 weeks.

If they complained about the length of time, you were supposed to tell them you can ask your supervisor to expedite it, and they should see it in 4-6 weeks instead.

If they threatened legal action after months and months, you were supposed to tell them to contact the company legal department ( we didn't have a company legal department) and then hang up on them. Then, make a note in their account. No one should field calls from that account further.

More than half the call center quit in a single week in protest of this decision.

Company collapsed in on itself within a few months.

In my hometown there was an independent fast food and homemade ice cream place, long established and run by close friends. It was a goldmine. They decided to sell and retire. New owners immediately changed everything. Painted it a wild color, removed some attractions on the grounds, changed the 60 year old menu and switched to commercially made ice cream. They lasted 8 months.

My late great uncle started a fish and chips restaurant. He had his own unique recipe for the fish and it was very popular. Businessmen had offered him thousands in cash for it over the years, but he always declined. After about 40 or so years, he decided to retire and hand the business over to an ambitious recent college grad. He offered to give her the recipe and even volunteer his services for a bit while she got comfortable in her new role as owner. She declined both and within a year, she was forced to sell the restaurant after coming close to declaring bankruptcy. My great uncle died and took the recipe with him to his grave

Knew this guy who wanted to start his own BBQ and hot sauce line, here was his process:

Get high with buddy and make the decision go into business together.

Argue about who should be financing the business

Get a loan from Grandma

Order a bunch of bottles

Use a sharpie and some blank labels to put on the bottles

Fill the bottles with bulk BBQ sauce.

Try and sell these to Walmart

Get upset that Walmart won't shelve your sketch sauces

Have several hundred bottles of unsealed product that wasn't prepared hygienically.

Try and sell some to your extended family.

Get angry with extended family that they don't believe in your dreams of the last two weeks.

Beg family for money to pay back grandma.

There was a shopping plaza near me with a fairly large gift store. Not a gift shop in the museum sense, basically like a Hallmark store but independent. It wasn’t exactly bustling, but they apparently did solid business and a lot of people in the community really appreciated having it there as a place to buy gifts and wrapping paper and such. The owners of the shopping plaza raise rents to the point that the shop goes out of business. The reason this was stupid is that the store front sat vacant for like 15 entire years. Seriously, this place closed when I was a child and I’m now 27 and the vacancy was only taken over very recently. If their goal in raising the rent was to have a more profitable store move in to that space, they certainly failed and missed out on decades of rent as a result.

This one involves my Dad. Back in the '80s he decided he wanted to teach people how to use Lotus 123, Excel, MS Word, etc. So he bought a bunch of computers for a classroom, and he wrote interactive learning programs, and printed out manuals and such. Even without advertising, he had people asking to join his class BUT ... he was never quite ready. This Lotus 123 program could use more work. He wasn't ready for a class, this MS Word tutorial isn't quite done. The perfectionist in him wouldn't let him expose the less than perfect programs/class to people ... just yet. He turned down paying customers for fear that it wasn't just perfect. He had taken a loan out from a friend to finance this, but never made a dime. He paid the loan back by selling our cottage, something he regrets to this day. And why? Because he was afraid to be flawed.

That taught me a lesson though, as the old saying goes "Perfect is the enemy of done". He could easily have made money and taught his classes, refining the programs to student feedback. He could have covered deficiencies by teaching in person. He was afraid it wasn't perfect, so it was never done. We don't talk about it, or the cottage that we built together (we had the foundation and structure built by pros, then the whole family pitched in to build the interior when we were teens).

It saddens me more because it was what he wanted to do, and he went for it ... but not quite.

I worked for a video store during the time Finding Nemo came out on DVD. The video store I worked for got a huge fishtank put inside. It was so big they had to shrink the game rental section. The tank had clown fish in it. The tank was also locked and we couldn't feed the fish or clean it. This was supposed to be done by someone who I never saw come in. So the tank ended up filled with a bunch of dead Nemos in a nasty as f*** tank. Needless to say parents were very unhappy about it. The local paper did a small article about it too which didn't help an already dying store. I have no idea what they thought an expensive as Hell fish tank would do for their business.

I worked for a design/printing place for years, and the owner went from amazing idea to stupid idea on a regular basis. don't get me wrong - guy is a brilliant designer, totally took advantage of new tech every chance he could and made it work.

But - he was cheap and greedy, so, ruined what would have been lucrative long term business relationships.

So - we did this huge order of promo supplies for a fairly big on-line casino. huge, for him. about a 20k order, with good margins, and the chance at long term work with this company.

While it was being picked up, on the spur of the moment, he decides to pad the bill by about 200 bucks. the guy picking it up was the son of the casino owner, and literally watched the boss do this while I stood at teh till.

The customer looks at me, smiles, and pays the bill. With a huge wad of cash. And says "I know it's not your fault, but - my family is very wealthy. We didn't get that way letting people rip us off. Tell the boss over in the corner he just f***** himself out of a lot of money, because we loved the work." in a voice meant to carry.

Edit to clarify who was paying. And padding means he increased the bill over what he had quoted the job to cost.

Take a help desk that has been consistently rated extremely well by its customers for their first-call-resolve, attitude, and helpfulness; outsource it to a company that's been rated towards the bottom of the list for over a decade because it costs less than the salaries/benefits of your former in house help desk. Then complain when your first-call-resolve drops through the floor and your customer satisfaction is at an all time low.

Target's expansion into Canada

collapsed in 2 years and cost them Billions

Kodak refusing to push digital cameras / photography, and instead focusing on film cameras. If I recall correctly, I think Kodak was one of the first companies to create a digital camera, but instead of capitalizing on it, they sat on the technology and focused on film development.

I worked at JCP before and after 2011 (I think) when they revamped the whole company. They took away coupons, and they took away a lot of departments people (especially older people) loved, like custom window coverings. They also brought in extremely expensive furniture. Like $8,000 dining tables. Trust me.. no one shopping at JCP is looking to buy an $8,000 table.

They paid the CEO who brought about all these changes a massive amount of money and it failed miserably. People HATED the changes and we went from a busy store almost every weekend, to it being dead almost every weekend. It lasted maybe 2 years and then they brought back a lot of the stuff they got rid of, but the damage was done. The people who had been shopping at JCP for years and years who stopped after the changes, didn't come back.

JCP lost an insane amount of money during this whole thing and never recovered. They filed for bankruptcy last year.

Cafe I work for decided it wanted to fire everyone except for the leads and the manager. Then told the manager they weren't paying her salary anymore AND she needed to take on more work. Assumed people would do it because they "love their jobs"

20th Century Fox giving George Lucas the merchandising rights and rights to sequels for Star Wars in exchange for a pay cut on his director's fee (from half a million to $150,000)

Circuit City was pretty stupid. When the recession hit, they decided to stop selling appliances and instead focus on DVDs and televisions and such. (Appliances are known as being a recession proof item. People always need refrigerators and microwaves. They don't need DVDs.) They also wanted to cut down on labor costs, so they fired a lot of managers and assistant managers, and just left a lot of entry level employees because they were cheaper to pay. Well, entry level employees don't really know how to fully run a store, so pretty much every Circuit City became dogs***.

There was a Tex-Mex place I loved in Fairbanks, Alaska. The food wasn't GREAT, but it was consistent, and the prices were fair.

Well, a new owner came in, and they decided to revamp it into a fine dining steak house. $30 was pretty much the lowest cost you could get for an item, and this was in a neighborhood that had a substantial crime rate and was right across the street from the bikini barista and the marijuana dispensary.

I stopped going, and they went under shortly thereafter. I walked in once before the place closed down, and it was dreary and empty and they had tried to bring some of the classics back to the menu, but it was far too late by then.

You were too good for this world, Los Amigos.

Two members of the band Steppenwolf wanted to break away from founder John Kay and wanted to tour using the band name. John Kay told them he would allow it....only if they signed over their royalties from the song writing credits they had in the band. These two members were convinced they would be successful on their own so they agreed.

Since Steppenwolf without John Kay would be like the Rolling Stones without Mick Jagger, that version of the band flopped tremendously.

Also, even a five year old could tell you that giving up your royalties on major hits like "Born to Be Wild" and "Magic Carpet Ride" would be a really stupid thing to do, so these guys ended up having to work regular menial jobs when they could have been getting a nice royalty check in the mail instead.