Entertainment
Food
Technology
Retail
Misc.
100

They made a videogame console whose screen had a red and black palette that caused headaches, nausea and seizures.

What is Nintendo?

100

This seafood chain added an all-you-can-eat shrimp option to combat declining sales; the deal was too successful and lead to a loss of $11 million.

What is Red Lobster?

100

Despite inventing the digital camera, this film company's leadership wouldn't sell them fearing it would cannibalize existing business.

What is Kodak?

100

This toy store chain had a 10-year partnership with Amazon, eliminating its online presence and allowing Amazon to dominate the online toy market.

What is Toys "R" Us?

100

This bank chain wanted to charge customers $5 per month to make purchases with their debit card.

What is Bank of America?

200

This movie rental company rejected a deal to buy Netflix for $50 million.

What is Blockbuster?

200

While tasty, this fast-food chain's Ch'King was an operational nightmare and had 21 steps in preparation leading to a decline in sales by 3%.

What is Burger King?

200

This tech company launched phones that overheated and caught fire, leading to a recall

What is Samsung?

200

To try to increase their dwindling profit, they cut sales and ended coupons and clearances.

What is JCPenney?

200

They missed a comma in their sale price costing them $70 million in 1999.

What is Lockheed Martin?

300

This failed indoor role-playing amusement center gouged prices to keep up with rising rent from the 2008 financial crisis, leading to a decline in attendees.

What is Wannado City?

300

Known for its $5 Footlong, this fast-food chain faced backlash after it was discovered that its sandwiches were only 11 inches.

What is Subway?

300

This tech giant is known for their project graveyard amassing 296 abandoned projects.

What is Google?

300

This electronic store chain had about 4,300 locations across the US, cannibalizing its revenue.

What is RadioShack?

300

This bank chain accidently sent Revlon lenders an interest payment of $900 million instead of the $8 million they were supposed to send.

What is Citibank?

400

Despite raising $1.75 billion, this streaming company and its short-form content "is going to go down as a case study at Harvard Business School on what not to do when launching a streaming service."

What is Quibi?

400

This healthy buffet chain permanently closed during the early days of the pandemic because the food was wholly self-serve.

What is Sweet Tomatoes?

400

During the dot-com bubble, this tech company bought the unprofitable Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion making Mark Cuban a billionaire. 

What is Yahoo?

400

This former bookstore seller hired Amazon to build an e-commerce site but backed out because of the dot-com bubble; Amazon would then use the infrastructure themselves.

What is Borders?

400

This discount clothing site accidently capped all items—including luxury brands—at $49.95 for six hours costing parent company Zappos over $1.6 million.

What is 6pm?

500

John Travolta's Battlefield Earth became a mega-flop and brought about the downfall of this production company.

What is Franchise Pictures?

500

This fast-food chain launched a Twitter campaign in 2012 that was pulled after 2 hours because 68% of the tweets were negative.

What is McDonald's?

500

Even though this former tech giant invented Java, they quickly collapsed after the dot-com bubble, failing to incorporate the rising popularity of x86 processors.

What is Sun Microsystems?

500

This department store chain discontinued its very successful catalog business in 1993—a year before Amazon started—because they viewed it as a dying venture.

What is Sears?

500

This Italian airline charged customers $33 instead of $2,558 for business-class tickets from Toronto to Cyprus because they forgot to add two extra zeros when pricing them. 

What is Alitalia?