Red Lobster - Failure Museum

Red Lobster

Founded in 1968, Red Lobster brought seafood to landlocked people at more affordable prices than fine-dining restaurants. In 2024, the debt-laden seafood chain announced it was considering filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Red Lobster was bogged down by increased labor costs and expensive leases on its restaurants. Some of the financial woes are due to its decision in 2023 to make its “Endless Shrimp” promotion, which used to be an occasional, limited-time offering, permanent.

Red Lobster wasn’t losing to a competitor in their space — they’re were losing to competitors outside their space. People who are hankering for lobster or fish are increasingly going to steak houses that offer those options.

Yikes! Pencils - Failure Museum

Yikes! Pencils

Released in 1993 since kids liked to customize their pencils with stickers or even their own inscriptions applied via thumbnail. The designer suspected wooden pencils that didn’t look like wood might have an appeal. They offered Yikes! pencils in a range of inventive colors though they were limited to black, orange, and pink at launch. The company also included a range of similarly themed erasers and a see through pencil sharpener so you could see the crazy pencil shavings.

However, the pencils were discontinued in 1996 since it was objectively terrible to write with a Yikes! pencil. The graphite smeared with a touch and the nifty polyurethane erasers didn’t erase. They just spread the graphite into a black blob. Yikes! pencils were a nightmare for homework worksheets in an era before digital copies.

 

Disco Demolition Night - Failure Museum

Disco Demolition Night

Disco Demolition Night was a MLB promotion on Thursday, July 12, 1979, at Comiskey Park in Chicago, that ended in a riot. At the climax of the event, a crate filled with disco records was blown up on the field between games of the twi-night doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers. Many had come to see the explosion rather than the games and rushed onto the field after the detonation. The playing field was so damaged by the explosion and by the rioters that the White Sox were required to forfeit the second game to the Tigers.

White Sox officials had hoped for a crowd of 20,000, about 5,000 more than usual. Instead, at least 50,000 packed the stadium, and thousands more continued to sneak in after capacity was reached and gates were closed. Many of the records were not collected by staff and were thrown like flying discs from the stands. After they blew up the collected records, thousands of fans stormed the field and remained there until dispersed by riot police.

Outer Space Men - Failure Museum

Outer Space Men

In 1968, Colorforms released Outer Space Men, which was a series of bendable figures.  Using the basic constellations of planets in our own galaxy, each figure was given a name, and assigned a planet of origin.

It is speculated by several collector’s markets that the line was produced to compete with and also be incorporated with Mattel’s Major Matt Mason line from the same period.  Colorforms failed to find much commercial success with the line when it was first produced, and the line quickly vanished from store shelves.  This unfortunately meant that even though a second series was well into production, the line was cancelled before it would be released.

BIC Sport - Failure Museum

BIC Sport

Founded in 1979 and shut down in 2010, BIC Sport was one of the world’s leading windsurfing manufacturers and had best-selling boards on the planet.

Adidas Cologne - Failure Museum

Adidas cologne

Launched in 1999, Adidas cologne starts with sweet notes of bergamot and apple. The heart and base add notes of lavender, rum, leather, sandalwood and vanilla.

Heinz Baby Food - Failure Museum

Heinz baby food

Heinz’s attempt at baby food in the 1950s

Here’s a baby food commercial from back then:

Brooklyn Dodgers (NFL) - Failure Museum

Brooklyn Dodgers (NFL)

The Brooklyn Dodgers played in the NFL from 1930 to 1943. Its home games were played at Ebbets Field, also the home of MLB’s Brooklyn Dodgers. 

Onyx Motorbike - Failure Museum

Onyx Motorbike

Onyx Motorbike went out of business in 2023. The category is super crowded, while most of the frames are not straight, sport mode cuts out frequently, and have trouble hitting 50+ even though they claim 60. The wiring inside them is a complete mess, the first thousand bikes did not even have full coverage of brake pads on the discs.

Amazon Go's Just Walk Out - Failure Museum

Amazon Go’s “Just Walk Out”

Launched in 2016 and discontinued in 2024, Amazon gave up on the cashier-less “Just Walk Out” technology at its Amazon Fresh grocery stores. New stores will be built without computer-vision-powered surveillance technology, and “the majority” of existing stores will have the tech removed. In the early days, Amazon’s ambitions included selling Just Walk Out to other brick-and-mortar stores. The problem was that the technology never really worked.

Just Walk Out was supposed to let customers grab what they wanted from a store and just leave, skipping any kind of checkout process. Amazon wanted to track what customers took with them purely via AI-powered video surveillance; the system just took a phone scan at the door, and shoppers would be billed later via their Amazon accounts.

Amazon had more than 1,000 people in India working on Just Walk Out as of mid-2022 whose jobs included manually reviewing transactions and labeling images from videos to train Just Walk Out’s machine learning model. Just Walk Out required about 700 human reviews per 1,000 sales, far above an internal target of reducing the number of reviews to between 20 and 50 per 1,000 sales.