11 companies that deserve a “corporate Darwin Award” for the stupid ways they went out of business

03.11.2025 01:00

The Daily Dot

Companies go out of business all the time for all sorts of reasons—shifting landscapes, poor leadership, bad decisions. But sometimes the choices that lead to their extinction are so mind-numbingly stupid that they tarnish the company's legacy even long after they're gone.

Redditors are keeping these corporations in mind with a recent post on the r/AskRdedit sub asking for the "best corporate Darwin Award that basically killed the business." Now, some of these familiar names were gobbled up by other companies, others have crawled back to the realm of the living in some form or another, while others are simply gone, albeit not forgotten.

But all of them had people in charge who made some really unfortunate choices that got them to wherever they are now.

1. Schwinn Bikes

"Outsourced to contract manufacturer in China/ Tawain. Didnt have a noncompete agreement. The contract manufacturer started making their own bikes." —u/jjflash78

2. Ratners

"Ratner’s Jewellers in the UK. Had a major market share of high street business countrywide and the owner Ratner made comments at a CEO conference saying how crap his products were and the group almost went bust losing £500 million." —u/Common-Ad6470

3. Hoover

"The British division of Hoover has to be one of the top Darwin Awards. They offered two free round trip tickets to the US (value of over 600 pounds), to customers who purchased 100 pounds in Hoover products." —u/sixshots_onlyfive

4. Osbourne Computer Corporation

"Osbourne Computers were selling portable computers and let it slip that the next version was going to be even better. So a lot of potential buyers just decided to wait until the next version was available.

Trouble is, without the sales of Version One, they didn't have the funds to bring Version Two to market, and they went out of business. They call that The Osbourne Effect." —u/The_Safe_For_Work

5. Blockbuster

"I don’t know what could possibly top Blockbuster declining to buy Netflix." —u/SurviveDaddy

6. Digg

"The digg.com redesign is what pushed myself and a bunch of other users to start using Reddit basically overnight." —u/ElOsoSabroso

7. Knight Capital Group

"Their high-frequency trading algorithm went berserk and lost $440M in 45 minutes, bankrupting the company." —u/chillywillylove

8. Sears

"Sears had the stores, the distribution network, the buying power, the mailing list, and the cash to have become an incredibly powerful hybrid retailer. Same is true when WalMart came along.

Had they just adjusted their model and thrown a sh*t-ton of resources at it, they could have crushed both like a bug. But, dinosaur that they were, they just stared at the WalMart and Amazon comets and did nothing until they were flattened." —u/AnybodySeeMyKeys

9. Quiznos

"Forced their own franchisees to buy overpriced products and put themselves out of business" —u/LSUChase83

10. BlackBerry

"Blackberry (RIM) every time. Abandon the market for two years to invent some crappy QT based phone while the dalvik version was created in 12 weeks." —u/Richard_J_George

11. AOL Time Warner

"The (then) largest online provider acquired a large print, movie and music corporation. Some will say this was the beginning of the dot com bubble bursting, so it was inevitable that it would fail. But it’s also the same year that Apple launched the iTunes store and they had to license their music." —u/jim_br

12. Circuit City

"Circuit City backing DivX, the one-time use dvd "rental " program. From memory, they sank something like 500 million dollars into the development, only to have users rebel and boycott Circuit City." —u/eclectictaste1

13. Toys 'R' Us

"Toys 'R' Us thought that e-commerce was just a fad that would pass. They got so many orders on their website that they couldn’t get them all out in time. Then they PAID amazon $50 million a year to sell AND a percentage of their sales to use their marketplace, and be their only seller of toys.

So when you went on the toys r us site, it would redirect you to their amazon shop. Amazon literally learned their whole business and turned their back on Toys r Us and started selling the same stuff without them.

Toys 'R' Us won the lawsuit and made their $50m back but at that point, customers stopped caring about toys r us and started buying toys on amazon instead." —u/duuchu

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