Complex Numbers

In Decision

Here's a pretty recent one from Cracked. Mostly just because I felt like sharing it.

    4 Times Corporations Invested in the Exact Wrong Thing  

The title is maybe a bit misleading, but close enough.

Making decisions has to be one of my absolute least favorite things to do. That’s why I try to avoid it at all costs.

Would it help to know that your decision is already made, but you just haven't caught up to that moment in time yet?

And the more decisions matter, the more they suck. Picking a cereal to start your day with is a decision, but given the general futility of life, who really cares? Realizing halfway through a bowl of Cap’n Crunch that you really would have preferred Froot Loops is just another thin cut delivered by the blade of life.

I avoid this by not having cereal in the house.

It’s when you’re faced with decisions that really influence the future of your life or business that you get to experience the full cocktail of stress and anxiety.

Hence the relevance to the article's content. Though sometimes the wrong decision turns out to be not deciding at all.

4. Sony Backing Betamax

Given that plenty of people under 30 probably don’t even remember VHS tapes, I’m going to wager that Betamax rings even less bells. It’s an old, cursed technology, that barely made the cut for my 33-year-old brain, much less Zoomers’.

We really need to teach history better.

Anyway, yeah, so Sony backed the losing technology. They're still around, though, unlike the next fool:

3. Borders Gives Amazon Its Business

The biggest mistakes they made? First was not investing in or offering e-books, and the second was outsourcing all their online book sales to a little company called Amazon.

Yeah, I'm gonna call that one of the worst mistakes of all time.

2. Kodak Doesn’t Go Digital

This one's pretty well-known.

In 1975, a Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson invented an early digital camera that could record images electronically onto tape and display them on a TV screen. He showed it to executives, who gave it a resounding thumbs down, because it would ruin their ability to sell film, a big part of their business.

So someone else went to market with it, and the tech steadily improved, ruining their ability to sell film. If only they could have seen the writing on the wall. (Okay, that might be an obscure reference.)

1. JCPenney Respects Its Customers’ Intelligence

I'd have titled this "JCPenney Overestimates Its Customers' Intelligence." I mentioned the 1/3-pound burger fiasco a few days ago in here, and that people were so abysmally ignorant that they thought it was a worse deal than a quarter-pounder because, clearly, 3 is less than 4. Well, this is similar.

It turns out that they do not want a $40 waffle maker, they want a $40 waffle maker they can tell people was worth $80, and if they don’t get it, they will figuratively burn your store to the ground. Sales dropped 20 percent, and one ex-customer with a real peach of a brain explained, “If I don’t get a special discount, it’s not worth the trip.”

No, I'm not calling YOU stupid. Anyone who reads this blog is automatically smart, attractive, and talented, if only by association. But goddamn, the vast amorphous bulk of consumers are idiots to the core.

Anyway, I'd add one more to this list: Sears. They built a sales empire on mail-order, sending catalogs to the farthest reaches of the US and Canada, and probably beyond, I don't know. At one point, they were mail-ordering houses. I'm not kidding. They got so huge that they built and occupied what was then the tallest building in the world.

And then the internet came along, and they didn't keep up.

There are probably lots more, of course. Most decisions are going to turn out to be bad ones, or at least neutral, which is why people like me and this article's author avoid making them whenever possible. Which is also going to be a bad decision, but whatever, at least then it's not my fault.