Toast - Blockbuster

Sliced Bread

BBC

Health & Fitness

4.6 • 695 Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2023

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

While Sliced Bread takes a break we serve up… Toast. A study of the spectacular failures of wonder products and businesses which had promised so much to consumers.

In each episode the presenter and BBC business journalist, Sean Farrington, examines one big idea. What did it promise? Why did people back it? Why did they get burnt?

Some of the world’s most successful businesses have also brought us some of the world’s most remarkable failures. So, what led them to be toast? And what can we learn from their stories today?

Sean unpicks all the early optimism, hype and ambition. He speaks to expert commentators and to people involved with doomed wonder products to discover how they view things now and what, if anything, could have been done differently.

Along the way he discovers charming and surprising stories from people who took to these products but lived to regret it and, with the help of self-made millionaire and serial entrepreneur Sam White, tries to work out where they went wrong.

This week, Sean and Sam examine the game and movie rental chain, Blockbuster.

Its first store opened in 1985 in Dallas, Texas. At its peak in 2004, it had around 9,000 stores globally, was earning nearly $5.9 billion in revenue and employed over 84,000 people worldwide.

How did it lose its way? Spoiler alert - it wasn't just down to the rise of streaming services like Netflix.

Toast is a spin-off from Sliced Bread, the series in which Greg Foot investigates the latest so-called wonder products to find out whether they really are the best thing since sliced bread.

Sliced Bread returns for a new batch of investigations in May. In the meantime, Toast is available in the Sliced Bread feed on BBC Sounds.

Toast is a BBC Audio North production for BBC Radio 4.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Before this BBC podcast kicks off, I'd like to tell you about some others you might enjoy.
0:05.1	My name's Will Wilkin and I Commission Music Podcast for the BBC.
0:08.7	It's a really cool job, but every day we get to tell the incredible stories behind songs,
0:13.5	moments and movements, stories of struggle and success, rises and falls, the funny, the ridiculous.
0:19.1	And the BBC's position, at the heart of British music
0:21.7	means we can tell those stories like no one else.
0:24.5	We were, are and always will be right there at the centre of the narrative.
0:28.6	So whether you want an insightful take on music right now
0:31.3	or a nostalgic deep dive into some of the most famous and infamous moments in music,
0:36.1	check out the music podcasts on BBC Sounds.
0:40.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:47.4	Hello and welcome to Toast, brought to you by the team behind BBC Radio 4's hit series, Slice Bread.
0:54.2	Toast has a look at wonder products or businesses, which promised the earth but left
0:58.8	their back as burnt.
1:03.3	I'm Sean Farrington with me as usual.
1:05.8	Sam White, been there, done it, self-made millionaire, entrepreneur.
1:09.9	Hello Sam.
1:10.7	Hello, darling. Still winning in life?
1:12.8	I'm still trying to win, yeah. Excellent. After hearing from our other expert guests, Sam's job,
1:18.8	as you may well know, is to decide why today's wonder product went from potentially being the best
1:23.8	things since sliced bread to toast. So Sam doesn't know what we're looking at today.
1:28.9	The idea is you hear the story right now. You hear the whole highs and the lows. You've heard
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.