What has been the best corporate Darwin Award, as in how did they kill their own business?

I own a vineyard and was looking for numbered tags to attach to the post at the end of each row.

One website that sold such items said,

Don't use cheap cattle ear tags to mark your rows,

and proceeded to describe how much better their tags were.

I thought, cheap cattle ear tags, of course,

and promptly found and purchased them at a fraction of the cost. I would never have thought of it

if not for this great marketing. I officially nominate Schlitz Beer for the Corporate Darwin Hall of Fame.

Number one beer in America by far in the late 60s and early 70s, when

some genius at the head office decided to change the recipe to save money on ingredients.

Sales fell off a cliff. Almost immediately they changed back to the old recipe, but it was already

too late. The old Schlitz drinkers stayed away in droves. The company remains up Schlitz Creek without a paddle.

We actually had Schlitz as a case study in business school.

Management went through no less than 10 successive rounds of cost cutting, incrementally

decreasing product quality with each round.

The last cost cutting was the death knell.

They stopped filtering out the last little yeast flakes from the final product,

figuring that consumers wouldn't mind little flecks of yeast in the head of their beer.

Lesson learned, consumers typically don't notice the drop in quality going from A to B,

but definitely notice the drop from A to J.

Prodigy Online Service. They had a great message board system system which was included in the monthly rate.

They got greedy and for no reason other than wanting to make more money started charging

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