A car with push-button gear shifts in the center of the steering wheel and a grille that looked like a horse collar. A new and almost instantly disdained recipe for the world’s most popular soft drink. A coin the size of a quarter that was intended to replace the dollar bill, the most powerful symbol of American economic strength.
In retrospect, it’s easy to ask what the perpetrators of the Edsel, New Coke and the Susan B. Anthony dollar were thinking — or drinking. But these and other famous stumbles from the worlds of fashion, electronics, cars and other buzz-driven categories were all the products of careful, seemingly rational consideration, even if the motive was nothing grander than making money.
And speaking of money, a hot trend that goes into the deep freeze isn’t necessarily a financial failure. Think of the millions of 8-track tape players and cartridges that electronics manufacturers and record companies sold before their evident shortcomings caught up with them. And then think of the millions of gadgets that people bought to play the cassette tapes and compact discs that replaced 8-track tapes. So sometimes the answer to the question “What were they thinking?” might just be: planned obsolescence.
1. THE FORD EDSEL
The Edsel, named for Henry Ford’s son, was a fiasco from the start. In an over-the-top marketing campaign, Ford promised a revolutionary new car, but when the public finally saw it in September 1957, their reaction was a collective “Huh?” The car’s grille, which was dominated by a chrome oval that critics compared to a horse collar, gave the vehicle a goofy look, and the push-button gear selector was located in the middle of the steering wheel, where the horn usually was. Result: Some motorists ended up changing gears when they meant to hit the horn. The cars suffered from poor production, too, giving them a reputation as lemons. Edsel, some said, stood for “Every day something else leaks.” Ford put the Edsel out of its misery after three years, having sold just 111,000 cars.
2. THE 8-TRACK TAPE
The 8-track tape format, invented by Bill Lear of the Learjet Corp. in 1964, seemed to be a Space Age leap forward for recorded music. The cartridges that housed the tape were smaller than a clunky vinyl record and much easier to handle than reel-to-reel tape. Soon 8-track tape players were being offered as options in Ford and GM cars, and the end of vinyl seemed nigh. Alas, the reports of vinyl’s death were premature. The 8-track format divided the tape into four sets of stereo tracks on a continuous spool of tape. That meant that songs were sometimes interrupted as the player changed tracks, sounds from different tracks could sometimes be heard at once, and the constant pulling of the tape meant that with repeated play, the sound would become distorted. Compact, high-quality cassette tapes finished off the 8-track format, and not a moment too soon.
3. THE LEISURE SUIT
Double-knit polyester found its ultimate expression as a fabric in the mid-1970s in the leisure suit, which coupled a shirt-like coat, preferably with a wide lapel and contrasting stitching, and bell-bottom pants. Pair it with a flowery silk shirt open to the navel to reveal a Burt Reynolds-like carpet of chest hair, and the ladies will come running. At least, that was the theory. But as personified by Bill Murray’s lounge singer on “Saturday Night Live” in the late 1970s, the reality was a tacky turnoff. The leisure suit died an unmourned death by the end of the decade, but the impulse behind it — a desire for a looser, less-dressy look than a business suit — lingered on. Today’s business-casual look owes more than a nod to the lowly leisure suit.
4. BETAMAX
Just as the race is not always to the swift, wars in the consumer electronics world are not always won by the better format. That was the lesson of the struggle between Sony’s Betamax and JVC’s VHS for supremacy in the videocassette market in the early 1980s. Betamax, introduced in 1975, delivered better picture and sound quality than its rival, which debuted in 1976. But Sony’s videorecorders were more expensive than VHS machines, and VHS cassettes had greater recording capacity than their Betamax rivals. By 1988, when Sony announced that it would start making VHS machines, only about 7 million of the 55 million VCRs in the U.S. were Betamax machines. But, having learned a hard lesson, Sony was better prepared when its Blu-ray high-definition DVD format went up against Toshiba’s HD DVD. Earlier this year, Toshiba conceded defeat when major Hollywood studios opted for the Sony format.
5.THE SUSAN B. ANTHONY DOLLAR
After the double-digit inflation of the 1970s, the mighty dollar wasn’t so mighty anymore, and so it might have made sense — no pun intended — to demote the dollar to the lowly rank of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. Sense, that is, to a government bureaucrat. The Susan B. Anthony dollar, introduced in 1979, was intended as a more economical replacement for one of the country’s iconic symbols, the George Washington dollar bill. Coins last far longer than paper currency — as long as people use them. Honoring the suffragette was a nice idea, but the coin was misbegotten from the start. It was the size of a quarter, leading inevitably to confusion and resentment when people realized they had paid a dollar for a newspaper or a cup of coffee (remember, this was 1979). Roughly 760 million dollar coins were minted the first year. That fell to 90 million the following year, and in 1981, the Susan B. Anthony dollar was discontinued.
6. NEW COKE
Coca-Cola may have been the dominant soft drink for decades, but by the mid-1980s, it was growing increasingly concerned that its chief rival, Pepsi-Cola, was catching up. What to do? Make Coke taste more like Pepsi. Brilliant! Except it wasn’t. When the sweeter-tasting New Coke debuted in 1985, the reaction was overwhelmingly negative. No one had asked loyal Coke drinkers if they wanted their favorite fizzy beverage to change. People started hoarding the original Coke, and there were even reports that cases of the real thing were being sold for up to $30 on the black market. Coca-Cola executives relented after only three months and brought back the original recipe, now dubbed “Coca-Cola Classic.” New Coke became Coke II until it was discontinued a few years later.
7. THE MCLEAN DELUXE
It was billed as “91 percent fat free, 100 percent delicious,” but the McLean Deluxe proved 0 percent popular with McDonald’s customers after it was rolled out with great fanfare in 1991. With only nine grams of fat, the burger was undeniably heart-friendly, and health experts cheered its arrival. To take the place of the yummy but naughty fat, McDonald’s used carregeenan, a gumlike substance derived from seaweed. But for most taste buds, fat is where it’s at. The burger was blah, customers said, and it never caught on. Only two years later, the McLean Deluxe accounted for less than 2 percent of McDonald’s sales, and some restaurant franchisees refused to sell it. It was discontinued in 1996. McRib, anyone?
8.”CLEAR” LIQUIDS
Color bad. Clear good. That was the simplistic logic behind a bevy of beverages and other consumer products that suddenly went colorless in the early 1990s, during the “clear” years. In 1992, Pepsi introduced a clear version of its signature cola, called Crystal Pepsi, and the next year, Coca-Cola followed suit with a see-through version of its diet cola, called Tab Clear. Miller followed suit with Miller Clear beer, spending $12 million to market its clear brew. From gasoline to mouthwash, the theory went, clarity meant purity in consumers’ minds. But isn’t a cola supposed to be dark? Isn’t beer supposed to be golden or even darker? “Saturday Night Live” parodied the gimmick with a spoof ad for Crystal Gravy. Store shelves were cleared of clear products within a year or two, with only Coors’ Zima clear malt beverage outlasting the trend.
9. THE APPLE NEWTON
Wat a grate idee-a! A komputter tat reeds ur hndwrtng! In this age of Apple ascendancy, with everyone agog over iPods and iPhones, it is a salutary exercise in perspective to recall that, like Isaac Newton’s proverbial apple, the company is still subject to the laws of gravity. Apple came a cropper in 1993 with the Newton, a chunky tablet computer that was supposed to recognize your handwriting when you wrote on the screen with a stylus. But the software never worked properly, the price was too high, and for the design-conscious Apple, the Newton looked uncharacteristically boxy and geeky — in other words, like a Microsoft product. Ah well, timing is everything. A few years later, with much better software and other technological improvements, the handheld PalmPilot soared where the Newton had fallen flat.
10. THE SEGWAY
When inventor Dean Kamen introduced his “human transporter” in 2001, he described the two-wheeled electric scooter as “like a pair of magic sneakers” and predicted that his company would sell up to 100,000 Segways in the first year. Apple’s Steve Jobs said that urban planners would one day design cities around the Segway. But at $5,000 apiece, and with a top speed of 12 miles an hour, the Segway got off to a slow start. A very slow start. It turned out that only 6,000 scooters were sold in the first six months. The Segway, with supersensitive gyroscopes that respond to the rider’s movements to accelerate, turn and slow down, is undoubtedly a marvel of engineering, but it has yet to prove more than a techie curio. If gas prices rise again — make that when gas prices rise again — the Segway may, ahem, segue into the mainstream. In the meantime, isn’t walking supposed to be good for you?
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