When someone refers to something as the cost of doing business these days, they generally refer to something that sounds out of line or unfair. It’s an indictment of how we view business in general that this has become a turn of phrase that can be used in everyday life. We recognize that business, no matter what kind of business it may be, is going to cost you. How much it costs can be surprising.

10. Item Returns Cost US Retailers Over $816 Billion 

When was the last time you returned something to a store? Maybe it was broken, food that had gone bad, or something you just didn’t like once you got it home and looked at it. Have you ever considered what that means to the business that accepts the return? Most of us don’t, but the cost of retail returns to businesses is an almost baffling $816 billion per year. That works out to more than what the US government spends on education training and employment programs in a year.

In many cases, there are multiple levels to how a return item costs a company money. For instance, if you return your Amazon order, Amazon pays the postage to take it back. A number of things can’t be restocked and sold to somebody else for various safety reasons. Other items are so inconvenient to restock that they’ll throw them out instead. 

About 16.5% of all retail sales are returned by consumers. Holiday returns alone account for $171 billion in losses. Fraudulent returns make up around $84 billion in yearly losses. 

9. The Original Xbox Cost Microsoft $4 to $7 billion 

The console gaming market was worth $37.9 billion in 2022, and it’s only expected to grow year over year. The market would be nowhere near as big as it is without the Xbox versus PlayStation battle that has fueled for decades now. 

Microsoft’s decision to join the console Wars and create the Xbox looked completely foolish when it started back in 2001, but it began to make a lot more sense. This is all because Microsoft lost between $4 billion and $7 billion on the original Xbox. 

Microsoft worked quickly to push out the original Xbox. It wasn’t designed to be cost-effective or efficient; they just wanted it done as soon as possible. Every piece of hardware they sold was a loss for the company. The idea was that they could make up money later on the software, which is clearly what they did as the Xbox gave way to the 360 and later generations that have all been huge money-makers. 

8. Friday the 13th Costs Businesses Hundreds of Millions

Paraskevidekatriaphobia is possibly the most costly fear for business in America. The fear of Friday the 13th may sound silly, but when you get to the bottom line, it’s no joke. People take this so seriously that it has a multi-million dollar impact on the economy every single time the 13th falls on a Friday.

An estimated $700 million to $800 million in productivity or revenue is lost every Friday the 13th due to people refusing to go to work or shopping. One survey in Britain showed that one in 20 people won’t leave their house on the unlucky day. 

Considering that there could be up to three Fridays the 13th on the calendar in any given year, the potential business loss could be over $2 billion in total.

7. CVS Lost $2 Billion in Annual Sales by Dropping Cigarettes

For many years doctors would endorse the smoking of cigarettes. TV commercials would feature someone in a nice white coat smoking their Marlboro and explaining how it helped relax you and take you to flavor country, or whatever the medical reason might be for smoking a cigarette in the 1950s. Later, this advertising method was dropped, but cigarettes were still not far removed from the world of healthcare. For decades you could buy cigarettes at a drugstore.

CVS drug stores stopped selling tobacco products in 2014. Remarkably, this did a great service to the world at large. 38% of CVS customers who were smokers stopped smoking altogether rather than inconveniencing themselves by going to another store to buy cigarettes. 

On the financial side, the company took a massive hit of around $2 billion by dropping tobacco. Their overall sales were $139 billion at the time, but a $2 billion loss is nothing to sneeze at. 

6. Sunny Delight Saw Its Sales Cut in Half by a Scandal

Sunny Delight was a childhood staple for many people of a certain age. It wasn’t exactly orange juice, but it was orange. That has to count for something. It became a huge hit when it made its way to the United Kingdom. Sunny Delight was the third best-selling soft drink in the UK in the ’90s, right after Coke and Pepsi. It was also the 12th best-selling grocery product of any kind in the country. However, that didn’t last long.

Though it sounds like an urban legend, there was a story in 1999 about a 4-year-old girl who drank so much Sunny Delight she turned yellow. This was true because of the amount of beta carotene added to Sunny Delight to give it the bright yellow color it was famous for. Although it was harmless, it faded soon after, and the girl had to drink 1.5 liters a day to achieve it; once the story hit the news, the damage was done.

Sales of the beverage were cut in half in the aftermath of the yellow girl scandal. This led the company to attempt rebranding in 2003, then a reformulation in 2009, and another tweak in 2010. Sales never fully recovered.

5. The Movie Sideways Cost Merlot Wine Makers $400 Million

Sideways was a 2004 comedy-drama about a trip through wine country. It was nominated for several Academy Awards and was generally well-liked by audiences. Most audiences, at least. But probably not the people who make Merlot wine.

The lead character in the film is something of a wine snob. At one point, he angrily exclaims that he has no intention of drinking merlot and insults the wine. You’d think a character in a movie doing that wouldn’t be a big deal, but you’d be wrong. This had a devastating effect on the real-world Merlot market. 

Sales of Merlot began to tank immediately after the film was released. Ten years on, the estimated loss was $400 million. Farmers lost about 7,650 acres of merlot grapes in favor of something else, in many cases pinot noir, which saw a huge boost after the film.

4. Tropicana Lost 20% of Their Sales After a Package Redesign

Have you ever wondered how important branding is for a product? Tropicana can tell you. In 2009, Tropicana decided to redesign its orange juice cartons. The juice stayed the same, all they did was change the package, which backfired miserably. 

For whatever reason, Tropicana felt the old look, which was just an orange with a straw in it under the product name, was not good enough. They spent $35 million on a rebranding campaign complete with a new design that was a close-up image of half a glass of juice. Not very complex stuff, right?

The company had about $700 million in annual sales before the redesign. Sales dropped by 20% after customers began to criticize the new look. That worked out to around $30 million on top of the $35 million they spent on the campaign in the first place.

The failure was blamed, at least in part, on Tropicana losing its connection with its customer base. Their old logo, which they went back to, was famous and iconic. It also has some personality. But they switched it to an incredibly generic redesign with little appeal, and customers rejected it very strongly. 

3. Halo 3 Was Blamed for a  27% Drop in Box Office Returns 

The box office success of movies is something that people find endlessly fascinating. Whether or movie does incredibly well or incredibly poorly, you can count on a hundred articles about it on entertainment websites for weeks to come. What’s far less common is when you find an outside reason for a drop in box office for all movies. But that happened in 2007 with the release of Halo 3.

Box office returns had plummeted 27% in October 2007 following Halo 3’s release, and it was the only thing analysts could think to blame for the massive slump. It was the worst October since 1999.

Analysts are often wrong, so you can take this all with a grain of salt, but the numbers were still awful. The Heartbreak Kid, a movie that reunited Ben Stiller with There’s Something About Mary directors the Farrelly Brothers, was expected to make as much as $25 million on its opening weekend. Instead, it took in $14 million. 

The link to Halo was established with Xbox Live numbers. 2.7 million people played the game in its first week, more than a third of everyone who was an Xbox Live member at the time. The game logged 40 million hours of play in its first week. Both Halo 3 and The Heartbreak Kid were looking to appeal to the same 18-34 demographic. Still, Master Chief seemed to win the battle handily. 

2. SC Johnson Lost a Huge Market Share by Changing Saran Wrap

Sometimes doing the right thing is a one-way trip to financial loss, something SC Johnson learned when they removed a dangerous chemical from Saran Wrap. Saran Warp famously contained something called polyvinylidene chloride. This compound was chiefly responsible for the cling quality of the plastic wrap that allowed it to stretch and stick over bowls ad plates to keep all your leftovers fresh.

It was actually news when the formula changed because people complained that their Saran Wrap didn’t cling like it used to. Clinging was the only thing people wanted Saran Wrap to do, so if it failed at that, it was a waste of money. The problem was that PDVC is very toxic and carcinogenic. 

SC Johnson dropped the chemical from the formulation, and their control of the market dropped from 18% to 11%,

1. Beavis and Butthead Destroyed Album Sales for the Band Winger

Beavis and Butthead started as a short cartoon before they got their own series on MTV in 1993. While the show mostly focused on Beavis and Butthead themselves, there were a couple of supporting characters who became memorable. One of these characters is Stewart, a nerdy kid from the neighborhood that Beavis and Butthead often mock. Like the two main characters, Stewart is always seen wearing a band shirt. That band was Winger. Winger believes Beavis and Butthead ruined their careers.

Winger guitarist Reb Beach once said the band had just released what he considered to be their best album. They were on tour to promote it when someone showed them an episode of Beavis and Butthead where they hung up Stewart by his underwear. They go to Stewart’s house, and all of his family, even the dog, are losers. And they’re all wearing Winger shirts.

The band’s tour sank immediately. People stopped buying tickets, and album sales went into the toilet. Radio stations stopped playing the band’s latest single because they were embarrassed. One stupid cartoon ruined them, costing Reb an expected $200,000 publishing advance.

In 2011, Kip Winger made amends with Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge and admitted the show had hurt them a lot, but they had buried the hatchet and moved on.

Selling you stuff—it’s what mega-corporations are best at. Every year, they find new ways to get consumers interested in their products: eye-catching marketing schemes, big-budget promotional events, and, most common of all, sales promotions. Sales promotions are like advertisements, except that they also target the buyer with a promise of reward; coupons, contests, and vouchers are all examples of sales promotions. Some, like the long-running McDonald’s Monopoly campaign, drive up company profits enormously and become staples of consumer culture. On the other side of the spectrum, however, a poorly-received promotion can all but destroy a brand, as shown by these ten laughably ill-conceived examples.

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10 Sunny Co Clothing: “Pamela” Bathing Suits

Back in summer of 2017, California-based startup Sunny Co Clothing offered Instagram users a free swimsuit, styled after the iconic one-piece worn by Pamela Anderson on the TV show “Baywatch” and valued at $64.99. All you had to do to receive it was repost the accompanying image, tag Sunny Co, and pay shipping fees—they’d handle the rest.

Unfortunately, the company massively underestimated just how many swimsuits they would have to give away. More than 330,000 people liked the original post, and despite a scourge of technical issues, the company did end up taking the L and delivering on their promise. You can’t say the error destroyed SunnyCo, as the stunt thrust them into the limelight and no doubt grew their consumer base (surely the intent of the promotion), but dishing out thousands of freebies still might not have been worth it in the long run.^[1]

9 Chevy: Do-It-Yourself Ads

Rule number one of using the Internet: be prepared for anything you post to be received by a network of trolls, critics, and “memelords”—this applies double if you’re a big company like Chevy. In 2006, they partnered with the hit TV show “The Apprentice” to offer fans the chance to create their own ad for the Chevy Tahoe, through a website where anyone with a fast connection and a little bit of time on their hands could splice together clips of the SUV with custom text and their pick of pre-provided soundtrack to create—presumably—a creative piece of user-generated advertising.

Predictably, critics of the brand (especially environmentalists) saw the contest as an opportunity to create disparaging “ads” pointing out perceived flaws with the Tahoe or just Chevy in particular. Many of these submissions stayed on the contest website for indefinite periods of time, as GM (Chevy’s parent company) specifically stated they wouldn’t be removing “negative” ads, only “offensive” ones. In the end, it seems that, like many tech-illiterate corporations both before and after them, GM definitely overestimated the Internet’s innocence.^[2]

8 American Airlines: The AAirpass

American Airlines has had a bumpy history, to say the least, but their lowest point may have come in the early 1980s—a time when they were losing money fast and needed to make a quick buck to stay afloat. Their solution to the dilemma? An exclusive membership program called the AAirpass.

The idea was simple: for just $250,000, you could purchase a pass that entitled you to free first-class flights for life. Seems pretty simple, right? The trouble started when, in 2007, AA (again in the midst of financial trouble) realized some people were using their passes too much, and it was costing the company millions. While they tried to simply remove the offending passholders from the system (citing “fraudulent activity”), the matter was only settled after years of litigation. Nowadays, the program is mostly remembered as a high-profile example of a colossal business mistake.^[3]

7 Red Lobster: Endless Crab

Plenty of companies have misjudged consumer demand when giving out freebies (for instance, Sunny Co Clothing), but none did it as catastrophically as Red Lobster. An “Endless Crab” promotion in 2003 cost them millions during its short-lived run and led to the resignation of company president Edna Morris, all because too many customers went back for more. Apparently, the team behind the stunt didn’t realize that, despite being quite the costly appetizer, crab just isn’t that filling.^[4]

6 Build-A-Bear: Pay Your Age

Obviously, the Red Lobster mistake isn’t replicated that often. That’s because most companies are able to weigh the risks of heavily discounting items against the advantages of gaining new customers and make a balanced decision based on the data they have. However, even when the monetary side of things is accounted for, poor planning can completely ruin a potentially profitable promotion.

For instance, in 2018, Build-A-Bear announced “Pay Your Age Day”, an event during which parents could buy the company’s trademark stuffed animals for the low, low price of their child’s age. It seemed like a smart marketing tactic, until Build-A-Bear employees realized the stores were unable to handle the influx of crowds the promotion had created. Those who had to wait in line for hours—with kids in tow, no less—were less than happy, and the fiasco led to a surge in negative PR for the company.^[5]

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5 Coca-Cola: MagiCans

Coca-Cola’s “MagiCans” contest idea seemed decent, at least in theory—among the millions of regularly-labeled Coke cans distributed across the United States, there would also be a select number of disguised “MagiCans”, special “golden ticket” cans that hid prizes inside which would pop up once the can was opened. To keep the MagiCans from being discovered too easily, they were designed with a compartment inside that contained a replacement for the usual soda; a (non-toxic) mix of chlorinated water and an unknown, foul-tasting liquid clearly meant to keep the contents from being drunk.

The promotion was nixed after just a few weeks, however, after numerous reports came in of problems with the cans: the liquid ruined the prize, or the prize didn’t pop up at all, or—in one extreme case—a child drank the Coke-replacement liquid. At first, Coke did try their best to dispel concerns, but the campaign led to so much negative publicity that they finally decided to pull the plug.^[6]

4 McDonald’s: When The U.S. Wins, You Win

To keep the patriotic spirit going during the 1984 Summer Games, McDonald’s created a promotional contest called “When The U.S. Wins, You Win.” The premise: buy an item, you get a game piece with the name of an Olympic event on it. If the U.S. gets a medal in that event, you get free food (a Big Mac for gold, fries for silver, and a Coke for bronze).

However, what seemed like a smart way to capitalize on the biggest sporting event of the year became a marketing nightmare for McDonald’s after the Soviet Union boycotted the games, leading to the United States performing far above expectations. So many prizes had to be given out as a result of this that some McDonald’s locations even reported a shortage of Big Macs, the chain’s signature burger.^[7]

3 Malaysia Airlines: My Ultimate Bucket List

After 2014 saw Malaysia Airlines take a huge hit from two unconnected incidents that resulted in the combined loss of more than 500 passengers and crew members, the company was no doubt looking for a way to restore its image. However, a “bucket list” themed contest (which asked entrants to describe, in 500 words or less, “what and where [they’d] like to tick off on [their] bucket list”) might not have been the best option. At least the gruesome association was caught quickly, giving the airline time to rebrand the contest as a “to-do” list—albeit not before international news media had picked up the story.^[8]

2 Hoover: Two Free Flights

One of the most well-known examples of a truly terrible marketing campaign was Hoover’s ill-fated “two free flights” promotion. In 1992, desperate to overcome the ongoing financial crisis, Hoover’s British division partnered with little-known airline JSI Travel to offer two free round-trip flights to anyone who bought a Hoover product worth £100 or more (about $123 USD).

Despite the fact that Hoover purposefully made it as hard as possible to redeem the flights (a controversial fact in and of itself), they just couldn’t keep up with the high levels of demand, and the ensuing scandal caused the company irreparable damage. In 1995, Hoover Europe was sold to Candy, an Italian unit that was formerly one of their primary competitors. In 2004, a BBC documentary was made about the incident, the release of which led to Hoover’s failures being brought back into the public eye; the company subsequently lost their Royal Warrant as a result.^[9]

1 Pepsi: Number Fever

It’s quite possibly the only marketing snafu to date in which a simple error quite literally meant the difference between life and death: that’s right, I’m talking about Pepsi Philippines’ infamous number blunder. In 1992 (quite a year for disastrous promotions), the company introduced a contest called “Pepsi Number Fever”. Pepsi bottle caps would be marked on the inside with one three-digit number, and certain “winning numbers” would be eligible for prizes of up to one million pesos (or about $40,000 USD).

The promotion enjoyed moderate success for a couple of weeks until the night of May 25th, 1992, when the next winning number—349—was announced. Almost everybody was a winner that night—but only because Pepsi had goofed and printed winning number 349 on more than 800,000 different bottle caps, only 2 of which were “supposed” to be winners. With thousands of people trying to redeem the contest’s million-peso grand prize, Pepsi announced their mistake and offered a 500-peso consolation prize to the now-angry “prizewinners”, a move that cost them more than four times the contest’s original budget in and of itself.

The trouble didn’t end there, however, as the country continued to rally against Pepsi. Not only were thousands of lawsuits filed, but dozens of Pepsi trucks were vandalized, several Pepsi executives were issued death threats, and five people (including three Pepsi employees) were killed by grenades thrown by anti-Pepsi rioters. While things eventually went back to normal, the “349 Incident” went down in history as a projection of the worldwide economic unrest prevalent during the early 1990s, as well as a tragic example of how a tiny mistake can have big consequences for a brand.^[10]

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About The Author: Izak Bulten is a pop culture enthusiast and connoisseur of all things bizarre. He’s written for ScreenRant, CBR, and The Art of Puzzles.