Products that were built then physically modified since they didn't sell

December 16, 2024 9:49 AM

The recent story about Tesla turning "Foundation Series" Cybertrucks into normal Cybertrucks and cutting the price reminds me of a story I read as a kid, where Lionel released a girl's train set in the 1950s, which flopped for various reasons, and Lionel bought unsold trains back and repainted them. What are other examples of companies getting stuck with merchandise, and instead of simply discounting it or destroying it like the E.T. video game, they modified it after the fact to increase its appeal?
posted by Seeking Direction to Grab Bag (13 answers total)

Not sure if it fully counts, but a shout out the Hitachii Magic Wand - a product which was developed for the modest market of people wanting treatment for sore muscles, but flourished in the much larger market of people who sore it as a sex toy, to the point where the company has coyly removed their name from its branding.
posted by rongorongo at 10:04 AM on December 16 [3 favorites]

The infamous “butcher cover” of the Beatles album Yesterday and Today, which was so dreadful that it was stickered over with a replacement.
posted by xil at 10:15 AM on December 16 [3 favorites]

Sort of a double whammy, but the VW Golf Harlequin was built by taking apart single-color cars and reassembling them to be multi-colored. More expensive than the base Golf and, well, looking like it did, it didn't sell very well, so dealers then disassembled the cars again and rebuilt them as single-color models.
posted by papayaninja at 10:36 AM on December 16 [6 favorites]

A slightly different but related process is: Product Binning.

It's different since with binning the "modification" is just a result of the initial manufacturing process, instead of something that happens later.

CPUs are the easiest to understand version of this. Intel and friends do their best to make as many high-performing chips as possible, but the ones that come out with fewer functional cores (and therefore less performance) get sold as the lower-performance and cheaper edition of that chip.

Produce is another good example. The perfect looking apples go to Ralphs Fresh Fare at $2.99/lb, the beat up ones from the exact same harvest go to El Super and at $.99/lb.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 10:39 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]

Baby cut carrots.
Take imperfect carrots , peel them, cut them to small uniform lengths and sell them as baby cuts
posted by yyz at 11:51 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]

Nintendo of America only managed to sell 1,000 out of the 3,000 Radar Scope arcade game machines they ordered from Japan. To avoid having to dispose of the other 2,000 that were stuck in their warehouse, they commissioned a new game that they could convert the remaining Radar Scope units to run; the resulting game, Donkey Kong, became a smash hit.
posted by Calysma at 11:55 AM on December 16 [6 favorites]

Does he-man being a toy first and then they made the tv show fit?
posted by St. Peepsburg at 12:40 PM on December 16 [1 favorite]

Also for the internet clout: I had the ET game, completely missed the online brouhaha and lost my chance to make hundreds. HUNDREDS! It was indeed a terrible game.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 12:41 PM on December 16 [1 favorite]

In the early 1980s, the US had much stricter electrical shielding requirements for microcomputers than the UK did, so when Acorn tried to sell the BBC Micro in the US in 1984, they had to add a bunch of extra metal shielding inside the case. The US market wasn't interested, so most of the machines were returned to the UK and were refitted with UK ROMs and power supplies for sale. Collectors occasionally find one of the modified machines.
posted by offog at 1:27 PM on December 16

After Star Wars got big, a lot of toys got remade into Star Wars merchandise. Then in turn, Star Wars toys got repurposed for other franchises, particularly Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.
posted by chrisulonic at 3:15 PM on December 16

The DAK catalog was known for this. Most notably, the "Thunder Lizard Mistake" speakers, which were speakers which had the wrong tweeters installed at the factory. DAK bought them as surplus and then resold them as a bundle with the correct tweeter that the customer could install as a DIY project. Link to the catalog, scroll around 1/8 of the way down.
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 4:16 PM on December 16 [1 favorite]

It's different since with binning the "modification" is just a result of the initial manufacturing process, instead of something that happens later.

It's pretty common for yields to be so good that CPU manufacturers modify perfectly good processors to be worse because there is more demand for the cheaper parts than the natural defect rate can supply. AMD's Phenom II was well known for this, often you'd get more working cores than you paid for.
posted by davidest at 6:49 PM on December 16

According to a fascinating episode of The Food That Built America, TV dinners initially arose from Gilbert Swanson cornering the market on frozen turkey then discovering that no one was buying them outside of Thanksgiving and Christmas.
posted by platinum at 7:22 PM on December 16