There were so many companies and brands we thought had died or isn’t useful in the modern-day world. But, wait a second. They are still alive and kicking.
What “obsolete” companies are you surprised are still holding on in the modern world? Here are our top picks from internet users
RED ROOSTER
“Red Rooster in Australia. Not a single person I’ve ever known goes to Red Rooster and yet they’re everywhere, defies logic.”
RENTACENTER
“Seriously, who rents a TV or a couch? I’ve never known anyone to go there, lol.”
KIRBY VACUUM CLEANER
“I had some older woman knocking on my door at like 2 pm on a Wednesday trying to come in and give me a demo of a Kirby vacuum cleaner.
Also, door-to-door salespeople are still a thing in 2023.”
JENNY CRAIG
“Jenny Craig just bottomed up this week. I’m surprised it lasted this long.”
AOL
“Blows my mind that aol.com is still a thing.”
“1.5 million people still pay money for AOL. Average $10 per user.”
NETFLIX RENTING DVDs
“I read that Netflix just announced they are going to stop mailing DVDs for rental in the next few months. I thought they stopped doing that a long time ago.”
LONG JOHN SILVERS
“There’s a secret society among us that is keeping Long John Silvers afloat.”
“My grandma liked to go there for a piece of fish and some hush puppies. Then she’d take me to McDonald’s for coffee (for her -I was a small child) and a vanilla cone. When I miss her, I go to one of the last Long John Silvers in my area and get fish and hush puppies.”
THE YELLOW PAGES
“I do remember before being able to look stuff up online, going out of town & browsing the yellow pages at the hotel looking for places to eat & many other things. I couldn’t tell you when I last saw a set of yellow pages.”
“I work at a hotel. About once every two years, I get someone asking if we have a copy of the Yellow Pages.”
PARTY CITY STORE
“Party City. Their stores are huge, and every time I go, there are less than ten customers.”
“Party City is one of those stores that makes its nut from a few days a year. The week before Halloween and there’s a line out the door. 4th of July, Easter, graduation time, and Thanksgiving and Christmas are when they do their business. It’s a one-stop shop for everything you need for an event that allows you to see it beforehand and not make a bad Amazon purchase.”
In 2022, they made a whopping $2.140 billion in revenue.
HERBAL LIFE
“Herbalife. Don’t the people know? Lol”
They still have a revenue of $5.12 B a year in 2022.
CUTCO
“Cutco. They could be much more successful if they dropped their current sales rep pyramid model.”
“Yeah, I never understood the MLM thing. Sometimes the product is good, but the execution is garbage.”
Their revenue was $200.0M in 2022.
XEROX
“XEROX. It’s like they have been actively and consistently trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of success for the last 3+ decades.
Their in-house researchers were the first to pioneer, and subsequently discard, graphical user interfaces for computers (later copied to massive success by Apple and Microsoft), the ethernet protocol (the backbone of the modern internet), the computer mouse, modern WYSIWYG editors who are now the industry standard way of building interfaces for modern apps, and SO MANY OTHER THINGS.
If XEROX had followed through to market on one or two of their prototypes instead of giving them away, they might have had a bigger market cap than Microsoft and Apple combined today. Instead, they are mainly still just making copier machines like they are perpetually stuck in 1958, yet somehow they are still in business.
That’s just crazy to me. It’s like if IBM had decided that electronic computers were just a fad and were instead still focusing on electromechanical typewriters in 2023.”
“The US Navy takes a Xerox tech on deployment on aircraft carriers. It is vital to the mission to have a civilian living onboard to fix printers/copiers.”
APPLEBEES
“Applebees. I can microwave my food.”
“Working in the service industry; I’ve known many a coworker who goes to Applebee’s because the drinks are cheap and open late. They have the “whatever, what other option do we have?” market cornered for poor people who work nights.”
They made a revenue of 4.24 billion U.S. dollars
TUPPERWARE
“Tupperware offers close to free replacements of your products, forever. You only need to buy something once, and then you have it for life. How do they make any money? We haven’t bought anything new from Tupperware in like 20 years, we send stuff back, and they replace them.”
MYSPACE
“MySpace.com is still fully functioning”
“I wish everyone would go back there, and we could pretend like Facebook never happened. We could do cool stuff like show off our pets and share songs.”
Revenue for the year 2022 was $34.0M in 2022.
SMITH-CORONA TYPEWRITER
“Smith-Corona Typewriter Company is still alive and well. Write on!”
“Looks like they’ve gone bankrupt twice and no longer make typewriters. Now they are focused on label printers.”
They made a whopping revenue of $17.9 Million.
World Book Encyclopedia
“Obsolete if they had remained solely print, but certainly a viable business if you go digital and sell subscriptions to schools and businesses who might be afraid Wiki isn’t as vetted as World Book.”
“Same goes for the Oxford Dictionary, Roget’s thesaurus, etc. Nothing gets in their database that hasn’t been thoroughly vetted.”
There revenue was a massive $56 Million in 2022.
KODAK
“Eastman Kodak. In 1996 the king of photography had 2/3 market share on film and photographic supplies and $16 billion in sales (equivalent to $30.78 billion today).”
“Kodak was blindsided by the digital revolution that swept over the world of photography, and they became an afterthought. Kodak’s 2021 sales were only $1.15 billion, and I’m surprised they were that high.”
Kodak made a revenue of $1.205 billion in 2022.
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This article originally appeared on Mrs Daaku Studio.