Earlier this year, Wendy's, the fast-food restaurant chain beloved by many for its edgy social media presence, angered virtually the entire online world after news broke that it was considering charging different prices at different parts of the day—a tactic associated with airlines and ridesharing apps.
Immediately, negative headlines and hashtags calling to boycott the company rose to the top of people's feeds. Wendy's then went on the defensive and released a statement, saying it never intended to charge customers more at times of peak demand—on the contrary, it planned to lower them when store traffic was low.
Intrigued by this PR disaster, Reddit user Lushsweet made a post on the platform, asking everyone to list other prime examples of public backlash. And folks delivered! Here are some of the most memorable entries from the discussion with thousands of comments.
#1
Papa John's complaining that he would have to add 10 cents to the price of a pizza if he were forced to provide healthcare to his full-time employees.
People were disgusted, sales tanked, stock tanked.
This was only one of a series of bone headed, tone def, racist, and ignorant statements by the CEO. The guy just couldn't shut up.
John Schnatter was removed as CEO.
Many customers never returned.
Image credits: LincHayes
#2
Apple slowing down iPhone 7s so people would buy the iPhone 10. They said it was to protect people’s batteries from failing prematurely or some nonsense. Another example of a company just trying to protect you and save you money! They didn’t really “take it back” but everyone kind of knew what was happening and a lot of people lost trust in Apple.
Image credits: TjbMke
#3
Adidas burned up like a billion dollars worth of products because Kanye West doesn’t like Jews.
Image credits: rmunderway
#4
Cadbury announced they were going to change their formula to include palm oil in their chocolate manufacturing process, and there was a huge uproar. Lots of people boycotted them or threatened to boycott them if palm oil was used as it's incredibly environmentally damaging. Cadbury's walked it back shortly after and never mentioned switching the formula again.
Image credits: TheSnowBunny
#5
Dungeons and Dragons is owned by Wizards of the Coast which is owned by Hasbro.
Im not sure if it was directly Wizards of the Coast or if it was Hasbro, but they wanted to change the licensing for DnD. This was going to f**k over thousands of streamers, podcasts, other types of small companies and start ups that were doing things related to dungeons and dragons.
The backlash from the community was huge. People canceled their DnDbeyond subscriptions on a very large scale (one of the few ways they were making money). Many popular dnd podcasts and streams openly denounced the idea and started to talk about using DnD's biggest competitor instead (pathfinder). They eventually made a half a*s statement that did not help and a couple weeks later did a complete back track and apology. This was also maybe a year ago if not more recent.
Image credits: gunnie56
#6
The Internet bullied Paramount into fixing Sonic for the movies.
Image credits: Hyrophant_sNs
#7
I remember when Bank of America wanted to roll out a $5 charge for using a debit card. People got pissed. Like really pissed, and were leaving the bank. To the point where they were like never mind.
Image credits: Mockturtle22
#8
In 2014, Apple automatically added U2's new Songs of Innocence album to the libraries of every iTunes customer for free -- more than 500 million customers. If you had an auto-downloads enabled on your iTunes, the album was automatically downloaded to your devices.
People hated this. As a result, Apple created a webpage dedicated to deleting the album from people's accounts.
Image credits: MaterialPace8831
#9
In Canada the grocery market is pretty much completely owned by 4 companies which means they try to get away with a lot of b******t since there's virtually no competition. One of them, Loblaws, had a longstanding practice of putting 50% off stickers on items that were about to expire or produce that was beaten up. Recently, they decided that they were going to drop this 50% off to 30%. I don't think they even announced anything, I'm pretty sure word just got out when employees received the new 30% off stickers. The backlash in Canada was absolutely enormous, Loblaws is widely disliked right now for using the lack of competition to gouge grocery prices and this was just another infuriating greedy move from them. In light of the backlash the company reversed course and kept the 50% off.
Image credits: brodoswaggins93
#10
The "pasty tax".
In the UK the government tried to introduce higher taxes on hot food from bakeries like sausage rolls, Cornish pasties etc. and the country basically rioted until the govt u-turned.
There were protests outside downing street and smear campaigns against food companies seen to be complicit. It was a wild time but quite a proud moment for the country when it was reversed.
Imagine what we could do if we cared this much about other issues!
Image credits: dottydaydream
#11
Back in the '70s, the Kentucky river flooded in the Appalachian region around Harlan, KY. The area is full of dirt-poor people, and huge numbers of people lost everything from flooding.
Hill's Department stores was a regional chain of variety stores (like Walmart). They had a store in the area which flooded. So, what do with all of the store's water-damaged stock? They decided to put it all on trucks, ship it to Lexington, and hold a tent sale to get rid of it. They ran ads announcing the sale, saying "our loss is your gain".
Well, the public told them pretty quickly what they _should_ have done with the damaged stock. Pretty quickly they cancelled the sale, shipped everything back to Harlan, and donated it to the relief effort.
Image credits: ReddyKilowattz
#12
The game engine Unity introduced a per-install runtime fee - meaning anytime someone installed a Unity game you made, Unity would charge you. Details as to how this would be tracked and billed, how multiple installs per user or machine would be handled, how malicious installs would be prevented, how installs from prepaid deals like Gamepass would be counted, were fully absent.
Unity is one of two most popular non -proprietary game engines by far, and favored by smaller devs, who could lose all their profits with this arrangement.This alone outraged the entire game dev community, but the week of shifting explanations and rules changed on the fly really put gas on the fire.
Developers began preparing to move away from Unity, the stock price crashed, massive partners like Microsoft appeared blindsided. In the end, Unity had to retract the policy and create a new one where devs could choose between the runtime fee and a tiered percentage cut (the normal way). And the CEO had to step down. And then the company laid off 25% of their employees (although that was likely due to the same overgrowth that caused them to try the runtime fee in the first place). It was a massive disaster for the company and I would say their reputation has not recovered.
Image credits: furbylicious
#13
JCPenney tried a whole tactic of "We won't have any sales or coupons anymore, our prices will just always be low". Instead, sales tanked, the stock prices dropped into single digits, stores ended up closed left and right, and JCPenney barely exists anymore.
Image credits: N_dixon
#14
Onlyfans said they were gonna ban "sexually explicit content" and that had to be one of the stupidest things I ever seen and they reversed that decision pretty damn quick as was expected.
Image credits: WalkingMyBeer
#15
BMW had plans to charge a monthly subscription fee for heated seats and adaptive cruise control. When you would order the car you could opt to pay for those to be installed or not not. But they would installed them anyway and then you could pay a monthly fee afterwards if you changed your mind.
Image credits: lolzbolz42
#16
At one point when bourbon exploded in popularity (largely due to growth in the SE Asian market), Maker's Mark was faced with not having enough product to meet projected demand, since it takes quite a while to produce. They announced they were going to slightly lower the alcohol percentage of their flagship product to "stretch" the supply. This idea went over like a lead balloon and was crushed almost immediately.
Image credits: mickipedic
#17
Through much of the 20th century, the biggest beer brand in the world was Schlitz. Budweiser was a distant second and gaining ground. Schlitz new CEO, son of the longstanding CEO decided the way to beat Budweiser was to make beer with a shorter brewing time. He ordered the formula changed to corn syrup from malted barley, added a new yeast to cut brewing time. Overnight consumers started complaining that the new beer was flat, cloudy and full of flakes of yeast, which turned off the loyal following. They started recalling the beer which left no beer to sell to the marketplace. Schlitz plunged from the number one brand to obscurity. Anheuser-Busch could not have come up with a better way to sabotage their competitor.
Image credits: PizzaWall
#18
Microsoft Xbox One was supposed to be always online and removed it after fan backlash.
Image credits: Silverblade3
#19
In 2010, gaming company Activision-Blizzard (who ran World of Warcraft among other things) proposed to put players' real names on their forum posts. This...did not go well. *At all.* Doxxing of children to make a point was involved.
They did not go through with their (terrible) plan.
This incident is usually referred to as the "Real ID Fiasco" among players who were around at the time.
Image credits: PinkNGreenFluoride
#20
When the Fine Brothers announced they were going to trademark the term "react" in relation to YouTube videos.
Image credits: europorn
#21
Monster threatened to sue a Vermont microbrewery.
We crashed their website, pulled Monster from the shelves in a good portion of the state, and Bernie Sanders called them stupid.
Image credits: vociferousgirl
#22
Cricut is a brand of cutting machine used for a variety of crafting purposes. It's existed in many incarnations, but current machines utilize proprietary Cricut Design Space software in conjunction with a machine and a variety of blade options and accessories to cut complex shapes out of a wide variety of materials. They are most commonly used in the crafting world for cutting out vinyl to make custom tshirts, tumbler cups, ornaments, et cetera.
Users can purchase a Cricut Design Space premium subscription for $10/month which gives them access to a vast library of premade assets such as fonts, shapes, and predesigned projects. Since the software is reliant on .SVG files, and those can't be created within Cricut Design Space, the subscription works well for non-techie casual crafters who don't know how or don't feel like designing and converting their own SVGs in a separate program. If you are savvy enough to make your own SVGs (or if you buy/download them from other sources) you can import them into Cricut Design Space and use them. You just can't create them within Design Space.
A couple years back, Cricut made the announcement that a paid premium subscription would now be required for all users who want to import more than 10 SVG files into Design Space per month. The majority percentage of Cricut users who create projects to make money were the kind of users who created their own SVGs, and depending on complexity, *ONE* project could require 10 uploads. For all but the most casual users, this was basically Cricut forcing them into a subscription that they didn't need.
On top of all this, Design Space is absolute garbage software. It's buggy as hell, it's designed for simplicity over efficiency, certain functions barely work at all, so on. Since you can't use any other software for Cricut machines, there's no real reason for them to bother to make it good. So they don't.
The backlash was so instant, so intense, and so immense that Cricut walked their decision back very quickly. However, the whole thing caused a giant mistrust for the brand in general (which was already known for extremely overpriced accessories and terrible software) and Cricut's reputation has been damaged in the crafting community ever since.
Image credits: GaimanitePkat
#23
Pretty much every Australian bullied the snack brand Shapes into reverting back to their original recipe after changing it, so the new one only lasted a few weeks on the shelves. These crackers are a national delicacy and the new flavours genuinely tasted like s**t. Really great to have seen a nation band together for the greater good ??.
Image credits: Zalyra
#24
There was a car rental company that installed speed monitoring devices on their cars and charge you every time you went over the speed limit. I want to say Avis? Didn't last long
Edit: Acme was the name of the company, this was back in 2001. There's a New York Times article about it.
Image credits: culturebarren
#25
Taco Bell discontinued stocking potatoes and the people rioted. .
Image credits: forwardaboveallelse
#26
Tangential: I think Wendy's branded this horribly. My first though was: well I guess I'll never go to Wendy's since I'll never know what things will cost before I get there. But if they marketed it as 20% off during off peak hours or 30% after 9:30 PM or something I'd probably think of going there if I needed an early or late meal. Actual surge pricing for fast food is dumb, when a school bus of kids show up on a sports or band trip are they going to jack the prices up on all of them? Specific days/times with higher/lower prices seems more viable.
Image credits: clandestine_justice
#27
When the Covid lockdowns started hitting, the city of Denver announced that all liquor stores and [weed] dispenseries would be shuttered for the duration. Hordes of people scrambled to these shops and formed huge lines to stock up.
Two hours later, the city announced that NO, those shops would not be forced to close, that they were deemed essential services.
[https://denverite.com/2021/03/22/looking-back-at-denvers-prohibition-of-2020-a-symbol-of-the-citys-covid-moment/](https://denverite.com/2021/03/22/looking-back-at-denvers-prohibition-of-2020-a-symbol-of-the-citys-covid-moment/).
Image credits: The_Ombudsman
#28
Valve announced a plan to charge for mods almost a decade ago.
Internet backlash against this was swift and powerful enough to get them to backtrack.
It was an especially surprising move for a company that the Internet considered "good" (as good as a for-profit corp could be, realistically).
Image credits: rnilf
#29
X box one was going to have only digital game sales.
They got beat up in the media so bad they quickly pivoted to also selling games on disc like before.
Image credits: Jim3535
#30
Kind of. Minor one, but in the early 2000s Marvel had started a great run of Fantastic Four by Mark Waid and Mike Weiringo. It got huge critical acclaim and good sales and it was clear the duo wanted a long run on the book.
About a year in, Marvel president Bill Jemas, announced that their run would wrap up after only 18 issues, with the next team going for a feel closer to the upcoming Fox Fantastic Four (2005) movie.
Everyone was pissed. After a lot of online debate, Jemas backtracked and said that the Waid/Weiringo run would continue, and the version closer to the film would be a second FF title.
The Waid/Weiringo run ended up being about three years.
Image credits: majorjoe23
#31
When sunchips realeased their new eco-friendly bag. That thing was sooo f*****g loud anytime it crinkled. They had to change the bags back very quickly from the backlash haha.
Image credits: perrin515
#32
Tesla is now putting normal round steering wheels into model s/x instead of the "yoke" they tried so hard to push onto people for about 2 years.
Image credits: 23andrewb
#33
EA received huge backlash for adding loot boxes into the modern Battlefront 2 game. They actually basically removed them but there is a remnant still in the game. When you unlock new guns/cosmetics, it uses the loot box animation to show you what you unlocked. There is no way to get loot boxes in the game and the currency you unlock can directly unlock cosmetics now though.
Image credits: Hypernatremia
#34
Netflix trying to spin off their DVD service into Qwikster, separate from its fledgling streaming service in 2011. Stock tanked 80% in part due to that, was shelved.
On a side note, billionaire investor Carl Icahn bought 11% of Netflix stock at the lows for $650M. He was going to agitate to sell the company, but the stock quickly ran up. He sold it at a 5x gain over the objection of his son...would have been worth about $25-30B today..
Image credits: Illustrious_Hotel527
#35
The San Francisco 49ers tried to introduce a new logo in the early 90’s and it was honestly pretty ugly and bad. A “what were you trying to accomplish?” decision and this was in the years when they were winning like every other Super Bowl so people had grown attached to the look the team had worn to great success. Pre internet so the fans flooded the team with letters and calls and picket lines outside the office and the team said “fine we won’t use the new logo” .
Image credits: Navyblazers2000
#36
Just last month WWE caused a global fan backlash when The Rock came back and forced out Cody Rhodes from wrestling Roman Reigns in the main event at this year's WrestleMania. The backlash was so severe that WWE not only put Cody back in the main event but The Rock realized he had to turn heel so the booing and anti Rock chants made sense to the casual audience.
Image credits: Rumham_Gypsy
#37
If you follow tech the most recent one would probably be Nvidia with the RTX 4080. At first Nvidia launched a RTX 4080 16GB for $1199 and a RTX 4080 12GB for $899. The problem was the RTX 4080 12GB used an entirely different GPU and was significantly slower rather than just being a card with less VRAM as the name implied. Nvidia “unlaunched” the RTX 4080 12GB and relaunched it as the RTX 4070 Ti at $799.
Image credits: otritus
#38
Twitch, just a few weeks back, allowed for one day complete nudity. All they asked was that streamers explicitly marked their streams as being 18+.
A handful of streamers f*****g ran with it in that one day. One of my personal favorite streamers, PayMoneyWubby, made ai generated sexual images and was (unrighteously) banned for a week. Twitch changed their mind back the following day. That streamer had to fulfill his week ban.
Image credits: NotABlastoise
