The Year's Top Business Screw-Ups

Fortune recently published a list of 2007’s 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, and then the Seattle Post-Intelligencer cooked that down to just 9 really good ones. Now we’re summarizing the Seattle PI article. (If you’d like to play along, pick just a couple of business blunders from our summary and write them on a sticky note—we’d like to get this down to a six-word fortune cookie by December 31st.) Some of the Seattle PI’s picks include the rats at the KFC in NYC, the GHB toy beads, Best Buy’s in-store kiosk version of its website with higher prices, Jay-Z’s dog-fur coats, and that time when SkyWest wouldn’t let that passenger pee, and so he had to go in an air-sickness bag, which led to him being questioned by the police when he finally got off the plane.

They also picked Hasbro’s Easy-Bake Oven, which we mentioned here but incorrectly reported as a basic recall that wasn’t a big deal. Turns out it happened twice and one case involved a partial amputation of a kid’s finger.

In February, Hasbro announces a recall of nearly one million Easy-Bake Ovens after 29 children get their fingers stuck inside, some suffering severe burns. Five months later, the company is forced to reissue the recall after receiving reports on 249 additional incidents, 77 involving burns, including one that required a partial finger amputation.

“Top consumer blunders of the year” [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]

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“101 Dumbest Moments in Business” [CNN Money]

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