So this is one of those articles they wrote to get people to hate read and then the engagement gets people to read their failing website?
My instant pot is amazing. Everyone i know has one. How did they fail??
I have a theory that shitty products fundamentaly out-compete good products today because its way cheaper to market your product as good than to actually develop it well. I call it the craptocracy
I want to see craptocracy trend so hard that it makes it into spellcheckers.
When everyone already has one, no one needs to buy it anymore
The George Foreman machine is still my "peak design". And yet nobody owns one after everyone burned out on it from oversaturation.
They still sell panini press grills. It's generally a bachelor pad thing though.
Someone needs to create a business that bails out/buys excellent quality products and produces them in a small enough scale that only new owners will need.
Consider it an excellent achievement for a product to make it here. Only the best buy it for life products.
Someone needs to destroy private equity.
And the concept of infinite growth.
Financially, if your company is not expanding an increasing amount quarter on quarter on quarter, it's considered to be failing.
And yet, nothing can grow forever. At some point, all things must come to an end. It's an unrealistic pipe dream.
Say that the Instant Pot is so good that everyone has ten of them. Where would they grow from there?
FTFA:
A few years and one pandemic later, the company filed for bankruptcy on Monday,
It's also in a bunch of comments already
This is an older story. The narrative that it failed because it was too good is false. It was a private equity leveraged buyout that doomed it. The company got saddled with like 8x debt with a lot of that money going to dividends for the PE firm.
The product and the brand were strong enough that they've been sold to a different firm in the bankruptcy. If they are competently managed they should be fine.
The lede is buried at the end.
The problem is how the debts got there in the first place—in pursuit of growth for its own sake, of increased output with no clear needs that the new output would address.
What i still don't quite understand with these kind of buyouts is who lends them the money and who gets saddled with the debt? Surely banks know the drill and wouldn't want to borrow and hold debt for a company destined to fail in such a way.
Do banks get repaid before that happens and the only people being owed are small contractors and employees? Does the bank repackage the debt and sell it to someone else? Or are the interest payments high enough to just factor in losing part of the money borrowed with high certainty?
Wtf is this? You can still buy them and other instant pot products on Amazon. Not to mention they still sell well. I have had mine and use it almost daily for 5 years and the seals are still good. Easy to clean, easy to use.
Once everyone had their instant pots that are really reliable and rarely break, instant had to come up with something else to sell and make money. In the pursuit of that, they made a lot of bad choices, including taking on debt, and didn't find the same success they had with instant pot.
I guess the hypercapitalist definition of failed is that people bought them, and then sales & revenue dropped. Like it would happen with a quality product.
The biggest failure here is the number of people who obviously didn't read the article. Why comment if you don't know what you're actually commenting about? Is this the writing equivalent to loving the sound of your own voice?
Pay wall after 3 paragraphs
If there's a pay wall and you don't use something like 12ft.io or archive.ph to get around it, just don't comment. There's no requirement to comment and those that do so without knowing what the article is actually about are providing commentary on their imaginations.
Sorry I tried but I'm not making an account to read an article
That's fine but, if you don't read the article, don't comment on it like you did. I'm not suggesting that's what you did, but that's clearly what many people here did.
P.s. use 12ft.io and archive.ph to get around pay walls.
The product didn't fail, American business culture failed.
they should have worked this into the title:
"A company needs to grow.
In the past few decades, the idea that every company should be growing, predictably and boundlessly and forever, has leached from the technology industry into much of the rest of American business."
Private equity destroying another productive company.
The founders knew what they were doing. This was their way of cashing out some of the company while continuing to run it. All of the private equity tricks are designed to avoid paying taxes in the process.
Does everybody here have an atlantic subscription or did nobody actually read the paywalled article?
I use the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension for Firefox
This is a mirror. The OG was on pushed off GitHub due to DMCA bullshit and now lives on GitFlic
Thanks for linking the original!
I guess I didn't get the memo. Mine gets regular use.
Yep. I've had mine for 6 years and it's still incredible. Luckily compatible sealing rings are still available from 3rd party vendors. Makes great Greek Yogurt, Chicken Soup, and Steel Cut Oats. And of course , it can make so much more.
It sucks that when you make something this good, you're destined to put yourself out of business, meanwhile planned obsolescence works...
Sadly I lack an account for the Atlantic, but I am going to assume that they were bought out.
They got toys R us'd by corporate bookeeping shenanigans where they take debt from other companies and dump it all into one business which destroys it.
Articles that lie to me like this make me want to punch the author in their momma smoocher.
Iirc they went broke because their first product was a huge hit, so they followed up with a bunch of useless crap that nobody bought.
I can recommend the Sage/breville "fast and slow go 6L" cooker if you cannot or don't want to get the instant pot. I have had mine for 2 years now and its solid build and i have used it a lot. Makes excellent youghurt and risotto among others.
The thing is, these are just a pressure vessel with a timer and a heating element. They are all good unless they are very poorly made.
Theyre all good until they are bombs, then they're pretty good bombs
So are water heaters and we use those pretty confidently.
Pressure cookers get a bad reputation for safety from the times when they were basically a metal box with a tiny hole in it, but modern cookers have a lot of additional redundancies. Particularly modern ones with timers. It'd take a lot of work to get one of those to go catastrophically. It's more likely to get killed by lighting than by pressure cooker, at least in the US, and as far as I can tell from available stats, and most of the pressure cooker injuries the stats list are from people who got a contact or steam burn, not by explosions.
It's also interesting that people are often afraid of exploding pressure cookers when they think of them as pressure cookers, but you don't get as much anxiety from rice cookers (AKA pressure cooker - but small).
Every dedicated rice cooker I've seen has a permanently open vent. They aren't pressurized.
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