Toast - Blockbuster

While Sliced Bread takes a break we serve up… Toast. A study of the spectacular failures of wonder products and businesses which had promised so much to consumers.

In each episode the presenter and BBC business journalist, Sean Farrington, examines one big idea. What did it promise? Why did people back it? Why did they get burnt?

Some of the world’s most successful businesses have also brought us some of the world’s most remarkable failures. So, what led them to be toast? And what can we learn from their stories today?

Sean unpicks all the early optimism, hype and ambition. He speaks to expert commentators and to people involved with doomed wonder products to discover how they view things now and what, if anything, could have been done differently.

Along the way he discovers charming and surprising stories from people who took to these products but lived to regret it and, with the help of self-made millionaire and serial entrepreneur Sam White, tries to work out where they went wrong.

This week, Sean and Sam examine the game and movie rental chain, Blockbuster.

Its first store opened in 1985 in Dallas, Texas. At its peak in 2004, it had around 9,000 stores globally, was earning nearly $5.9 billion in revenue and employed over 84,000 people worldwide.

How did it lose its way? Spoiler alert - it wasn't just down to the rise of streaming services like Netflix.

Toast is a spin-off from Sliced Bread, the series in which Greg Foot investigates the latest so-called wonder products to find out whether they really are the best thing since sliced bread.

Sliced Bread returns for a new batch of investigations in May. In the meantime, Toast is available in the Sliced Bread feed on BBC Sounds.

Toast is a BBC Audio North production for BBC Radio 4.