[mjfern]

The housing mortgage crisis, dot com boom and bust, payday loan industry, for-profit universities, fad diet companies, supplements with no scientific basis, cigarette manufacturers... There are whole industries and periods of time where large numbers of shady companies are rising and falling.

[dillonmckay]

dot com boom and bust?

Like Whole Foods or broadcast.com?

[mjfern]

Like pets.com. It turns out shipping 30 lb bags of dog food via FedEx isn't such a good idea.

Edit: Not such a good idea in 1999, when operating without economies of scale and scope, and with high transportation costs.

[sigstoat]

and yet now i receive dense boxes of cat litter from amazon.

[jamiek88]

Seems to work for Chewy.com & Amazon.

[big_chungus]

This was an issue of bad timing, not a bad business model. People weren't really mentally at the point of buying such thing on-line, and pets.com burnt through their cash so quickly that it couldn't wait for people to start adopting it. As pointed out by others, Amazon made it work; however, they are very smart about diversifying, re-investing, and not being profligate with cash-on-hand.