You Won't See These in 2010
On this list?Products and Brands We Lose This Year
While for most of us 2010 was a year of very gradual recovery, there were some moments of great loss. Over the course of the year, we said goodbye to a number of people, brands and products that have been a part of our lives for many years.
- Kodachrome Color Film
- South Beach Living Diet Frozen Food Entrees
- Buell
- Circuit City
- Saturn & Pontiac
The last three are in the transportation arena, with the one surprise being Buell. Apparently the novelty of a Harley-powered sportbike wasn't enough cachet to get folks to part with 50% more money than a Honda or Kawasaki. Pontiac's departure from the automotive world was bittersweet, the once-great manufacturer of the GTO and the Trans Am reduced to re-badging Opels. Pontiac never really recovered from the emissions regulations in the 1970s that ended the muscle car era in the quest for efficiency, turning into just another GM clone that offered different badges on the same sheetmetal.
Perhaps the saddest loss of 2010 is the Saturn marque. Saturn hit the market in 1990, starting the last decade of the 20th century with a completely different kind of GM brand. Saturn showcased the "no-haggle pricing", where rather than have a grossly inflated MSRP and haggling it down to something approaching reasonable, they started off the bat with a reasonable price. Saturn's cars were well-built compared to other American cars at the time, and if there was any failing in the line it was only that they were limited - Saturn offered a compact coupe, compact sedan, and compact station wagon.
Saturn was perfectly positioned as an entry-level new car for the recent college graduate - and as I was in that demographic, I knew literally dozens of my contemporaries who did just that. Graduate, get a job, buy a Saturn as your first car. The problem came when that recent grad got married and had a baby on the way - that little coupe or sedan just wasn't going to cut it as a family car, and the owner, happy with the reliability of the Saturn name, had nothing larger to move up to. In 2000 the short lived "L" series - a re-badged Opel Vectra B - was debuted, and suffered something like a third more recalls and problems than average. GM took the easy way out more and more with Saturn, and in the end was doing nothing more than slapping Saturn's badge on every other crappy GM offering - they turned it into just another brand, rather than something special.
All of the products on this list didn't make the cut for one reason or another. Some are technologically obsolete - the Sony Walkman was also phased out in 2010 - while others just didn't have the sales to justify their existence any more. There's a lesson to be learned from each failure, whether the manufacturer got too greedy, cut too many corners, or relied too heavily on name recognition alone. In any case, each is a perfect case study in why we buy - or don't buy - any given product.
Fare thee well, ghosts of products passed; we will certainly add more products next year...
That is all.
14 comments:
Kodachrome. I can't think of it without remembering shooting Kodachrome 64 in Japan and the Philippines, coming home and using it to capture the first years of all the children, using a manual Olympus SLR and always wishing I could afford more film.
Buell made me weep. The only interesting American bike, and certainly the only innovative one for the past 60 years (possible V-Rod exception), and HD killed it. So much for Americans advancing the state of the art.
Uh... that's Paul Simon by hisself who recorded Kodachrome, not Simon & Garfunkel. At least, he's the only one credited on the record label...
One of the oddities of Saturn in the early years was that - despite their reputation for being solid, reliable, and dependable vehicles that would survive into higher mileage than most American cars - compared to any other brand their resale value would plummet as soon as you drove off the lot. It didn't really make much sense, but - true or not - that was the popular "wisdom" when it came to Saturns.
Unfortunately, at that time the demographic Saturn was mainly targeted at weighed resale value very highly. The people in the market for what Saturn offered expected to "trade up" within a couple of years, and wanted the biggest bang for their buck - and Saturn couldn't deliver that.
Then they turned into a GM re-badge line, and just died out. By the time they were killed off, it was really past time to do so.
I still drive the '93 Saturn sedan I bought (on eBay) while I was in college. I've overhauled the motor once and otherwise kept up with basic maintenance and wear-items (clutches, brakes, wheel bearings). Simple car to work on. It only left me stranded once, when the belt tensioner failed and I lost engine cooling.
It's my daily commuter, and I even had a brief period with three kids (in car seats) across the back while we waited for our new minivan. The odometer long since quit working, and I'm guesstimating that it has around 220K miles on it. On longer highway trips, I can see fuel economy of 40 mpg, otherwise I fuel up every two weeks for around $25.
I'd love to be driving something better, but I just can't beat the economy of this car. Two more years and it will have lived longer than the company that made it.
Uhm, isn't this story like a year old? These are all items/companies/people that died back in 2009.
Growing up when the Pontiac GTOs(spent a day helping a friend change the gas leaky gas tank on his "Goat" on a miserable January day way back when), Plymouth Road Runners, Barracudas, '69 GTX, Chevy Chevelle with the 396 ci. Were all the rage and of course Dodge Chargers and Challengers and Ford's Mustangs when they finally grew up.
Was great times.
All gone now.
But Buell? I had not heard that. I have a morbid facibation with Buell for some reason. Because it was American? Because it was a "sport" bike? Because I love big V-Twins but not "cruiser" style bikes?
To bad.....
I bought a 99 Saturn used in 2002 and drove it until last summer just before the sales tax went up. It served me very well, it just wasn't worth fixing to me anymore.
Mopar,
The list may very well be from 2009 - these are items that were discontinued in 2010...
Jay: Nope, they were all discontinued in 2009. The article even states:
"But that was just one of the many products, brands, companies, people -- and more -- that bid us farewell in 2009.
Click through our gallery to see what you won't see in 2010."
Would be nice to find/make a list like this from 2010 though.
http://www.dwaynesphoto.com/
I don't know about the rest of the list, but Kodachrome dies this week. The last processing line in the world shuts down on December 30th, 2010.
ASM: But Kodak stopped MAKING it (and processing it) in 2009. Announcement at Kodak.com
"Eastman Kodak Company announced on June 22, 2009 that it will discontinue sales of KODACHROME Color Film this year, concluding its 74-year run as a photography icon."
Dwayne's was the last authorized processor to still process it. If you still have any kodachrome film left from 2009, you will now have to process it yourself.
I'll miss Pontiac (my first couple of cars were Pontiacs), and Kodachrome too, I suppose.
But Circuit City? Not so much.
Circuit City closed in 2009 as well, although someone bought the name and continues to sell on line like CompUSA does.
We won't be seeing Mercury much longer, though. And I think Hummer might be going the way of Saturn.
And GE did close the last incandescent light bulb factory in the US this year.
Sadly, in 2010 we will be seeing a Democrat majority in the Senate. That was one thing I was really hoping to see become extinct on January 1.
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