Modern MBA

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Every case study, searchable by company, industry or headline.

75 case studies

Case study — TechnologyWhy Insta360 beat GoPro at its own gameGoPro invented the category. A startup took 82% of the market and now owns a future that nobody thought was possible.10 min readCase study — FinanceWhy Ukraine's minerals are Iraq's oil all over againAmerica has signed this deal twice before, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and lost both times to the same rival.15 min readCase study — TravelWhy Asian airlines are so much betterAsian carriers deliver a service Americans barely recognize. American airlines earn more doing far less.11 min readCase study — ServicesWhy college is so expensive in AmericaHarvard holds $57B and charges $82,866 a year. Tuition isn't the business — the undergraduate is the seed, not the customer.16 min readCase study — Food & beverageWhy your favorite brands got so much worseRecipes got cheaper and portions smaller across American brands at the same moment. Not a coincidence.10 min readCase study — TechnologyWhy the AI boom is the dot-com bubble againDifferent technology, same house of cards — and this time the pump happened in private, where nothing is marked to market.10 min readCase study — TechnologyWhy police departments can't quit AxonForced by regulators to put a camera on its own weapon, Axon found the business that replaced it.12 min readCase study — Media & entertainmentHow much a haunted house actually makesA haunted house has six weekends a year to make its money back. The good ones out-earn Disney Parks on margin.12 min readCase study — Media & entertainmentWhy movie theaters survive off popcornTheaters keep less than half your ticket and lose money on the film. The popcorn is not a joke, it is the plan.10 min readCase study — Retail & brandsWhy UNIQLO makes more money than GucciSame playbook, three outcomes. The only variable was whether the boss knew what stage he was in.16 min readCase study — Food & beverageWhy the dairy industry is failingOatly lost $344M in a year and Dean Foods went bankrupt. Milk is priced by politics, and the subsidies stop at the farm gate.16 min readCase study — ServicesWhy Ozempic is so expensiveThe same two companies that quintupled the price of insulin now want obesity classified as a disease.16 min readCase study — ServicesWhy almost nobody makes money in an MLMTupperware went bankrupt and Avon was dissolved. The model works spectacularly, and then it always fails.10 min readCase study — TravelWhy almost no luxury carmaker makes moneyToyota sells 10.3 million cars a year. McLaren sells 2,137. Only two exotic makers have made that arithmetic work.16 min readCase study — TravelWhy American public transit sucksNew York's subway loses $8.5 billion a year. Tokyo turns a 15% profit on an older system carrying more people.17 min readCase study — Retail & brandsHow a $1,000 jacket became a luxury brandCanada Goose built a real luxury brand in ten years. The margins prove it. The share price says it may not matter.14 min readCase study — Media & entertainmentHow much nightcrawlers actually get paidLocal news cut the night shift and kept the footage. The freelancers who replaced it carry every cost and get a watermark.11 min readCase study — TravelWhy Chinese EVs are so far aheadCheaper, faster and better equipped than anything the West sells, and cheap labor has nothing to do with it.10 min readCase study — TravelWhy car rental is such a bad businessMargins as thin as an airline, and the companies make more money selling the cars than renting them out.10 min readCase study — Food & beverageHow Papa John’s buried Papa JohnSix regimes in thirty years, four of them engineered by the founder. The filings contradict his version.13 min readCase study — Food & beverageWhy omakase is suddenly everywhereNo servers, no walk-ins, no storefront, revenue booked before the door opens. Omakase deleted every cost that kills a restaurant.11 min readCase study — Retail & brandsWhy gun prices make no senseThe most lucrative consumer market in America is also the only one with no prices, no ads and no data.16 min readCase study — Media & entertainmentWhy there’s no money in making moviesThe Big Five survive flops because movies are one line item in a conglomerate. Lionsgate had nothing to fall back on.14 min readCase study — Media & entertainmentWhy arcades never actually diedConsoles killed the arcade market. They did not kill the arcade business — it just stopped being about games.14 min readCase study — TechnologyWhy Twitter never made moneyA Facebook user was worth $8 to advertisers. A Twitter user was worth $2.75. Everything else follows from that.12 min readCase study — FinanceHow credit card companies actually make moneyThe swipe fee is not the business. The interest is — and the networks taking the blame were founded by the banks collecting it.15 min readCase study — Media & entertainmentWhy regional amusement parks are dyingA decade of growth moved the average ticket from $21.26 to $24.86, and in-park spend by about a dollar.13 min readCase study — Media & entertainmentWhy Pokemon cards are worth so much moneyA piece of cardboard printed in 1999 sold for $420,000. What sets the price is not rarity or nostalgia.11 min readCase study — Retail & brandsWhy Hermès bags are so hard to buyGucci spends 12% of revenue on advertising. Hermès spends 4%, makes you earn the bag, and its products appreciate 14.2%.9 min readCase study — TechnologyWhy the scooter startups all went bankruptA Bird scooter grossed $2,000 a year, cost $1,300 to buy and $1,000 to maintain. It lost money on every vehicle, always.15 min readCase study — Media & entertainmentWhy free content never became a businessBuzzFeed's advertising revenue has never once covered what it costs to make the content. That is the whole story.13 min readCase study — Food & beverageWhy Chipotle got so much worseA weekly staple became a byword for small portions and high prices in under ten years. Here is what broke.10 min readCase study — Media & entertainmentWhy esports collapsed and who got paid for itThe audience never left. The money still vanished. That makes this a story about who was selling, not about fans.16 min readCase study — Food & beverageWhy Americans stopped drinking sodaBig Soda spent years funding scientists to blame exercise instead of sugar, and lost to a Midwest seltzer it never took seriously.8 min readCase study — Food & beverageWhy pizza is the best restaurant businessThe one restaurant category where independents beat the chains on margin and almost nobody goes bankrupt.10 min readCase study — Food & beverageWhy Starbucks is fighting its own baristasIt can afford the raise. What it cannot afford is an operating margin that looks like a restaurant's.12 min readCase study — ServicesWho makes all the cardboard boxesTwo of every three Amazon boxes is International Paper. Every pizza box is WestRock. Neither company is visible.10 min readCase study — Food & beverageWhy fast food can't make a good burgerMcDonald's makes more from rent than from food. That is why it can't fix the burger — and why four LA independents can.13 min readCase study — TechnologyWhat happened to GoProIt invented the action camera and then spent a decade learning what an action camera is for.11 min readCase study — Retail & brandsHow Yeezy and UltraBOOST saved AdidasThree failed five-year strategies, then one year that produced UltraBOOST, NMD and Yeezy together.10 min readCase study — Media & entertainmentWhy Xbox lost the console warsFrom defining a console generation to a distant third twice running, and the cause was never the hardware.10 min readCase study — Media & entertainmentWhy video games launch unfinishedSquare Enix went all-in on live service and wrote down $105 million. Take-Two did it properly. The difference is the case.9 min readCase study — Food & beverageHow much a Texas BBQ joint actually makesOne in three fail, brisket yields 40%, and the biggest variable in whether you survive is one magazine editor's palate.16 min readCase study — Media & entertainmentWhy football clubs never make moneyBarcelona spends 80–90% of everything it earns on player wages. It has done for eight straight seasons.12 min readCase study — FinanceHow Western Union makes money from the unbankedIt has more US locations than Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi, Capital One and Bank of America have branches combined.11 min readCase study — Retail & brandsWhy self-checkout didn't replace cashiersAmazon's cashierless store was a thousand people in India watching cameras. Every retailer copied it anyway.15 min readCase study — Retail & brandsWhy GameStop failedThe pre-owned disc was a perpetuity at 47% margins. Then the publishers worked out how to make it non-transferable.14 min readCase study — Food & beverageWhy Taco Bell got so expensiveThe most profitable chain in fast food is being squeezed hardest, and the reason is KFC and Pizza Hut.11 min readCase study — TechnologyWhy Temu and Wish can't make moneyWish spent 90 cents of every revenue dollar on ads to buy customers worth $10. AliExpress never profited either. Temu is next.15 min readCase study — ServicesWhy private equity can't kill your barberRegis spent forty years consolidating barbering. The stock went $725 to $9, and independents still hold 80%.15 min readCase study — Food & beverageWhy nobody wants to own ice cream anymoreUnilever, Nestlé and Kroger all owned the biggest brands in ice cream. All three decided it wasn't worth keeping.16 min readCase study — Food & beverageHow McDonald's recovered from its worst yearThe turnaround began when McDonald's stopped trying to be something else and started collecting rent instead.10 min readCase study — FinanceHow casinos actually make moneyCasinos run 40%+ margins on gambling. DraftKings has never had a profitable year. The difference is not technology.14 min readCase study — Food & beverageWhy the Popeyes chicken sandwich was so goodThe sandwich came from a decade of R&D discipline its new owners inherited and did not build. That is the problem.14 min readCase study — Food & beverageWhy donut shops out-earn Krispy KremeThe average Krispy Kreme grosses $119K a year. A 650 sq ft Portland shop grosses $600K at a 40% margin.12 min readCase study — TechnologyWhy Opendoor and Zillow failed at flipping housesIt needs to flip 60,000 homes a year to break even. It flipped 21,000. The rest is debt and vocabulary.12 min readCase study — TechnologyWhy AI is just big data againBig data was sold for a decade and produced nothing. The same players are running the identical playbook with AI.15 min readCase study — Retail & brandsWhy the sneaker market collapsedStimulus money made everyone a reseller. What survived is the people who can price a used shoe from memory.11 min readCase study — TechnologyWhy Facebook bet everything on the metaverseOne iOS setting cost $10 billion in profit. The metaverse is what a company does when it cannot own the device.9 min readCase study — FinanceWhy buy now, pay later never makes moneyThe loan you take is not funded by the company you owe. It is bought back days later, above what it is worth.13 min readCase study — Retail & brandsWhy Under Armour failedIts products were ugly. Rather than fix that, Kevin Plank spent $700M on fitness apps and called Under Armour a tech company.14 min readCase study — TechnologyWhy food delivery is never profitableUber admits in its filings that it has never charged enough to cover the cost of an Eats delivery. It is not alone.11 min readCase study — ServicesWhy self storage is so profitableA building with no plumbing, no insulation and no staff, on land nobody else wanted, netting $958,000 a year.10 min readCase study — Retail & brandsHow Dollar Tree makes money selling everything for a dollarA fifteenth the size of a Walmart, a better gross margin than either giant, and 700 new stores while Target opened 58.10 min readCase study — TravelHow cruise ships actually make moneyAirlines carried 4.5 billion passengers the year cruises carried 29 million — and the cruise lines earned the better margin.15 min readCase study — Food & beverageWhy diners never go out of businessThree chains, three opposite strategies, and identical 13% store margins. Diners survive everything and grow at nothing.14 min readCase study — Food & beverageHow much a taco truck actually makesTwo sisters run fifteen unbranded taco stands in LA grossing $7.58M a year. Almost nobody knows the business exists.11 min readCase study — Retail & brandsWhy marijuana legalization never paid offEvery public cannabis company loses money. Three self-funded LA shops do not. Being unable to lose money is the advantage.15 min readCase study — Food & beverageWhy bubble tea is so profitableA Sawtelle boba shop grosses $1.08M at a 30% store margin on $9 orders. The moat is the supply chain, not the brand.11 min readCase study — TechnologyWhy Casper lost money on every mattress it soldBuy a mattress for $400, sell it for $700, spend $300 on ads and $300 on overhead. Lose $200 a mattress.10 min readCase study — Media & entertainmentHow nightclubs and club promoters make moneyA club has to look packed before it is packed. The people who manufacture that are not on the payroll.8 min readCase study — TravelWhy budget airlines stopped winningThe low-cost carriers say the industry is rigged. It isn't. The legacy carriers just copied the only thing they had.16 min readCase study — Food & beverageWhy Crumbl won't lastMrs. Fields had its decade too. Crumbl store margins fell from 30% to 10% while corporate went from $4M to $152M.15 min readCase study — TravelWhy Airbnb never killed the hotel industryHilton owns under 2% of its rooms. Marriott owns 1%. Wyndham owns none. The incumbents were already platforms.8 min readCase study — Food & beverageWhy KFC got so bad in AmericaThe same company, the same recipe, two outcomes. What changed was who owns the buildings and cooks the chicken.11 min read