17 post-mortems · 6 dead · 11 ghostsUpdated October 3, 2026
Every brand dies twice: once when the money runs out, and again when people forget it.
Spectre Brands writes the second obituary. Each post-mortem rebuilds a company from its SEC filings, court records, contemporary press and archived web pages, with charts you can check, the commercials as they aired, and original drawings of what the brand looked like.
Two ways a brand ends
Dead 6 brands
The company is gone: liquidated, dissolved or shut down, and nothing operates under the name today.
Ghost 11 brands
The original business failed or shrank to a shadow of itself, but the name is still in use: as a licensed brand, a shell, a single surviving outlet, a limited re-release, or a much smaller operation under new owners.
The index
17 post-mortems
Dead1996 – 2001Overexpansion
Webvan
Raised more than $1.2 billion, built warehouses for millions of orders, and stopped delivering on a Monday in July 2001.
$827M cumulative net loss, 1998 to Mar 2001
Ghost1921 – 2015Technology shift
RadioShack
Once a store within a short drive of almost every American. It kept the stores long after the reason to visit them had moved online.
5,289 company stores at the 2001 peak
Ghost1957 – 2018Debt and buyouts
Toys “R” Us
The store that invented the toy superstore was still selling $11.5 billion of toys a year when it failed. Nearly every dollar it earned from operations went to interest on its own buyout.
$457M interest in its last full year, on $460M of operating earnings
Ghost1992 – 1994A fad that faded
Crystal Pepsi
Pepsi took the color out of cola, put about $40 million of advertising behind it and projected $1 billion in sales. Within a year the product was being reworked. The name now comes back for a few weeks at a time.
$40M estimated launch advertising, for a drink reworked within a year
Dead1998 – 2001Outcompeted
Sega Dreamcast
The first console with a modem in the box had the biggest launch day the industry had seen. Sixteen months later Sega stopped making it and never built a console again.
510 days from U.S. launch to the exit
Ghost1985 – 2010Technology shift
Blockbuster
The biggest name in home video had 9,094 stores in 2004, a billion dollars of new debt and a rival it had declined to buy. One franchised store in Oregon still rents films under the sign.
1 store left, of 9,094 at the 2004 peak
Ghost1925 – 2022Strategy and management
Howard Johnson’s
Once the largest restaurant chain in America, with 28 flavors and an orange roof on every highway. It was sold twice in six years, split in two, and left to its franchisees.
1,040 to 0 restaurants, 1979 to 2022
Nothing matches that combination.
How the post-mortems are made
No figure appears without a source, and nothing is presented as fact that we could not check. The short version is below; the full rules are on the About page.
- Every figure links to a numbered source: SEC filings and court records first, then contemporary press, then the Internet Archive.
- Numbers we calculate are labeled derived. Estimates are labeled with where they came from. Claims we could not confirm are labeled unverified, or left out.
- Old websites are shown as screenshots of Internet Archive captures, each linked to the original capture.
- Logos, ads and footage appear in historical and editorial context. Drawings are original illustrations, not official assets.
- Cause-of-death weights and what-if scenarios are editorial judgment and are marked as such.