New Coke, Dead Malls, and the Shrine Economy: Why Americans Go on Pilgrimage to See Things That Failed
Photo: Steve Shook from Moscow, Idaho, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
There is a museum dedicated to failure. It has toured multiple countries, been featured in dozens of breathless news segments, and contains — among other treasures — a bottle of New Coke, an unscented laundry detergent for people who apparently wanted their clothes to smell like nothing, and a series of gadgets so doomed you can practically hear the boardroom meeting where someone said 'ship it.'
The museum is thriving. That's the punchline. A shrine to things that didn't work is one of the most reliably successful attractions in the experience economy.
The Rise of the Flop Pilgrimage
Americans have always had a complicated relationship with failure — publicly we fear it, privately we binge-watch it. But something shifted in the last decade. Failure stopped being a cautionary tale and became a destination. People now plan vacations around dead products and demolished attractions the way previous generations planned around national parks.
Consider the evidence. Collectors pay four figures for relics of defunct theme park rides — signage, vehicles, the occasional animatronic with a thousand-yard stare. Abandoned mall photography has become its own artistic genre, complete with coffee table books. There are active fan communities dedicated to discontinued fast food items, complete with elaborate conspiracy theories about why the chili cheese thing was taken from us. New Coke, a product that survived 79 days on shelves in 1985, has outlived most of the marketing campaigns of its era through sheer cultural afterlife.
Why We'd Rather Visit a Flop Than a Winner
Here's my working theory: successful things are boring because success hides the machinery. A hit product shows up on the shelf fully formed, scrubbed of struggle. A flop, by contrast, is a fossil record of every assumption its creators got wrong. You can read a failed product like a diary entry from a moment in time — what we feared, what we wanted, how badly we misjudged ourselves.
New Coke isn't really about soda. It's a time capsule of a panicked American company in the mid-eighties losing a taste test to its rival and responding with corporate hubris of mythological proportions. The DeLorean isn't really about a car. It's about ambition, bankruptcy, and one movie's grace. The failed products in that museum are more honest than the successful ones sitting in any supermarket, because success gets to be boring and failure has to be interesting to earn its place in the collection.
A Field Guide to America's Flop Tourism Circuit
If you want to participate in the shrine economy, the options are more robust than you'd think.
The museum route. The Museum of Failure and its various imitators tour regularly. Go with friends. The group dynamic of pointing at a doomed product and saying 'I would have bought that' is the entire experience.
The auction route. Defunct amusement park auctions are the flop economy's version of Sotheby's. When a ride gets retired, enthusiasts show up with trailers and checkbooks, and pieces of failed entertainment history end up in garages across the Midwest.
The archaeological route. Dead malls, abandoned water parks, the remains of retail chains that once ruled America — all of it is documented, mapped, and beloved by online communities who treat a shuttered food court with the reverence of a ruin in Rome.
The kitchen route. Home cooks attempting to recreate discontinued fast food items is a genre unto itself, and honestly, some of these recipes deserve more success than the originals got.
The Gift Shop at the End of the Business Plan
The great irony of flop tourism is that it's become, well, a business. Museums of failure sell tickets. Flop conventions sell vendor tables. Failed brands get resurrected specifically to sell nostalgia to the people who mourned them. The failure economy has achieved what the failures themselves never could: sustainable revenue.
But maybe that's fine. There's something weirdly healthy about a culture that builds shrines to its missteps instead of burying them. Every dead product in that museum is proof that somebody, somewhere, tried something. The success rate of human ambition is terrible, and the exhibits are its receipts.
Besides, in a hundred years, the only things left to study from our era might be landfills and this one museum. Better hope the gift shop stays open.
