About and methodology
Spectre Brands is a collection of post-mortems: what a company was, what killed it, and what happened to its name afterward. This page explains how they are researched and the rules they follow.
What this is
Each post-mortem is a single long page built from data files: a story in chapters, a timeline, the numbers, the commercials, the old website, a cause-of-death analysis, a few counterfactuals and the afterlife of the brand. Nothing is written directly in HTML; the same renderer builds every page, so every brand gets the same sections in the same order and can be compared with the others.
The site is independent. It is not affiliated with any company it covers and takes no money from any of them.
Dead versus Ghost
Every brand carries one of two tags, and a one-line justification that links to the evidence.
- Dead
- The company is gone: liquidated, dissolved or shut down, and nothing operates under the name today.
- Ghost
- 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.
| Brand | Tier | Justification |
|---|---|---|
| Pets.com | Dead | Pets.com, Inc. was dissolved and liquidated in 2001–2004; pets.com only redirects to PetSmart and nothing trades under the name.61036 |
| Webvan | Dead | Webvan Group stopped all deliveries on July 9, 2001, filed for Chapter 11 four days later and was sold off at auction;81028 Amazon later owned the name and ran webvan.com as a shop for packaged groceries from 2009 until at least 2016,2021 but the address no longer loads a website and nothing operates under the name today, so we file it as dead and not as a ghost.32 |
| RadioShack | Ghost | RadioShack Corporation went into Chapter 11 in 2015 and its successor General Wireless did the same in 2017, but the name is still in use: Unicomer Group has owned the brand since 2023, and it sells online and through dealer and franchise stores.15263031 |
| Circuit City | Ghost | Circuit City Stores, Inc. liquidated its last 567 U.S. stores in early 2009 and its estate passed to a liquidating trust in 2010, but the name has been sold twice since and an online shop still trades as Circuit City at circuitcity.com.15182337 |
| Toys “R” Us | Ghost | The U.S. chain liquidated all 735 of its stores in 2018; the name now belongs to the brand manager WHP Global, which puts it on shops inside Macy’s and on small, mostly temporary stores run by a partner.141627 |
| KB Toys | Ghost | The store chain was liquidated after its second bankruptcy in December 2008, but the name is in use again: a small online business, KBToysverse, sells new KB Toys collectibles under what it describes as a license from the brand’s owners.2434 |
| Kiddie City | Dead | Lionel Corporation announced on June 2, 1993 that it would liquidate Lionel Leisure and close its last 28 Kiddie City and Playworld stores; we found no business trading under the name since.242526 |
| Groupon | Ghost | Groupon, Inc. is not defunct: it still operates and trades on the Nasdaq as GRPN, but its 2025 revenue of $498.4M is 84% below the $3.19B it first reported for 2014, its 16.2M active customers are down from 53.9M, its 1,734 employees are down from 11,843, and its shares went through a 1-for-20 reverse split in 2020 (percentages derived).561117 |
| AOL | Ghost | AOL still operates as a free web portal and e-mail service, owned since January 2, 2026 by Bending Spoons, but the business that made it, a paid dial-up online service with about 26.7 million U.S. subscribers in September 2002, was down to 2.2 million by 2014 and was switched off on September 30, 2025.6141819 |
| Zima | Ghost | U.S. production ended on October 10, 2008, but the name never went fully out of use: MillerCoors sold limited runs in the summers of 2017 and 2018, and Hakutsuru Sake Brewing has sold Zima in Japan under an agreement with Molson Coors since March 31, 2023.142631 |
| Crystal Pepsi | Ghost | PepsiCo withdrew the original clear cola in 1994, but it has put the Crystal Pepsi name back on bottles in limited runs: a 2015 sweepstakes, retail releases in 2016 and 2017, and a 2022 contest.1925303234 |
| Sega Dreamcast | Dead | Sega decided on January 31, 2001 to stop making the Dreamcast and left the console hardware business; Sega itself survives as a software publisher inside Sega Sammy Holdings, so it is the console and Sega’s hardware line that died, not the company.225 |
| Atari | Ghost | The original Atari, Inc. was broken up and sold by Warner Communications in July 1984; the name now belongs to Atari SA, a Paris-listed publisher of retro games and hardware that reported €56.0M of revenue for the year to March 2026.721 |
| Blockbuster | Ghost | Blockbuster Inc. sold its assets out of Chapter 11 in 2011 and the last corporate stores closed by January 2014, but one franchised store in Bend, Oregon still rents films under the name, and blockbuster.com still shows the logo over a holding page.1327293132 |
| Quibi | Dead | The service stopped streaming on or about December 1, 2020, its shows were sold to Roku and rebranded Roku Originals, and its Turnstyle technology went to Eko in 2021; we found nothing that operates under the Quibi name.151721 |
| Howard Johnson’s | Ghost | The last Howard Johnson’s restaurant, in Lake George, New York, closed in 2022, but the name still hangs on 304 hotels franchised by Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.1416 |
| Burger Chef | Dead | No restaurant has traded as Burger Chef since the last franchise, in Cookeville, Tennessee, was renamed in 1996; Hardee’s keeps the trademark registered and has used it only for short Big Shef promotions.41113 |
A brand can move from one to the other. A dead brand that is revived under license becomes a ghost; a ghost whose last licensee stops using the name becomes dead. Tags are reviewed when a page is updated.
How sources are chosen
Sources are used in a fixed order of preference, and each one is listed in the numbered Sources section of the page that uses it.
- Primary filings. SEC filings on EDGAR (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, S-1 and proxy statements), bankruptcy court dockets and orders, and company press releases. Figures are taken from the filing for the period, or from a later restatement where one exists, and the page says which.
- Contemporary press. Newspapers, wire services and trade publications from the time of the events, which establish what was known then. We prefer outlets with a corrections policy.
- Later reporting and reference works. Retrospectives, books and encyclopedic histories, used for context and for periods before electronic filing.
- The Internet Archive. Wayback Machine captures for what a website actually said on a given date, and archived video for advertising and news footage.
- General knowledge. A small number of uncontroversial facts (the launch year of a well-known product, for instance) are marked as general knowledge in the data notes rather than given a citation.
Wikipedia is used to find sources, not as a source for figures. Where a number appears only in a secondary source, the page says so.
Data-honesty rules
These rules are enforced by the build: a page with a footnote that does not resolve to a source will not publish.
- Every number links to a numbered source. Never an invented figure, never a rounded guess presented as a fact.
- A figure we calculated from sourced figures is labeled derived, and the calculation is given in the chart note or the data notes.
- An estimate is labeled as one and attributed to whoever made it.
- A claim that is widely repeated but that we could not trace to a reliable source is labeled unverified or left out. Unknowns are stated as unknown.
- Cause-of-death percentages are an editorial weighting. The evidence under each cause is sourced; the weights are opinion and are labeled as such.
- What-if scenarios are speculation and are labeled speculative.
- Every chart has a data table beneath it, so the numbers can be read and checked without the picture.
Commercials and footage
Videos are embedded from YouTube (through the privacy-enhanced youtube-nocookie.com domain), the Internet Archive and similar services. Nothing loads from those services until you press play. We do not host or copy any video file. Each embed is captioned with its year, what it is and a link to where it lives, and a script checks periodically that every video still exists; dead ones are removed.
Upload titles and dates on video platforms are often wrong. Where the year of a commercial comes only from the uploader, the caption says so.
Trademarks and fair use
All brand names, logos, slogans, advertisements and trademarks shown on this site belong to their respective owners. They appear here for commentary, criticism, news reporting and historical record, at the size and in the amount needed to make the point: a logo cropped from an archived page, a screenshot of a website as it stood on a given day, a still from a commercial.
Illustrations labeled as original are our own drawings in the spirit of a brand's products, stores or mascots. They are not official assets and are not meant to be mistaken for them.
Images from Wikimedia Commons are used under the license stated in each caption, with attribution. If you own rights in something shown here and believe its use goes beyond fair use, write to the address in the repository and it will be reviewed promptly.
Corrections
The data files for every page are public in the GitHub repository. If a figure is wrong or a source has moved, open an issue with the page, the figure and the source you believe is correct. Corrections are made in the data file and the page is rebuilt.