They Were Weeks From Shutdown. Now They're Part of American Life.
Introduction: The Gap Between Starting and Surviving
Most businesses don't make it. That's not pessimism — it's just the math. The ones that do often carry a secret in their founding story: a moment, sometimes just a few days long, when the whole thing nearly came apart. A check that didn't clear. A supplier that walked. A product launch that landed with the sound of one hand clapping.
What follows are six of those moments, attached to six brands that most Americans encounter without a second thought. The near-misses are real. The details are messier than the official histories like to admit. And the difference between failure and survival, in almost every case, came down to something stubbornly human.
1. Walmart — The Banker Who Said No
Before there were 4,600 Walmart stores across the United States, there was a single variety store in Newport, Arkansas, and a 27-year-old named Sam Walton who had borrowed money from his father-in-law to open it.
By the time Walton was ready to open his second store, in Bentonville in 1950, he'd already been forced out of his first location by a landlord who reclaimed the building after seeing how successful it had become. Walton had no lease protection, no legal recourse, and no store.
He tried to secure financing for the new Bentonville location and was turned down by a local bank. The banker didn't see the point of another discount variety store in a small Arkansas town. Walton scraped together what he could from family, talked his way into a lease, and opened the Bentonville store with his wife Helen doing the books on the kitchen table.
For years, the Walton operation barely survived. Sam drove his own truck to pick up merchandise. Helen kept the family fed on a budget that would have alarmed most people. The vision of a national retail empire was so far from the daily reality that it almost seems like a different story entirely.
The banker who turned him down is not remembered. The store in Bentonville is now a museum.
2. Hershey's — The Chocolate That Almost Wasn't
Milton Hershey failed twice before he succeeded. Twice. The first candy company he started, in Philadelphia, collapsed. The second, in New York, collapsed. By the time he was in his mid-thirties, he had a reputation in the industry as a man who couldn't quite make it work.
He went back to Lancaster, Pennsylvania — his home — and started a caramel company. It succeeded. And then, at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, he saw German chocolate-making machinery and became obsessed with the idea of making milk chocolate affordable for ordinary Americans.
He sold his caramel company for $1 million in 1900 and put everything into a chocolate factory in the Pennsylvania countryside. The early years were precarious. The milk chocolate formula took years to perfect. The factory was built on credit, the equipment was expensive, and the market for mass-produced chocolate was unproven.
At several points during the first years of operation, the company's finances were genuinely dire. Hershey kept going partly out of stubbornness and partly because he'd already failed twice and had decided, apparently, that a third failure was simply not available to him as an option.
By 1911, Hershey's annual sales were $5 million. The rest is confectionery history.
3. Marvel Comics — The Week the Stapler Ran Out of Staples
In 1939, a pulp magazine publisher named Martin Goodman launched a comics line that would eventually become Marvel. But the story that matters here happens in 1961, when Marvel was one bad quarter from being shut down entirely.
Goodman had a distribution deal that limited how many titles Marvel could publish per month. The company was hemorrhaging money. Stan Lee, who was running the creative operation, had already mentally prepared to quit and try something else. He had a conversation with his wife Joan in which she told him that if he was going to leave anyway, he might as well try making the kind of comics he actually wanted to make first.
The result was Fantastic Four #1. Then Spider-Man. Then the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man. Lee and artist Jack Kirby essentially invented the modern superhero universe in a burst of creative energy born directly from the feeling that there was nothing left to lose.
The distribution deal that had been strangling them was eventually resolved. The characters they created during that desperate stretch went on to generate billions of dollars in film revenue alone. The whole thing almost didn't happen because a publisher was about to pull the plug.
4. Starbucks — The Investor Who Made Them Sweat
Howard Schultz didn't found Starbucks — he joined it as an employee in 1982 and then bought it in 1987 after the original founders decided they didn't want to be in the restaurant business. The purchase required Schultz to raise $3.8 million from investors.
He pitched 242 people. 217 of them said no.
The nos weren't polite. Several investors told him the coffee shop concept was absurd. Americans didn't sit in cafes. Americans drove through windows or drank office coffee from percolators. The idea of charging more than a dollar for a cup of coffee was, in the view of more than two hundred people with money to spend, simply ridiculous.
Schultz kept going back. He kept making the pitch. The 25 people who said yes gave him enough to make the purchase and begin expanding. The early Seattle stores operated on margins thin enough to make the accountants nervous.
Today there are more than 16,000 Starbucks locations in the United States alone. The 217 investors who passed are, presumably, aware of this.
5. Levi Strauss & Co. — The Pants That Almost Stayed a Patent
In 1872, a Nevada tailor named Jacob Davis wrote a letter to a dry goods merchant in San Francisco named Levi Strauss. Davis had figured out how to reinforce the stress points of workmen's pants using copper rivets, and the pants were selling faster than he could make them. He needed a business partner to help him file a patent.
Strauss agreed. The patent was filed in 1873. And then the hard part began.
The early years of the riveted denim trouser business were not glamorous. The pants were sold primarily to miners and laborers — people who needed durability, not style. Profit margins were thin. Competition from imitators was immediate. There were stretches in the 1870s when the business was genuinely uncertain, when the question of whether a riveted work pant could become a sustainable enterprise rather than a novelty seemed genuinely open.
What saved them was exactly the customer they'd aimed at. Miners wore the pants until they fell apart, and then they came back for more. Word spread through the mining camps and the railroad crews and the ranches. The pants worked. That was enough.
The blue jean went on to become, arguably, the single most recognizable garment in American cultural history.
6. Netflix — The DVD That Almost Stayed in the Mailbox
In 1997, Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph started Netflix as a DVD-by-mail service. The concept worked, but in the early years the company was burning cash at a rate that made investors deeply uncomfortable.
By 2000, the dot-com bubble had burst and Netflix was losing money. Hastings approached Blockbuster — then the dominant force in video rental — and proposed selling Netflix to them for $50 million. Blockbuster's executives reportedly laughed at the meeting.
That rejection, which felt like a death sentence at the time, turned out to be the thing that forced Netflix to keep developing its own model. The company cut costs, refined its subscription approach, and survived long enough to pivot to streaming when the technology caught up to the idea.
Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010. Netflix, by that point, was well on its way to becoming a global media company worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
The meeting where Blockbuster laughed is now taught in business schools as one of the great strategic failures in corporate history.
The Thread That Runs Through All of Them
None of these companies survived because of a formula. None of them had a guaranteed path. What they shared was a specific kind of founder stubbornness — the refusal to accept the closed door as a final answer, the ability to absorb the rejection and the near-miss and keep moving anyway.
The brands feel permanent now. They are part of the furniture of American life. But every single one of them had a week — sometimes several weeks — when the whole thing could have quietly ended, and nobody would have known what they missed.