How to Say Goodbye

We are taught to start our stories at the beginning. We open with “once upon a time,” hoping to capture the nascent moment when everything came to be. But there are few lessons — in our culture, in our schooling, in our socialization — in how to exit well. Our culture applauds the spirit, gumption and promise of beginnings. We admire the entry — the moment when people launch themselves into something new, plan and execute a new project, embark on important work, get married, take an adventure. Our habit is to tilt toward the future, perpetually poised for the next move, the strategic opportunity.

Happiness is a Glass Half Empty

In an unremarkable business park outside the city of Ann Arbor, in Michigan, stands a poignant memorial to humanity's shattered dreams. It doesn't look like that from the outside, though. Even when you get inside – which members of the public rarely do – it takes a few moments for your eyes to adjust to what you're seeing. It appears to be a vast and haphazardly organized supermarket; along every aisle, grey metal shelves are crammed with thousands of packages of food and household products. There is something unusually cacophonous about the displays, and soon enough you work out the reason: unlike in a real supermarket, there is only one of each item. And you won't find many of them in a real supermarket anyway: they are failures, products withdrawn from sale after a few weeks or months, because almost nobody wanted to buy them. In the product-design business, the storehouse – operated by a company called GfK Custom Research North America – has acquired a nickname: the Museum of Failed Products.