Someone Ruins It for Everyone

This trope is under discussion in the Trope Repair Shop.

You know how it goes: one bad apple spoils the whole barrel. So when there's something many people enjoy, it's entirely possible they'll all lose it forever because all it takes is a single person making a mistake or acting in bad faith to ruin everything. As a result, due to the actions of a lone individual or group, the others no longer get to enjoy said thing ever again even if they were doing so responsibly, and they have the one that caused this to happen to thank for it.

That sort of person is precisely why we can't have nice things — having them is asking for trouble to be caused because some people simply won't play nice or otherwise treat the privilege with proper respect.

One common consequence is a blanket ban from a certain place, so those who weren't at fault end up banished from somewhere anyway due to whatever mishap was caused by the individual they happen to be (loosely) related to. Another common consequence is the thing they were enjoying or about to enjoy getting taken away in some manner because someone's abuse of it made having that thing a liability. There may even be Misplaced Retribution at play, where the innocent ones get something revoked while the actual troublemaker gets away with no punishment. Regardless of the exact circumstances, other people pay the price for something only a small subset or individual can realistically be blamed for.

Sometimes, the reason why everybody loses out is perfectly justified. For instance, it could be that the thing being taken away depends on everyone involved being responsible about it as just one bad actor can (and often will) make it not worth having in general, no matter how good or useful it is; while the good ones do get unfairly punished, in the end it's for the better to not let anyone have it again than to do that but risk some jerk coming along to take gross advantage of it.

If the character ruins something for everyone else by damaging or destroying something precious and irreplacable, such as an expensive museum exhibit or an impressive landmark, then this is Priceless Ming Vase or Monumental Damage (depending on whether it's a priceless possession or a monument, respectively).

Compare Threaten All to Find One, when the threat of a collective punishment is used to find the one person they want by offering to spare the others of said punishment if they expose that person. Contrast Guilt by Association Gag, where the lone individual is the innocent one among a guilty group getting punished. Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things is a fandom-specific version.

Examples

Advertising

• A "No Talking or Phones" Warning combined with an advertisement for M&M's employs this concept. In the ad, the M&Ms are in a movie and Red M&M is trying to save several of his fellow M&Ms who are strapped to a Time Bomb. Suddenly, a phone rings (ostensibly in the theater audience), ruining the scene, and Red stalks off in a huff, complaining that this is why they can't make movies. As the clock continues to count down, one of the M&Ms asks worriedly why it's still ticking.

Anime & Manga

• In the .hack series, the Crimson Knights used to regulate Player Killing by hunting down infamous PKers and punishing them, sometimes working with CC Corp to punish PKers that killed players by cheating. When the Crimson Knights fell apart, PKing got so ridiculously out of hand that CC Corp was forced to remove the mechanic entirely (paving the way for a lack of PKers in the first video game quadrilogy), making it an odd in-universe example of Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things.

Films — Live-Action

• Godzilla: King of the Monsters provides a fine example: Tracking the wounded Godzilla, MONARCH finds an ancient city beneath the ocean, where Godzilla has come to rest. It's the historical and archaeological find of the millennium, but Godzilla needs to be healed in order to fight King Ghidorah right now, and the only way to do that is to set off a nuke in his face. For mankind to survive, the city has to be destroyed.
• In National Treasure, Nicolas Cage has to steal the Declaration of Independence to prevent the villain from getting his mitts on it. Throughout the movie, he treats the document with due respect and at the end of the movie returns it to the authorities, none the worse for wear. There's an awesome scene where he's holding the Declaration, in its frame, and the bad guys break in and see him just about to get in the elevator. Shaw shoots him in the chest. Luckily, as previously mentioned, the Declaration is under bulletproof glass, and Ben gets into the elevator, smirking.

Live-Action TV

• For Jon Stewart, Barbie dolls potentially being used by pedophiles.
• For the first five seasons of Canada's Worst Driver, the creators received hundreds of letters from fans begging the show to stop destroying classic cars in the weekly trials. For the sixth season they destroyed a 2010 Chevrolet Camaro. Cue the tears of a nation of car lovers. They drove the point across even further by introducing the car at the beginning of every weekly challenge with zoom-ins and beauty shots of the progressively worse shape of the car, torn-off bumpers and all.
• In Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, John and "Wanda Jo" tell this trope is the reason why Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption is getting closed. Ultimately, people took the requests for "seeds" literally, in a bad way ("There were not one, not two, not three, but four pots and/or vials containing semen. And I think some were fake, but some were not!").
• On My Name Is Earl, Earl and Randy had discovered that if a certain golfer at a local country club golf course got a hole-in-one, he'd buy everyone at the 19th hole beer. So that they would get more beer (and eventually lunch), they disguised themselves as golfers, and made it seem like he'd gotten holes-in-one every time. The fun was over soon enough, as Randy bragged about their exploits to all the lowlifes at the Crab Shack, who decided to do the same thing, and the country club responded by checking IDs at the door against their guest list.

Music

• In 2008, Ringo Starr caused quite a stir when fans and autograph hunters sent him items to be signed, and afterwards, he posted a video implementing a new policy where he decided to discontinue autographing stuff sent to him.

Religion

• Possibly the Ur-Example is Adam and Eve in Christian and Jewish myth. Eden was basically a natural utopia with farming being incredibly easy, talking animals, and even sex being great (completely painless pregnancy, for instance). There was only one simple rule, don't eat from the Tree of Knowledge. One might think that would be easy, right? Nope.
• In the Book of Numbers, the Israelites have been journeying through the wilderness of Sinai for 2 years, and when they're encamped in the Wilderness of Paran, Moses selects one man from each tribe to scout the land of Canaan. Ten of the scouts spread an evil report that the land eats the inhabitants, and is populated by giants. Joshua and Caleb tell the Israelites that they can take conquest of the land if they will only trust God, but the congregation wants to stone them to death. After Moses intercedes for the Israelites, God decides not to destroy them, but the Israelites of twenty years or older that murmured against God and participated in the rebellion (except for Joshua and Caleb) will not be allowed to enter the Promised Land, but will eventually die in the wilderness, and their children will have to wait 40 years before they can enter the Promised Land as the older generation gradually dies off in the wilderness.

Video Games

• The Dragon Age series should be called "Why We Can't Have Nice Things: The Franchise." Many groups of people, in mythology and history, forever lose privilege because of the actions of one or a few knuckleheads, and many wonders are also forever ruined for the same reason.
  • The Chantry teaches that the Maker preferred mortals to His first creation (spirits), and watched over them from His Golden City... until a handful of Tevinter magisters tried to invade His golden realm, and tainted it with their sin. Now the Golden City is the Black City, those magisters became the first darkspawn that ravaged the world, and the Maker abandoned the mortal realm. This is why we can't have nice things.
  • The Chantry also teaches that the Maker was willing to give humanity a second chance after falling in love with Andraste, his prophet and bride... until a handful of Tevinter supporters betrayed and killed her. Then He abandoned humanity for good this time. And that's why the world sucks.
  • After centuries of enslavement under Tevinter, the elves were given their own homeland. Then a small band of elves (allegedly) attacked a small human village, and now the elves don't have a homeland anymore.
  • Mages used to be free, but then a small percentage of them became the tyrannical magisters of Tevinter (and the darkspawn), so this is why mages (at least in Andrastian society) are kept in Circle towers.
• Dragon Age: Origins: The Ferelden Circle is on a small island in a large lake. Finn from the Witch Hunt DLC reveals that the mages used to be allowed outside for supervised exercise sessions. Then one day Anders bolted and swam across the lake, knowing the Templars couldn't swim after him in their full plate armor. They caught him a week later, and mages haven't been allowed outside since.
• Dragon Age II:
  • Many mages this game, including First Enchanter Orsino, heavily protest this trope, insisting that Knight-Commander Meredith continually cracking down on all Kirkwall mages because of the actions of a few just makes things worse for everyone.
  • Anders blew up the Chantry, causing Templars everywhere to crack down on all mages, forcing mages all over Thedas to either leave the Circle and fight or get persecuted/killed.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition:
  • The protagonist from the first game discovering the Temple of Sacred Ashes (Andraste's burial site) led to it being open to pilgrimages. This led to it being used for a villainous ritual that went wrong and caused a mountain-wide explosion at the game's opening. Now there is no more Temple of Sacred Ashes.
  • The Trespasser DLC reveals that all ancient elves were beautiful, immortal, and magical. Then a handful of war-leaders turned kings turned gods became insufferable tyrants, which culminated in them murdering their queen (Mythal) for trying to stop their power-hungry schemes. Then Fen'Harel created the Veil to imprison them, which cut elves off from the magic of the Fade, which caused them to lose their magic, immortality, and magic-fueled wonders. This is why elves can't have nice things.

Webcomics

• Stand Still, Stay Silent: While the crew is in quarantine, Reynir's older brother Bjarni, who happens to be a mechanic on the quarantine ward's boat, is only allowed a two-minute visit during the entire month of the quarantine's duration. While security and limited ressources can account for the number of visits, Bjarni himself gives a good idea of the reason visits are only two minutes long: within that time, he complains about his Hazmat Suit being itchy (which is also an early symptom of The Plague that warrants the quarantine) and tries giving Reynir a fist bump through his cell's glass wall.

Web Original

• The Something Awful forums had the OKCupid megathread closed down after multiple real-life stalking instances (both online and off) were traced back to users on the thread.
• For April Fool's Day in 2014, Wookieepedia, the Star Wars wiki, featured a somewhat ill-considered prank involving a claim that the site would be switching to paid access, as well as a heavily modified version of the article about breasts including, among other things, a number of slang terms for this particular part of human anatomy. This resulted in criticism outside of Wookieepedia, as well as a doomed attempt to simply delete the article in question. Since then, Wookieepedia has simply not participated in April Fool's Day, despite it having been a tradition since 2006 when it was founded.
• This Very Wiki has a few examples. For one, the ability to have strike-through text is disabled outside the forums because some editors would be tempted to abuse it for editorially-inappropriate snark.
• YouTube creator Simone Giertz used to do live-stream videos of opening gift packaged that fans have send to her. Then somebody send her a vibrator. She invoked this trope as to why those videos are pre-edited now.
• Not Always Right has several example of customers' selfishness either resulting in a policy that benefited customers being revoked, or employees who looked the other way at customers breaking a restrictive policy resolving never to do so again.
  • This photo store had to stop offering photo-cropping services because too many people tried to sue them for damages despite signing a waiver. The customer they're explaining this to then demonstrates exactly why they stopped.
  • This car rental employee stopped telling a joke about charging extra for cleaning bugs off a rental car's windshield after a customer, as usual, took the joke seriously and nearly went berserk over it.
  • When this customer asks why a store doesn't offer credit for recycled cartridges anymore, the clerk replies that people were getting cheap junk cartridges from other brands off the internet and recycling them for more credit than they were actually worth. Sure enough, the customer had been doing that scam himself.
  • An employee for a hotel chain decides to use the chain's discounted employee rate for stays at its Hawaii locations to take her family on vacation. However, when they get there, it turns out that she failed to have HR authorize the reservation and she must pay the full reservation. The resultant ear-shattering tantrum the woman throws costs her the trip, her job, and, for everyone else employed at the hotel chain, the employee discount at the chain's Hawaii locations.
  • In this story, the crew of a plane rapidly get tired of a mother not doing anything about her child running roughshod around the plane until…
    Captain (on PA): “I’m keeping the seatbelt sign on for the remainder of the flight. Passengers are only allowed out of their seats to use the restrooms. For those who wish to complain about my actions, please mention in said complaints that some customers were unwilling to control their children until it became technically illegal not to do so. I wish most of you a pleasant remainder of the flight.”
  • This postal worker isn't supposed to let people in when the post office is closed (like it is during her lunch break), but makes an exception when a woman desperately needs stamps. Then, after the woman turns abusive and demands a refund (stamps are non-refundable), the submitter regrets her decision.
    I no longer open that door during lunch for ANY reason. I don’t give a s*** if it’s some little old lady on the other side who just needs a single stamp to mail a card to her dying father.
  • This restaurant server was willing to let a five-year-old slide on the "under-4s eat free" policy, until the mother immediately claimed her near-teen was also under 4.
  • And this fast food worker let a mother who'd paid for a budget birthday event push what she was getting all the way to the prestiege event, only for her to still demand a discount because the mascot wasn't dancing enough.
    Lesson learned: Say a firm but polite ‘NO’ right from the get-go.

Western Animation

• In Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town, after Burgermeister Meisterburger trips on a toy duck and hurts his foot, he bans and outlaws toys from Somber Town, and it isn't until his successors pass on that the people realize how ridiculous his ban on toys actually was.
• In the "Serious Business" episode of Teen Titans Go!, when Robin gets tired of waiting for such a long time to use the bathroom, he institutes bathroom rationing which limits their visits to 5 minutes, or a bomb will go off. Since the others couldn't finish their leisure activities in less than 5 minutes, they boycott using it, and when he makes them wash up, they get a chance to show him the fun of singing, dancing, playing with hair gel, eating food-shaped water topped with toothpaste, and watching plays where the bathtub and curtain are the stage. After deactivating the bomb, Robin begins to hog the bathroom for himself, and the others have to wait even longer before they can use it. After the others confront him, the bathroom (whose name is John) comes to life and tells him that all the bathrooms came from a destroyed planet to Earth in the hopes they would be appreciated, and after witnessing Robin's blatant abuse of the privilege, all of the other bathrooms leave Earth behind to find a more appreciative civilization that will have more respect for their mysterious magic, all due to Robin's selfish actions ruining it for everyone else.
  Launchpad: Coulda been worse. It coulda been something new!
• The Fairly OddParents!: In "Merry Wishmas", Timmy turns into an anti-Grinch when he wants to give every disappointed person in Dimmsdale who didn't get what they wanted for Christmas a coupon for one free wish. Everything appears to be going fine... until Vicky feels slighted by just one wish, so she wishes for a million wishes, with some of the extra wishes going to other Dimmsdale residents who go on a wishing spree. In Fairy World, when the big wand gets overloaded, Jorgen traces the problem to Dimmsdale and finds that Timmy is responsible for giving everyone wishes, so he shuts off the magic power and plans to have Wishmas replace Christmas so the fairies can rule the holidays, with Santa Claus moving into Timmy's house after he feels kids don't need him anymore. After capturing Jorgen, Cosmo and Wanda (known as the Magic Mailman and the Mail Mites), Santa comes out of retirement when the kids are disappointed by Wishmas, with the kids filling Santa's sleigh with the mountain of surplus toys.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Wild Barts Can't Be Broken" Homer and his friends go on a drunken vandalism spree of Springfield Elementary in the aftermath of their baseball team's victory in the playoffs. Chief Wiggum blames the students, and when he catches them breaking the resulting curfew, he makes them perform community service. The kids retaliate with a radio show where they reveal the adults' secrets, and this little war of nerves eventually culminates in the kids and adults confronting each other in a musical showdown, each accusing the other of embodying this trope. Grampa Simpson and the other old folks complain about the noise, and succeed in securing a curfew against all under-70's.
  • In “Team Homer” Bart wears a shirt with the words “Down with Homework”, leading to chaos in Springfield Elementary. As a result, Principal Skinner creates a school uniform to the detriment of the student body. In one sequence, military-like marching can be seen and heard.

Real Life

• Part of the reason why photos of Osama bin Laden's corpse will not be released to the public is because of fears that it will be used as Garbage Post Kid bait.
• The Pulgas Water Temple in California, long cherished by meditators and quiet LSD trippers, used to be 24/7/365. Now it has strictly enforced hours due to bad behavior from tourists.
• The September 11th terrorist attacks are the reason why security at airports and other major travel venues are so jacked up that the process of getting on board the plane can take longer than the actual flight.
• The Athens 2004 torch relay was the first Olympic torch relay to travel internationally to every continent instead of just the usual relay routine. The following Beijing 2008 torch relay did the same thing, but quickly became infamous for being heavily sabotaged by Pro-democracy, Pro-Tibet, and other Anti-Chinese government protesters. This reached the point that many legs of the relay degenerated into confrontations of the relay by said protesters and many legs of the relay were shortened and otherwise altered (see the Wikipedia article for more details. Note that most other torch relay articles are mainly just about the paths they took.). This more or less killed any chances of there being another international torch relay.
• Midnight Rider, an infamously Troubled Production, met this fate due to the on-set death of camera assistant Sarah Jones by train. For the rest of his life, Gregg Allman didn't want to share his story with moviegoers anymore due to the incident, which was labelled an act of criminal negligence on the part of the filmmakers.
• Any chance for a wide release of The Interview ended up becoming a casualty of the Massive Sony Hack of '14, perpetrated by the terrorist organization Guardians of Peace (which has been alleged to have ties with the film's target, the DPRK, but is more likely to have been merely a disgruntled former employee looking for revenge).
• Moderators on the Steam forums can no longer edit anyone's posts due to one too many game developers and abusive moderators altering peoples' posts to silence criticism against them or the games. While more level headed moderators would edit posts so that they don't have to delete the post or lock the thread outright, now they have to delete posts/threads or lock threads with no middle ground.
• Enrico Caruso got one after his death in 1921. Initially his body was displayed in a glass case in the Cimitero di Santa Maria del Pianto^note Cemetery of St. Mary of Tears in Naples. Most visitors were very respectful. However, the cemetery has no bathrooms. In 1929, his widow Dorothy ordered the tomb sealed.
• The guitar makers of C.F. Martin & Co. gave an authentic 1870s guitar to be used in The Hateful Eight. But upon learning that the real guitar was destroyed during filming rather than one of the doubles, they decided to stop lending their guitars to film productions.
• There used to be a longstanding policy among continental European hotels and lodgings to not rent to English football fans due to (justified) fears of hooliganism.
• In September 2016, the Alphabet-funded linknyc Internet kiosks set up in public Manhattan sidewalks and other popular metro areas in the state were stripped of their internet browser capabilities when too many pedestrians used it for porn.
• The insurance company Esurance abruptly discontinued their highly popular "Erin Esurance" series of ads in 2010, in part because people on the internet wouldn't stop making porn of the character.
• After the 2015 NHL Draft, where teams openly tried to lose games to get a better shot at hyped prospects Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel,^BackgroundNormally, a given NHL draft will have at most one player viewed as a "can't-miss" superstar. The 2015 draft was rare in having two such players. So far, McDavid has had the edge over Eichel, though the latter has done very well in the league. the league changed the rules of the lottery to involve three separate lotteries for the top three picks. Two years later, the last-place Colorado Avalanche, who amassed 48 points without even trying to tank, were screwed over by the process when they dropped to the fourth pick, infuriating fans of the team.
• Go to the No Real Life Examples, Please! section on This Very Wiki and you will see a lot of examples of why we can't have nice real life examples, especially because of some people just couldn't resist Flame Bait. Locked pages often also qualify.
• According to Shattered, a book about the 2016 campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the phrase "We're not allowed to have nice things" became a "dark mantra" of the campaign as it was continually buffeted by stuff such as the FBI announcements about e-mail investigations, the Wikileaks dumps, etc.
• Ultra Music Festival, a music festival for Electronic Music, implemented an adults-only policy for 2015 onwards after two incidents occurred at the Miami venue in 2014. There was a 21-year-old who died of a drug overdose, as well as a security guard getting critically injured after a mob broke a gate and trampled her which resulted in dozens of arrests.
• Depending on your definition of what a "nice thing" entails, the U.S. State Department has decided to ban all Americans from travelling as tourists to North Korea following the death of Otto Warmbier in June of 2017. Warmbier had been travelling with a tourist group when he allegedly decided to take down a propaganda poster in his hotel room, a crime that earned him a 15-year hard labor sentence in early 2016 and ultimately cost him his life.
• A crisps company in the UK held a promotion where they invited people to upload selfies to be used in a humorous fashion by a sports newscaster and the winner would score some sporting event tickets. Predictably, the internet sent in photos of terrorists, dictators, pedophiles, and other criminals. The company ended the contest.
• For more than a century, the American outdoor retailer L.L.Bean, founded in 1912, offered a lifetime guarantee on all products it sold—offering refunds even without a purchase receipt. However, in the mid-2010s, certain customers began abusing the policy, returning products bought from third parties (such as yard sales) or effectively turning the policy into a lifetime replacement program. The company announced in February 2018 that returns would only be accepted from one year after purchase, and that proof of purchase would be required for any returns.
• Tumblr was no stranger to pornography, but the site did very little about it since for the most part, there was no harm to it. Thanks to the people who used Tumblr to upload child pornography and related material, Google and Apple banned the Tumblr app from their storefront and in the end of 2018, Tumblr prohibited pornography of all kinds.
• Usenet was once accessible through any computer and you could set your email client to subscribe to and download your favorite newsgroups. It was an extremely useful service for uncensored discussions of all kinds for free. Ripped-off binaries, child pornography, pirated material and other illegally encoded stuff caused most internet providers to stop Usenet service. Google bought Usenet and it is now called Google Groups, a mere shadow of its former vibrant self. Other services allow you to access Usenet via paid subscription.
• After it came to light that a lot of the anonymous user-submitted content on Pornhub featured pedophilia and human trafficking victims, there was basically no way to sort it out and they nuked everything but verified accounts.
• Before the 1980s, in France, lawyers used to be able to visit their clients in prison without being searched by the warden. After an escaping inmate shot a guard with a gun that had been handed to him by his lawyer Brigitte Hemmerlin, all lawyers were to be searched before entering.
• Said word for word at the 4:35 mark of this video. The video talks about how in Disneyland's, Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, restaurants had to stop giving out individual menus to diners, instead giving a party one menu to look at, switched from a stainless steel spork (with a Star Wars aesthetic) to regular plastic cutlery, and may even implement extra security as a way to help stop park goers from stealing these items and selling them over the internet.
• A local New York City newspaper disabled comments on their articles posted on their website. The staff said that it was costing them money to have moderators and algorithms deleting offending comments over and over (with no results) from people being nasty towards each other and the people in the articles. Said people even harassed and threatened people that were victims of crime and even those who were still in high school. The harassment caused people that had information for a news story to not come forward because they didn't want to deal with people looking up their names and location and harassing them.
• The National Emergency Library fell victim to this. The Internet Archive, which managed the library, decided to close it two weeks early because of a concerted attack by a quartet of commercial publishers.
• In 2016, Hooters had no choice but to close their branch in Rockville, Maryland and surrender their liquor license after a customer named Luis Gustavo Reluzco drove away after drinking heavily there, then struck and killed a police officer. The incident was blamed on one of the Hooter Girls, who continued to serve him while he was drunk.
• In 2011, a man named Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed. Before he was executed, he was allowed to request a last meal, and he requested two chicken fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fajitas, a meat lover's pizza, a pint of ice cream, and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts. The problem was, he didn't eat any of it. As a result, Texas did away with bespoke last meal requests for its death row inmates.
• According to this video, back in Sweden in the 1960s this person's grandfather bought a monkey from a sailor that came into his shop one day. After being locked up in its cage for several months, the monkey attacked and severely wounded its owner when it was finally let out, and the police were called in to deal with the situation, but after they couldn't capture it, they shot and killed it. A few months after the incident, no charges were filed as he had committed no real crimes, so the Swedish government created new laws that banned any animal that could be classified as an exotic pet within its national borders.
• The downside of quality children's programming such as My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is this, particularly ones who have a real adult fanbase. Predators would see the program and decide to use it as an excuse to connect to the little kids the show was originally aimed at. Not at all helped whenever a brony or adult fan of another show actually is outed as a groomer. Many potential watchers have been turned off of MLP, a legitimately good, well-written show, because of the groomer problem in its fanbase.
• This is why TP-Link routers sold in the USA are firmware-locked. Some killjoys have been using custom firmware to boost the Wi-Fi signal strength on their router so their signal is strong enough to be picked up where ever they are on the block, at the price of drowning out and thus effectively jamming some of the neighbors' Wi-Fi signals, and in extreme fringe cases even disrupts the radar systems of airplanes. This resulted in a threatening letter by the FCC, and thus TP-Link has decided to region-lock their routers, and the US version of the routers will be locked down extra tightly that third-party firmware will be forbidden to run on the routers.
• Nickelodeon barred Tom Kenny from voicing SpongeBob SquarePants in works produced without their approval or oversight after he voiced the character in a TV Funhouse X-Presidents skit in which he's hired by the titular group of former U.S. presidents to appear in a pro-War on Terror propaganda video.
• Signs that unintentionally say something funny will be frequent targets of theft by the amused, to the chagrin of the unamused authorities who have to keep paying for replacements until the sign itself is changed.
  • At one point, Interstate 40 had special milage signs at both ends of the interstate in Barstow, California and Wilmington, North Carolina showing the distance (of 2,554 miles) to the opposite terminus. While Barstow, as of 2023, still continues to have a milage sign showing the distance to Wilmington posted despite repeated theft, the NCDoT officially gave up on posting a milage sign in Wilmington showing the distance to Barstow in 2009 after the fifth time it was stolen.
  • The village of Fucking, Austria changed their name to Fugging on January 1, 2021, mainly because they were sick of constantly replacing the signs that marked the borders of the village (which were simply white signs with "Fucking" in black script) at €300 a pop.
  • Downplayed example with Shitterton in the southwest of England — they still have a road sign on the road to enter the hamlet, but it's carved onto a 1.5-ton rock to make it too difficult to steal without construction equipment.
• Road signs with memetic numbers on them also get stolen a lot, to the point where the governing authority will change the number and break their own numbering system to put an end to it.
  • "69" is a frequent victim because it is relatively low and therefore more likely to occur in any highway system. Several state highways formerly numbered 69 have been renamed to others, such as what is now New Jersey Route 31. For mile markers, many have been changed to read "Mile 68.99".
  • "420" is another mile marker that's often changed to officially say "419.9".
  • "666" isn't common for mile markers in the US as few highways are that long (highway mileage numbers reset to 0 at state borders), but one of the few places that this does happen is Interstate 10 in Texas due to its sheer size — they mark Mile 666 with a generic yellow-and-black-stripe "hazard" marker while Miles 665 and 667 are marked normally. For numbering the highways themselves, US Highway 666^note It was originally a spur route off of the famous and now-decommissioned Route 66, nicknamed the "Devil's Highway", kept having its signs stolen and the highway itself had a high vehicle fatality rate because of it, leading New Mexico and later Arizona to get it changed to US Highway 491 in 2003.
• When it comes to special Pokémon cards being given away or sold at certain stores, it takes just a few bad apples to ruin it for everyone:
  • In 2022, McDonald's gave away Pokémon cards with their Happy Meals. What should have been a fun extra for children to have with their meals turned into swarms of adults buying a ton of Happy Meals just to get the cards to sell online while throwing the food away. This caused many McDonald's restaurants to be devoid of the Pokémon cards, leaving none for kids to collect. McDonald's would eventually place limits to discourage adults from snagging up all the cards.
  • A Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam held a collaborative event with the Pokémon Company by selling a Pokémon card displaying a Pikachu wearing a felt hat whose art style was made after Van Gogh's. A bunch of scalpers swarmed the gift shop and bought out all the cards to resell online at highly inflated values. Due to how aggressive the scalpers were, the museum decided to stop selling the cards entirely.
• In August 2012, Mountain Dew held an online contest to let the Internet name a new green apple flavour of Mountain Dew. However, 4chan quickly raided the contest to elevate offensive names to the top (with "Hitler did nothing wrong" taking the top spot) and also hacked the contest page to add offensive banners and pop-ups, forcing Mountain Dew to end the contest.
• Hitchiking used to be a quite a popular method of travel. People would regularly give rides to strangers. However, due to increasing reports of serial killers targeting hitchhikers ( as well as predatory hitchikers assaulting/killing people gave them rides ), Hitchiking fell out of favor as a method of transport in America after the 70s. People stopped giving rides to hitchhikers. Nowadays you are hard pressed to find a stranger willing to give you a ride if you get stranded.
• Public restrooms are a frequent target of vandalism and other shenanigans like clogging the plumbing. Because it can get expensive to clean and repair a bathroom over and over, several outcomes can occur:
  • The bathroom is temporarily closed for cleaning and/or repairs. No one can use it until the work is done.
  • The owners make it harder for the public to use the bathroom such as installing locks on the doors requiring a code or key.
  • In some extreme cases, the bathrooms are hardly or never bothered with the upkeep to save on costs, causing the bathrooms to fall into a state of disrepair.
• The existence of "hostile architecture" in public spaces to create an environment to prevent unwanted behavior such as homelessness, vandals, and loiterers from hanging out in a particular area. This creates a less welcoming environment when removing or remodifying benches, adding spikes and studs on flat surfaces, removal of public restrooms, etc.