No More Twinkies? Say It Ain't So!

[bjl584]

No More Twinkies? It. Can't. Happen. In. America. - CNBC

[disneysteve]

No More Twinkies? It. Can't. Happen. In. America. - CNBC

I suspect that if the company does go under, someone will step up to buy the recipes and the rights to start making the product.

[kork13]

Wouldn't break my heart, but DS is probably right... Hostess products are (or at least were) nearly a cultural icon. If Hostess goes into bankruptcy, it's entirely likely that some corporation out there will see an opportunity and offer to buy it out.

[thesimplemoneyblog]

Now I feel like my Twinkie holder I purchased at WalMart was a waste. Now what will I use it for? Maybe it will become a collector's item...

[bjl584]

To update on this story:

Hostess going out of business; nearly 18,000 to be laid off - Dallas News | myFOXdfw.com

Hostess to cease operations. 18,500 to be laid off.

[GrimJack]

Bummer, hunh? Can you imagine a company starting up in this day and age with those recipes? Maybe they should not have given a 300% raise to their CEO and 90% raises to the rest of management?

[bjl584]

Bummer, hunh? Can you imagine a company starting up in this day and age with those recipes? Maybe they should not have given a 300% raise to their CEO and 90% raises to the rest of management?

Ha! No way could a company gain any traction today with something as unhealthy as a twinkie. And, I never understood the concept of cutting costs by cutting workers' wages/hours only for management to reward themselves with a big bonus for the excellent job that thay did at cutting costs.

[Joan.of.the.Arch]

Here is a statement (pdf) from the "baker's union" dated November 13. It gives a little closer look at what was at issue. It's not comprehensive, but a look. http://bctgm.org/PDFs/Hostess%20Plan...2011_12_12.pdf

Supposedly, one of the things Hostess was asking of its employees was that they take an 8% paycut. As I understand it, this would be on top of pay and benefit cuts that those employees took already in the beginning of the year. I think I heard that they were also contributing a flat $10/month out of their paycheck to reinvest in the company at the time it went into bankruptcy. I assume that would have granted some kind of employee onwership (stock purchases as a group or something? Honestly I don't know.

I saw in a video of striking workers a sign that said, "I make $30k a year." You know if that person had to take an 8% cut from there that would take them down to $27.6K. Those kinds of paycuts reverberate through a local economy where Hostess is a relatively large employer, as they were in my own city.

I suspect that those who say that this eradication of Wonder Hostess was another "bain-ification" --genericly speaking-- are right.

The history of local and regional bakery failures & buyouts, consolidation of mega-bakeries, splitting off, selling, and rebuying of mega-bakeries is decades old. I do not think that this is at all the end of those Wonder-Hostess-Dolly Madison-etc products. They may end up still produced under the same names, same recipes, same bakeries, same employees. Just a CEO or two will have ended up making $2.55M in a single year when they previously earned only $750K at the same company.

[disneysteve]

Ha! No way could a company gain any traction today with something as unhealthy as a twinkie.

Really? Have you been in a supermarket lately? The aisles and shelves are stocked with processed crap and lots of it has been introduced recently. Manufacturers are constantly bringing out new items, thousands of them every year. Twinkies aren't any worse than hundreds and hundreds of other items on the market and more to come.

[bjl584]

Really? Have you been in a supermarket lately? The aisles and shelves are stocked with processed crap and lots of it has been introduced recently. Manufacturers are constantly bringing out new items, thousands of them every year. Twinkies aren't any worse than hundreds and hundreds of other items on the market and more to come.

True. But most of that stuff doesn't have a shelf life of 30 plus years. I think that a Twinkie will retain its useability longer than weapons grade plutonium. That's scary to think about.

[autoxer]

True. But most of that stuff doesn't have a shelf life of 30 plus years. I think that a Twinkie will retain its useability longer than weapons grade plutonium. That's scary to think about.

The shelf life of a Twinkie is actually 25 days.

And the CEO salaries are not the reason the company is bankrupt. Their salaries are a small fraction of the companies overhead costs. Ultimately it is the managements fault, but not because they were greedy. It is their fault, because they didn't develop their brand with changing consumer demands. I used to love twinkies, but can't remember the last time I bought one.