Tonight I was at my local gas station/ convenience store. I noticed the Hostess Snack Display was gone. Not moved. Gone. It’s been there for over twenty years in the same spot. I can only assume they weren’t selling enough.
I almost bought a Hostess Sno Balls about a month ago. I had skipped lunch, it was hot and they looked so tempting with my 20 oz Coke. I think the price was a $1.59. :eek: I put that thing back very quick. All the other Hostess Cakes were similar. IIRC the Fried Pies were a little cheaper.
Buying a Coke and Hostess Snack Cake was a rite of passage when I was a kid in the 70’s. That’s what my allowance was for. Fifty cents for the Coke and 50 cents for the snack cake. Now, 20 oz Cokes at this convenience store are $1.45. Plus another $1.59 for the snack cake? No way in hell. No way will I give somebody over $3 for a coke and snack. For me that’s a deal breaker. I rarely even buy single cokes anymore. They are so much cheaper in the twelve packs of 12 oz cans.
Parents - do you feel the Snack Cakes are priced beyond what you’re willing to pay? Even for your kid that wants one? Have they priced themselves out of the market?
Adults - like me that bought these things decades ago. Are these snack cakes priced beyond what you’d pay? Even when you’re tempted?
Yes, I know I’m channeling my parents. I recall the stories of the ten cent cokes and ten cent Moon Pies.
For some things a certain price point sticks in our brains. For me it’s the fifty cent coke and fifty cent snack pastry. That’s what they were in junior high. They didn’t hit seventy-five cents until my college years.
I’ve paid over a dollar for snack pastry’s. But a buck and half is my breaking point. I rather buy a small hamburger at McDonalds or Sonic. I just won’t burn that kind of money on a pastry. I have the money but I refuse to piss it away like that.
Yes, I know boxes of snack pastry are much, much cheaper. I don’t want a box of them in my house. I don’t need the temptation.
$1.59 strikes me as incredibly cheap for an individually wrapped cake. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that $1.59 in 2011 has the buying power of $0.46 in 1978. As it turns out Hostess cupcakes have gotten slightly cheaper.
Also I doubt you could even buy a 20oz Coke in 1978. Your 50 cent bottle was probably 8-10 oz.
Just think, your outrage saved you over 600 calories of almost pure sugar (20oz coke, 240 cals; Hostess chocolate cupcake x2, 380 cals). I consider that a win.
That said, if Bazooka gum ever went over a nickel, I don’t want to know about it.
Too pricey for me. Safeway (Domincks here in Chicago) sells boxed snack pies for fifty cents each which is enough for an impulse purchase any time I’m there. The Hostess ones are $1.79 which just feels like too much for a couple bites of snack.
I buy my son the “Swiss Rolls” at Aldi for an occasional lunch snack which are twelve for $2.00. He doesn’t seem to mind any difference they have from a box of Ho-Hos which is $4.50 for ten of them.
Our boys don’t particularly care for them, and I wouldn’t buy 'em every day for myself, but $1.59 doesn’t seem too outrageous to me.
It was Hostess Fruit Pies that were the gold standard when I was a kid. Oh, man. Delicious, and you could trade one of those for practically anything at lunch time.
We haven’t bought Hostess in years, mostly because of the price. All of the snack cakes and pastries we buy are Little Debbie, which tend to be about half the price of Hostess. Tasty-Kake is our “special occasion” brand…we usually only buy the holiday special editions of those.
I tend only to buy them for special occasions simply because our teens inhale them seconds after they hit the house. And with anywhere from 8 (normal household) to 15 people in the house, buying enough to satisfy everyone is ridiculously expensive.
We only buy them when they are on sale and like someone else said they are usually gone so fast once bought that it isn’t often that we do buy them. You have to buy them at the grocery store or your crazy to buy them at all. And little Debbie is so much cheaper and on sale so much more often. Usually buy one get one free where I live.
What cost $1.00 in 1975 would cost $4.01 in 2010.
Also, if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2010 and 1975,
they would cost you $1.00 and $0.23 respectively.
I tried to explain in my first post that both Hostess cupcakes and Coke are cheaper than they were in the 1970s, but it doesn’t seem anyone is interested.
At any rate, my parents would have died rather than feed us Hostess or Little Debbie anything when I was a kid. They were very anti-processed-foods before that was cool. Fig Newtons and Honey-Nut Cheerios were really pushing the limits. I did suffer through wheat germ and carob chips, but we had REAL whipped cream when the occaision demanded it. When I started college I had never even tasted Cool Whip, or Hamburger Helper for that matter.
If it makes you feel better, a 20 oz. bottle of coke at the deli in the lobby of my office building costs $2.48. Which is weird since they are $1.75 at the convenience store 75 feet away. But not so weird since I still sometimes buy the $2.48 one because I’m feeling too lazy to walk 150 feet.
But yeah, while a $1.50 for a Coke may be a psychological barrier, on an equal dollars basis I’m pretty sure that almost all of our junk foods are quite a bit cheaper on a unit basis (many have also become much bigger) than they were when we were kids.
But it is a good way for me to feel old. “I remember when the corner store still sold penny candy, dammit!”
It’s not that anyone’s not interested, it’s that it doesn’t really matter. At the moment, people are probably making less, adjusted for inflation, than their parents were in the 70s. And when you also add the fact that store brands and Little Debbies are a six-pack box for $1.80 or less, one pie or cupcake for $1.xx is kind of expensive.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, adjusted for inflation median household income has increased 13% since 1975.
In the same time period, ignoring unit size and accepting the prices above, a Ho Ho and Coke has declined in cost 30%
Still might be a big psychological hurdle, but relative to what the average household is making it is still cheaper than 35 years ago (and you’re probably getting almost twice as much Coke).
But hasn’t that always been the case? I seem to remember similar price disparity when I was a kid (though I only ever ate Nutty Bars but it seemed like untold wealth to buy those instead when I wheedled some candy bar money out of my mom).
Yea, it’s pretty expensive when I compare them to an exponentially better tasting, and made with perhaps better ingredients local homemade donut of my choice at 67 cents each. So for around the price of your hostess I could get two large and dense, fresh, deep fried chocolate donuts (they certainly weigh more than any Hostess product) topped with a rich chocolate frosting.
Because they’d have eaten it within an hour of it coming in the house. Anyway, I lost my taste for snacky cakes back in high school when I’d buy them in the school cafeteria for a quarter and save the rest of my lunch money for cigarettes.
I almost never buy/bought Hostess snacks at the convenience store simply because even at just $0.99 or thereabouts, it seemed expensive compared to Little Debbies, which my mom would buy for me for my lunches (sandwich, LD, and a piece of fruit…which usually got chucked in the garbage can in the lunchroom since I was a horrible little shit…sorry, Mom). So I still avoid Hostess for the most part, but every now and then in the grocery store, I’ll scope out the LD Nutty Bars or Oatmeal Pies, and I’m shocked that they’ve gone up from $0.89 for a box to something like $1.49. Outrageous! Six, eight, or ten snackcakes for something like a quarter a piece?! I should call the state AG.
A)the price has declined more than real wages, meaning it is STILL cheaper, in real buying power, than in 1978.
B)It has always been cheaper to buy Hostess cupcakes – and virtually every food product – by the box or 6-pack, so how is that relevant to whether the indivdual pack is now too expensive?
C)Little Debbie has always been cheaper than Hostess, so how is that relevant? The question is whether Hostess cupcakes, qua Hostess cupcakes, have gotten too expensive. Not whether they are worth the greater price that has always been charged, compared to Little Debbie.
In sum, people don’t like being rational, especially not about childhood memories, and I’m pooping in your nostalgia/outrage punchbowl so sorry.
So what you’re saying is that thirty years ago, the Coke and the snack cake cost about the same amount, and you were okay with paying those prices for both items. Now the Coke and the cake still cost about the same amount, and you’re willing to pay the new price for one but think the other is way overpriced. I’m not sure I get why you’ll shell out that much for the soda but be outraged at the price of the snack.
