Reduced paycheck and benefits which will hurt their quality of life in the short term and their possibilities for unemployment and future employment in the long term? I’m not so sure about that. They’d be looking for a new job at some point anyway.
I’m not saying this is a better situation, just that I don’t think it’s a worse one.
A Hostess brand that doesn’t have to pay the millions they own in agreed upon pensions and benefits is worth a lot of money.
A lot of big name legacy brands with name recognition, driven into the ground, broke up, and then sold. Looks like a hostile takeover from within. As long as they can dump the pensions, a lot of very rich people will get a whole lot richer.
Whoever buys the brands could probably coast for years with no advertising whatsoever. Sell the stuff to non-chain groceries and $.99 stores.
You can, however, have more than enough Twinkies threads. Merged yours into the existing thread.
This thread will survive a nuclear holocaust, I’m sure.
The fact that Hostess snacks usually cost about twice as much as Little Debbie’s for the same number of cakes can’t have helped.
Said by someone who’s obviously never had a Zebra Cake!
I’ve been a fan of Twinkies, but if Dolly Madison dies, and I can’t get Zingers anymore, there’ll be hell to pay!!! 
(I love Zingers, especially with an ice cold glass of milk!)
Just bought a box of Hostess Cupcakes, and packs of Twinkies, Snoballs, and a cherry pie. Gonna eat that cherry pie, give away the cupcakes at the bar, and hold onto the Twinkies and Snoballs for posterity and an experiment for how long they last.
Given the horrible mismanagement of the company, there is no reason to believe that the “better pay down the road” promise would be fulfilled.
The company was seriously doomed. Time to sell it usable assets off as soon as possible. Many plants might reopen and stay open under new, better owners.
Private equity strikes again! “We’re far more deserving of the money in those pension plans than the employees who EARNED it!”
It wasn’t Bain Capital, but it is BC’s ilk in Vulture Equity.
I’ve wondered how much they’ve changed the recipes to cut costs? Sno Balls for example have almost no chocolate taste at all anymore. The fruit pies don’t taste much like fruit anymore. I used to love the cherry pies. They seem too sweet now. That tart cherry taste is missing.
I’d swear they were better 20 years ago.
I’m not taking about better pay. I’m talking about ANY pay for the next year or two. Something tells me the types of people working on the floor of a hostess plant aren’t going to have an easy time finding other work.
The union should have caved and kept the bakers employed even if it only would have been a few more months.
Perhaps the union could have moved a little on their salary and pension demands. But perhaps the management might have lowered expenses on its side, such as the $2.1 million in total annual salaries for the corporate treasurer and his two deputies or the finance types getting up to $895 per hour.
The Wikipedia entry for Hostess Brands is pretty interesting. The Hostess of today isn’t the original Hostess that (probably) most of us grew up with; it’s a renamed Interstate Bakeries (the Dolly Madison folks). Interstate Bakeries isn’t the original Interstate Bakeries; it’s a renamed Data Processing and Financial General Corp., which bought out the original Interstate (which itself was formed by a merger of an even more original Interstate Bakeries with a Chicagoland bakery). And all along, the various Interstate companies seemed to accomplish growth not by growing brands, but by acquiring tons of regional bakeries.
And that original Hostess? The original company, Taggart, was bought by Continental Baking, which had earlier been bought by Ralston Purina.
The result? A single company competing with its own brands in multiple areas. A single company with clashing corporate cultures. The original Interstate seemed to prefer local brands and bakeries with local autonomy, local bakeries, local distributors. Continental a rigid top-down culture with uniform national branding, large regional bakeries with large distributors. The company seemed to want to move to the Continental model, but was stuck with the surfeit of expensive-to-run tiny locals, yet they seemed to retain the Interstate idea that growth was best done by acquisition, causing financial overextension, as well as an even larger surplus of tiny local bakeries. A single company that focused on snack cakes and white bread, which have been declining in popularity for years (low-carb craze, rise in popularity of higher quality/artisan breads, restrictions in marketing to its core consumers of children, etc.). Two bankruptcies. Not to mention the top brass seeming to be more concerned with personal gain rather than fixing the problems in the company (which, frankly, were probably beyond their abilities).
That the company renamed itself Hostess after its first bankruptcy seems to point to the fact that the Hostess name and products were the profit center on which they wished to focus, and I can’t imagine that another large company will hesitate to snag it. I could see the former Dolly Madison products, Drake’s, Butternut, etc. dying, and seriously can’t see future buyers wanting to pick up the local bakeries and distributors, which seem to be a big part of the financial problem… but the Hostess brands and product lines? They’ll survive. And those saying Bimbo will come in are probably right… they’ve already tried to buy Hostess once before, and now’s their chance to pick up the brands with less headache and a cheaper price.
Who would eat an anal log??
X^@
No Devil Dogs! No Drakes Crumb Cakes! :(
Three kinds - yellow cake, chocolate and raspberry-with-coconut. Originally each type had its own name: The raspberry ones were Razzies, and the others were Koo-Koos and Zingers, though I can’t remember which was which.
Since the merger, all three kinds are called Zingers. I’ve seen them with both Hostess and Dolly Madison labels; think it depended on which part of the country they were in.
Never cared for Twinkies, but I’ll miss Zingers, Ho Hos, the Hostess cupcakes, Beefsteak rye bread, and Nature’s Pride breads…
Not to mention that they tripled the CEO’s salary, plus this is at least their second time filing for bankruptcy. With such stellar CEO and finance exec compensation, you’d think they could hire someone who could lead their way out of a paper bag.
But oh no, let’s blame those greedy, greedy union workers for not allowing more cuts in their salaries.
[Winston Zeddemore]-“That’s a big Twinkie”.
Could be the last chance for one of my favorite jokes.
A five-year-old girl accompanied her father to the barber shop. To keep her happy while he was getting his hair cut, her father had bought her a pack of Twinkies. As the barber snipped away, the little girl hung around right beside him, Twinkie in hand, fascinated by the process. Wishing she’d get out from underfoot, the barber warned, “Honey, you’re going to get hair on your Twinkie!” The little girl replied, “I know. I’m going to get boobs, too, but not till I’m twelve.”