Oh, I don’t blame the union workers. I mean, everybody I know walks right off a cliff, the 18,000 union workers who just did so are hardly any different from anybody else. The good news is that somebody will buy the rights to the Hostess properties and start manufacturing them again, but alas, those 18,000 cliff-jumpers will never again make another Twinkie. I’ll tell you one thing, though… I have never seen a suicide pact that big before. Is that a new record?
I never thought you were that gullible, Airman. The executives are looting the company. Whether or not these employees were going to kowtow and hand them 1/3 of their compensation is beside the point. The executives are BLAMING the union…that doesn’t even come close to meaning that the union is actually WHY the company is going under. It just means the executives don’t want you to look too closely at their mismanagement and vulture equity capitalism here. LOOK! Something shiny! Over there!
Yup. If you’re driving the bus over the cliff, might as well blame the passengers for not begging hard enough for you to stop. That just means you won’t do the extra lap before making the plunge anyway.
Did all of the union workers lose their jobs? If the answer is yes, they lost. Period.
We can talk about the mismanagement of the company all you want to. I probably agree with every single point you might make about the executives, but you know what? If my boss tells me that I have to take a pay cut or the place shuts down, I take his word for it. I don’t dare him to lock the doors, I don’t complain about how he’s been cheating me for years, I accept that either I take what I can get or I go somewhere else. In a company that has this kind of history of mismanagement, anybody with any sort of applicable skills is already gone. You now have 18,000 people suitable mostly for minimum-wage work, which you can be certain is less than they would have been making pushing Twinkies.
They let the anger over the company leadership destroy their judgment, and tomorrow when they’re on the bread line they’ll be wondering where it all went wrong. The union leaders, however, will persevere, there are always people to organize and suicide pacts for people to sign as long as the dues get paid.
I feel bad for the local Hostess Outlet stores. There’s one about 1/2 mile from me. Those people will be hurting this Christmas.
Am I the only one who thinks of Dan White whenever I hear Twinkies mentioned?
Oh no no no. I was distracted by all the twinkie talk and forgot about the cupcakes. Now what will I eat when I’m sad and nobody loves me and my job sucks and my kids are brats and my mother is crazy?
You’re still assuming the execs are telling the truth about that. It’s very likely (given past mismanagement and current looting (a 300% increase in executive compensation when they’re claiming imminent bankruptcy?)) that the worker compensation was a null set, useful only for transferring blame to someone other than the top tier.
Little Debbie. They’re cheaper, anyway. Or, if you feel like splurging, Tastykake is still in business (and has better products).
One of the articles I read this morning quoted a worker as claiming he mixed the dough and made nearly $18/hour.
I spent nearly a decade in the CPG manufactured food industry. One of the plants I dealt with had a bakery. So I know a little bit about the business and about this guy’s duties. His job would have been to take a big ass mixing bowl to the mixer where the ingredients would be piped in. Maybe dump in some shortening or the like, press a button to let it mix while oil and water ran in, then haul the mixed dough over to the front of the line, lock it in, and push another button. That’s it.
That job ain’t worth $18/hour. It is barely worth $9. So yeah, worker compensation was a problem. Add in that the Teamsters agreed with the management and you’ve got an indication this was about executive greed alright. The executives of the Baker’s union.
The recent news about Hostess declaring bankruptcy always begins with the most shocking and horrifying announcement possible: the Twinkie is dead.
Then the articles always go on to mention Ho’s Ho’s Ding-Dongs and Snoballs. Then they talk about Wonder Bread.
But why don’t they ever mention the single, most important food of all : the Hostess Cup Cake.
Simply perfect…divine, chocolate-y pleasure , with a little white filling, in a moist cake, with a great tasting, sugary chocolate frosting.
And it * looks* like a cup cake, too…the same size and shape as the cupcakes you can make at home.
Unlike the alien weirdness of Twinkies or Sno Balls, which look and taste like nothing else on earth.
But we hear nothing of the cupcakes…The mainstream media reveals its biased reporting once again!
So- let us all bow our heads and pause for a moment of silence as we recall the poor, negelected Cup Cake–the true victim of the story.
Because it’s just a bigger HoHo.
Well said, my favorite too.
I once ate an entire box of 12 cupcakes in one sitting. Burp.
Because it is the Spawn of Satan (as is the rest of their soon-to-be-defunct line). That stuff would always and inevitably leave a aftertaste in my mouth like something died (even as I might be eating six of them in one shot).
Dontcha just hate former junk food junkies who self-righteously rip on their former lifestyle? 
I know you made this thread to be primarily about Hostess cupcakes, but there were already multiple threads merged earlier (in CS) about the Hostess line going away…so I’m going to move this over there and merge it with the others since it’s still about the Hostess liquidation.
That seems utterly foolish to me! He has every incentive to lie to you about that.
Here is how it goes, or anyway, should go. You state your asking wage. He tells you whether he will meet it. If so, then you work for him. If not, then you leave. What the heck does it matter to you whether he gets to keep his place open or not? If he can’t pay you what you believe you should be paid, then his business is worthless to you.
Why couldn’t the executives invite the union leaders to accompany them to the courthouse, to show them that this time, for realsyreals, they are actually and in fact shutting the company down? I am having trouble seeing how it was possible for neither side to flinch.
Had a long, bizarrely involved conversation with a friend (employed by a regional bakery brand) last night regarding the future of the Hostess brands. Three of the four brands mentioned in this article, Buyers prepare bids for Hostess assets, came up: Grupo Bimbo, McKee, and Flowers. We ended up agreeing that Bimbo is the likeliest buyer of the snack cake brands, and covered some of the problems with other lines (Wonder bread, et al) the article covers.
Our thoughts:
If Bimbo buys Hostess: all of the primary snack cake brands will survive virtually unchanged, and the lower tier products (carrot cakes, fruit cakes, etc.) will still make seasonal appearances. The only major snack products which overlap with Bimbo’s current offerings are pies, muffins and doughnuts, all of which are currently available under the Entenmann’s brands. More than likely, the company would keep the Hostess name over the Entenmann name for those products, returning Entenmann to its original higher-status dessert niche. Bimbo will likely not be allowed to purchase the bread brands due to anti-trust(noted in the article). They’d also probably keep the Hostess and Drake’s brands separate, and are the most experienced company with running geographically large bakery companies.
McKee might make a bid in order to move up the snack brands chain, but it’s doubtful. They’ve always been the “generic”/budget version of Hostess, and have clones of virtually all of the major Hostess cakes: Suzy-Q/Devil Creme, Cupcake/Cupcake, Coffee Cake/Streusel, Twinkies/Cloud Cakes, Ding Dongs/Devil Squares, the mini-doughnuts, pies, and muffins, and the one that I think more people prefer the cheaper alternative of, HoHos/Swiss Cake Rolls. Taking on the Hostess brands would mean owning two barely different versions of a bunch of products. The interesting thing is that McKee doesn’t do bread currently, and they might be interested in picking up Wonder and the other non-snack brands to make the leap to a full-service bakery company. They also have experience with national distribution.
Flowers has their own “premium” line of snack cakes – Tastykake – but the brand has virtually no market penetration outside of certain geographic areas. The Tastykake brands only partially overlap the Hostess brands, and have a lot of their own unique offerings, so it would be less of a leap to either maintain both brands simultaneously. They also have their own regional bread brands, which would create issues with buying Wonder. Their biggest issue would be suddenly going national, rather than growing regionally.
Overall, cupcakes and Twinkies and such would probably survive under Bimbo and Flowers, but not likely under McKee.
Other runners-up would be companies like Kraft Foods (complementing Nabisco in snacks), Kellogg’s (Keebler in snacks and Kellogg’s in breakfast foods), or even Frito-Lay (snacks, and has an existing distributor network that replenishes and rotates daily already, which is needed).
If my company were going down the tubes, a 300% increase in my pay might convince me to stick it out rather than jump ship. My colleagues and I have plenty of places to land now, but fewer if we wait until we’re unemployed. This is a common practice to keep very-employable-elsewhere leadership in place.
A friend of mine suggests that since Hostess was privately owned and not publicly traded, the “raises” are actually just the investors recovering their investment, and that this is reasonable.
Is he right that the ones getting the raises are also the ones who have invested their own resources into the company?