Hostess goes under, ACIN is sad :(

[gaelic cowboy]

I never had one an I never seen one except on telly and seeing as there yankee snack food I guessing they were horrible anyway.

Last time I was in America if it hadn't been for steak I swear I would have starved to death.

Everything had too much salt or sugar and I mean everything, and thats saying something seeing as were not noted for cuisine here.

After all we invented the Jumbo Breakfast Roll

[Vladimir]

I never had one an I never seen one except on telly and seeing as there yankee snack food I guessing they were horrible anyway.

Last time I was in America if it hadn't been for steak I swear I would have starved to death.

Everything had too much salt or sugar and I mean everything, and thats saying something seeing as were not noted for cuisine here.

After all we invented the Jumbo Breakfast Roll

You people are aware that every type of food is available in the states, don't you? It's all cooked quite differently.

Europeans who complain about American food just have bad taste and can't use the internet.

[gaelic cowboy]

You people are aware that every type of food is available in the states, don't you? It's all cooked quite differently.

Europeans who complain about American food just have bad taste and can't use the internet.

not in Iowa Vlad your thinking somewhere like New York there man

Hand on heart it was a toss up between waffles and country fried steak as the worst meals I had in Iowa.

Luckily there was plenty of drink to see me through the holiday one place even served free drink that was a legend place.

[Kralizec]

After all we invented the Jumbo Breakfast Roll

That looks delicious and lethal. I must have one.

[a completely inoffensive name]

not in Iowa Vlad your thinking somewhere like New York there man

Hand on heart it was a toss up between waffles and country fried steak as the worst meals I had in Iowa.

Luckily there was plenty of drink to see me through the holiday one place even served free drink that was a legend place.

Wait, you didn't like waffles? Uhh, you just bad taste. No one hates waffles.

[gaelic cowboy]

That looks delicious and lethal. I must have one.

Traditional hangover food usually bought in a local spar shop or petrol station.


You know i cant help feeling this big publicity thingy with this Twinky crowd is all part of a plan, we had the same with Spice Burgers. The company announces there is only a few months supply left as there going out of business etc etc suddenly everyone is buying them in swoops investor angel to save the nations drunken food habit

[gaelic cowboy]

Wait, you didn't like waffles? Uhh, you just bad taste. No one hates waffles.

the amount of sugar was insane like they had a 5yr old in the kitchen.

Steak was fine so I basically it ate it every day after about 2 or 3 days of failure.



This crowd has an interesting take on twinky's demise and it makes a lot of sense to me about why I felt sick so much. There was me trying to have a ordinary meal when corporate were just trying to shovel salt and sugar in me.

Twinkies, Ho Hos and the unhealthy fear of fatty foods

By now all of the Twinkies, Ho Hos and other Hostess baked goods have been stripped from grocery store shelves — and countless tributes paid via Tweets, blogs and Facebook posts.

After more than 80 years in business, Hostess declared it was going under last week, dropping off the last of its Wonder Bread and Zingers deliveries, possibly ending jobs for more than 18,000 people, and marking yet another sad demise of a venerable American business institution.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Now, in a perhaps ill-fated 11th-hour round of negotiations with its workers, Hostess is struggling to escape the Great Recession sandpit, or get bought out. Yet this octogenarian snack king is really just the victim of another movement sweeping the country over the past couple decades: "low-fat" and "health food" trends, and the current government-sponsored anti-obesity campaign.

Among other evolutionary changes, Hostess-style chocolate and crème desserts are being replaced by a seemingly endless variety of gluey cereal bars with nearly as much sugar — but containing the word "fiber" on the label.

Funny how Americans weighed less when it was still OK to eat a Twinkie. In the same past couple decades, the number of overweight Americans has risen to 2 in 3. Dieting is rampant, yet numerous studies have shown that dieting in the long run frequently leads to overall weight gain.

To me, it's just this obsession with weight — instead of balanced living — that is fueling the decline of yet another little bit of joy on the planet: the unrepentant $1 snack dessert. Consider the Zen of the moment when you take a bite, that taste of something so simple yet decadent, Godiva for the everyman, and, for many, the savory hint of childhood and innocence. Can that small pleasure be had any longer without fear of diet-busting self-loathing?

One unintended consequence of anti-obesity campaigns (which are filtering into our schools) is clear, according to health experts: an increasingly all-consuming fear of gaining weight and an unhealthy relationship with food. "Kids are at all different stages. Some are stick figures, some are not," says Dr. Harry Brandt, director of the Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt Health System. "But to tell kids at that age not to eat fat, or to just eat low-fat, is wrong. Fat is a normal part of the diet."

I've seen that fear in my own family. At age 8, my daughter swore off sweets. At 10, though thin, she kids around with her friends about how to best burn calories. And they are hardly alone. A whopping "81 percent of 10-year-olds are afraid of being fat," according to studies cited by the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD).

Healthy eating is fine, but extremism in any form is often destructive. I've instead tried to emphasize the message of balance vs. self-denial. As I told her, "One of the joys of childhood is eating a cookie." She has listened, and dessert is now welcome in our home again.

And the Ho Ho, in particular, has been a savior of sorts. The Twinkie didn't quite translate to adulthood for me: that sticky, sweet cellulous sponge cake I once thought would be the last survivor of a nuclear holocaust. Ah, but the delicate Ho Ho: not too much chocolate. Not too much crème. No choco-gummy residue like a Little Debbie's Cupcake. Just a swish of sugary white filling and the snap of that thin chocolate coating that collapsed in your mouth at the end of each bite

When I heard the news, I asked my husband to check the shelves at Target. No luck, of course. And I'm not one to scour out-of-the way drugstore shelves in search of an out-of-date, overlooked box. I can only hope that, if Hostess does go down for good, some savvy entrepreneur will indeed bring back the beloved brands — recognizing that people don't just want to consume these culinary vestiges of Americana, they want to do so with love.

I can still remember the taste of my last Ho Ho. That's partly because I unknowingly bought my last box just a couple weeks ago. I put one in each of my children's schools lunches, and I know they have at least gotten to know a bit of the "happy" in my own childhood.

Luckily, I ate the rest myself.

Is Low Fat Food Making America Fatter?

[Vladimir]

not in Iowa

My bad. I'm sorry. :-(

[gaelic cowboy]

My bad. I'm sorry. :-(

I remember laughing when me mam said I would find it hard to eat the food, the first few days in Chicago were grand but once I hit the mythological environs of Des Moines I was toast.

I remember eating something called a bronco steak that so big it was folded on the plate but that was in Deadwood.

[Lemur]

If you're in Colorado, you should get high and watch this vintage commercial.

[HopAlongBunny]

It's videos like Lemur's that make me regret no longer doing acid :(

[drone]

If you're in Colorado, you should get high and watch this vintage commercial.

I forgot about the old fruit cakes, those were pretty good.

[Xiahou]

So, what? The fact that the CEOs were making buku bucks and raising their pay while cutting out the Union benefits is justified because the company has moved towards cost-saving semi-automated manufacturing?

It wouldn't have been "cost-saving" if they kept everyone on and payed them the same. Really, if you think about it, unions drive their own demise when it comes to manufacturing- they organize for increased pay and benefits until it becomes economically viable to replace them with machines... Business's aren't charities and their owners aren't obligated to drive themselves into financial ruin running unprofitable businesses.

If skilled labor is going to be cut out of the equation due to technology, then the big question becomes "How do you make a living in this crazy world?" Certainly that wasn't on the minds of the CEOs though, who were giving themselves raises even as they filed for bankruptcy. Corporate greed is corporate greed.

High Paying Jobs That Nobody Wants

[a completely inoffensive name]

It wouldn't have been "cost-saving" if they kept everyone on and payed them the same. Really, if you think about it, unions drive their own demise when it comes to manufacturing- they organize for increased pay and benefits until it becomes economically viable to replace them with machines... Business's aren't charities and their owners aren't obligated to drive themselves into financial ruin running unprofitable businesses.

Building on that idea you could say that companies drive their own demise by replacing workers with robots, creating a scenario where people have no jobs and goods are so cheap they might as well be free. No needs to sell anyone anything, everything is produced and automated for us by robotic overlords. Wait, did I just discover communism?

[Montmorency]

Building on that idea you could say that companies drive their own demise by replacing workers with robots, creating a scenario where people have no jobs and goods are so cheap they might as well be free. No needs to sell anyone anything, everything is produced and automated for us by robotic overlords. Wait, did I just discover communism?

Or, the dystopian scenario: virtually all production is automated, as well as all service, to the point that almost all consumers are out of a job and rich businessmen collaborate with researchers and engineers to maintain armies of autonomous robots on self-sufficient complexes as the ravening hordes once known as "the unemployed" claw at the gates with starving children in hand, shooting off whatever ordnance they have got their emaciated hands upon. World governments dissolve as politicians, especially Western ones, join their former campaign contributors - "You owe me this, man!" - in their mansion-fortresses and research complexes. All civil society collapses and modern civilization disappears under a pile of high-tech rubble. Some of the wealthy holdouts inevitably succumb to the surge of raging humanity, but the rest thrive. In time, inbred communities of the descendants of CEOs, Senators, and scientists form. Having forgotten the origin of their own lines and the technologies upon which they and their estates rely, they fight a perennial war against what they consider to be subhuman savages - those on the outside. Those that are called Morlocks.

Anyway, the Department of Labor gives something shy of 40K median income for the mechanics, similar for heavy truck and tractor-trailer drivers, and under 32K for industrial truck and tractor operators. The Yahoo!! News video was unsurprisingly misleading. These jobs are, by the way, highly skilled, highly challenging, and vulnerable to automation in the medium-term.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Or, the dystopian scenario: virtually all production is automated, as well as all service, to the point that almost all consumers are out of a job and rich businessmen collaborate with researchers and engineers to maintain armies of autonomous robots on self-sufficient complexes as the ravening hordes once known as "the unemployed" claw at the gates with starving children in hand, shooting off whatever ordnance they have got their emaciated hands upon. World governments dissolve as politicians, especially Western ones, join their former campaign contributors - "You owe me this, man!" - in their mansion-fortresses and research complexes. All civil society collapses and modern civilization disappears under a pile of high-tech rubble. Some of the wealthy holdouts inevitably succumb to the surge of raging humanity, but the rest thrive. In time, inbred communities of the descendants of CEOs, Senators, and scientists form. Having forgotten the origin of their own lines and the technologies upon which they and their estates rely, they fight a perennial war against what they consider to be subhuman savages - those on the outside. Those that are called Morlocks.

Go watch the trailer for World War Z. All we need to do is make a tidal wave of millions of people and dog pile on each other to get over the wall of the elites.

I think Xiahou missed the fact where Hostess was going under because the CEOs managed to pile debt on top of a company which was making a healthy profit. The Bakers union were idiots in not taking the deal, or perhaps not.

One possibility no one has brought up is that the Bakers union purposely killed Hostess to show other companies they deal with not to mess with them. Sacrifice a few thousand for the sake of the rest. Game theory makes motivations hazy.

[Xiahou]

I think Xiahou missed the fact where Hostess was going under because the CEOs managed to pile debt on top of a company which was making a healthy profit. The Bakers union were idiots in not taking the deal, or perhaps not.

That's a bunch of baloney- try to remember that we're talking about processed deserts, not processed meats.

Ripplewood is going to lose it's ass for investing in Hostess- and I'm not shedding any tears for them, but don't perpetuate the myth that they're somehow looting the company and getting rich. The only mistake they made was investing money into a doomed business. Hostess racked up hundreds of millions of dollars in debt- but most of it was pension liabilities. The company was being squeezed by a more health conscious consumer, a bad economy, rising ingredient prices (yay ethanol!), and and extremely expensive, outdated labor structure.

The company probably should have been liquidated the first time it went bankrupt, but some misguided investors (Ripplewood) felt they could turn it around. They were wrong. As a result, employees kept their jobs a few more years, and the investor will lose millions.

Fun fact: Do you know that the Teamsters union prohibits Hostess delivery trucks from drivers being able to deliver various brands? Certain brands had to maintain separate trucks and drivers for their products. Got a half full truck of Yankee Doodles that you want to fill with Oat Bars? Tough. You need two dedicated drivers (each with their own pension) on their own trucks for that. That's insane.

Speaking of insane, look up multiemployer pension plans and try to explain to me how any employer ever thought they were a good (or even viable) idea.

[drone]

Fun fact: Do you know that the Teamsters union prohibits Hostess delivery trucks from drivers being able to deliver various brands? Certain brands had to maintain separate trucks and drivers for their products. Got a half full truck of Yankee Doodles that you want to fill with Oat Bars? Tough. You need two dedicated drivers (each with their own pension) on their own trucks for that. That's insane.

That would explain this scene then.

Realism is not completely forgotten in Hollywood.

[a completely inoffensive name]

That's a bunch of baloney- try to remember that we're talking about processed deserts, not processed meats.

Ripplewood is going to lose it's ass for investing in Hostess- and I'm not shedding any tears for them, but don't perpetuate the myth that they're somehow looting the company and getting rich. The only mistake they made was investing money into a doomed business. Hostess racked up hundreds of millions of dollars in debt- but most of it was pension liabilities. The company was being squeezed by a more health conscious consumer, a bad economy, rising ingredient prices (yay ethanol!), and and extremely expensive, outdated labor structure.

The company probably should have been liquidated the first time it went bankrupt, but some misguided investors (Ripplewood) felt they could turn it around. They were wrong. As a result, employees kept their jobs a few more years, and the investor will lose millions.

Fun fact: Do you know that the Teamsters union prohibits Hostess delivery trucks from drivers being able to deliver various brands? Certain brands had to maintain separate trucks and drivers for their products. Got a half full truck of Yankee Doodles that you want to fill with Oat Bars? Tough. You need two dedicated drivers (each with their own pension) on their own trucks for that. That's insane.

Speaking of insane, look up multiemployer pension plans and try to explain to me how any employer ever thought they were a good (or even viable) idea.

You can bring up as many little union facts of "how absurd!" quality as you wish. But the fact is that the employees had not had a raise in 10 years. The company was making a profit. How does a healthy company fail other than gross incompetence from management? You can point to outrageous pension plans, but they stopped paying into the pension plans 6 months ago, so if that was the problem it doesn't follow why they continued to spiral downwards.

EDIT: Unless I am completely missing something (the way debt and all these structures operate go over my head sometimes), I am looking at a case of cause and effect. We see the effect, and what is the cause? I don't see how it is the unions given the facts we have.

[Major Robert Dump]

When I heard news that the Twinkie would die, I gently hugged my grandbaby and told her "I am sorry you will not get to grow up in America."

The robots are coming

[Ironside]

It wouldn't have been "cost-saving" if they kept everyone on and payed them the same. Really, if you think about it, unions drive their own demise when it comes to manufacturing- they organize for increased pay and benefits until it becomes economically viable to replace them with machines... Business's aren't charities and their owners aren't obligated to drive themselves into financial ruin running unprofitable businesses.

Replacing workers with machines causes the company to fire the workers, not cut their salary.

GC, yep you're correct that the obsolete worker will be one huge issue to deal with in the future. You'll need to keep the obsolete workers content, while keeping those who really need to work from being envious.

[HoreTore]

You can bring up as many little union facts of "how absurd!" quality as you wish. But the fact is that the employees had not had a raise in 10 years. The company was making a profit. How does a healthy company fail other than gross incompetence from management? You can point to outrageous pension plans, but they stopped paying into the pension plans 6 months ago, so if that was the problem it doesn't follow why they continued to spiral downwards.

EDIT: Unless I am completely missing something (the way debt and all these structures operate go over my head sometimes), I am looking at a case of cause and effect. We see the effect, and what is the cause? I don't see how it is the unions given the facts we have.

It's a standard case of looting valuable assets. Nothing more. No intention from the owners of actually running the company, just to make off with whatever value remains.

There's nothing the unions can do about that. The only option would be to forcefully take the assets and run the company themselves, but that's not quite legal.

[Fisherking]

I heard more today on this. The employees are still hoping to come out of it with a job.

Yes management looted the company and sold it off. It happened several times. But were the looters the same as the current ownership? It has been looted and sold several times.

I don’t know who the current management is or what their role in all this comes down to.

There are still 18,500 or so employees and their families about to lose a source of income.

I think the union is also to blame as they colored the situation other than how it really was. They were more concerned about giving in and what other companies might think than they were with keeping these people employed.

In these economic times a bad job beat no job.

I think there is plenty of blame to go around and it does not matter one bit, because none of those high salaried types is losing much.

Union officials are still getting paid and the corporate types have a safety net.

[CrossLOPER]

In these economic times a bad job beat no job.

Except that management made it very clear that they were only intent on doing no more than looting company assets, which they did. The CEO spent most of his time renovating his office and raising his salary into the millions. These people are the cause of "these economic times".

[Fisherking]

Except that management made it very clear that they were only intent on doing no more than looting company assets, which they did. The CEO spent most of his time renovating his office and raising his salary into the millions. These people are the cause of "these economic times".

Did I sound like I favored management?

I didn’t.

Unfortunately I know of now means to prevent people from destroying what the own.

It is a crying same. It is the workers who lose.

So, who is the dirt bag CEO?

[a completely inoffensive name]

I am happy again.

[Papewaio]

Is the expiry date SEP (20)24 or 24th of SEP?

[a completely inoffensive name]

Is the expiry date SEP (20)24 or 24th of SEP?

24th of September. Twinkies are just as susceptible to mold and expiring as any sugary, baked good.

[Papewaio]

Except McDs buns...

[a completely inoffensive name]

Except McDs buns...

I don't even think those are bread to be honest.