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The Glorious Return of the Twinkie
iggymanz writes "The geek food staple the Twinkie is coming back. The sturdy main component of the foundation to the geek four food groups of sugar, fat, caffeine and bacon — with rumored shelf life on the order of the time span to cool a white dwarf to room temperature — the Twinkie, along with Ding-Dongs, Ho-Ho's and Cupcakes, will be returning 15 July 2013 to the shelves under new management of Apollo Global Management and C. Dean Metropoulous & Co which paid over 400 mega dollars (U.S.) for the brands."
Are they like regular dollars with superpowers?
"Make it idiot proof, and someone will make a better idiot."
with rumored shelf life on the order of the time span to cool a white dwarf to room temperature
From the AP:
During bankruptcy proceedings, Hostess had said that its overall sales had been declining, although the company didn't give a breakout on the performance of individual brands. But Seban is confident Twinkies will have staying power beyond its re-launch.
As for the literal shelf-life, Seban is quick to refute the snack cake's fabled indestructibility.
"Forty-five days - that's it," he said. "They don't last forever."
The geek food staple the Twinkie is coming back.
Ok, show of hands. Who among you has actually consumed a twinkie after grade school? Last one I had was during the Reagan administration. Obviously they sell but I cannot recall the last time I saw anyone actually eat one. It's like the National Enquirer of foods. They apparently sell lots but you never actually see anyone buying them.
I don't really know any geeks who eat twinkies either. Is this a thing in some part of the country? I know some geeks who are overly fond of sugary treats (I'm one) but twinkies never seem to be in the shopping cart.
Mayor Bloomberg, is that you?
The USA public may have been sad at the thought of a Twinkies shortage, but the Secret Shadow Government engineered this re-booting of production for one reason. They know we need massive stores of Twinkies to sustain our brave zombie-killers in the upcoming Zombie Apocalypse.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Could you not just write "Bazinga! 42! All Your Base!! xD!" instead?
If anything, the Twinkie is the food staple to those who are too nostalgic or stupid to know to buy ANYTHING ELSE.
The sturdy main component of the foundation to the geek four food groups of sugar, fat, caffeine and bacon
Ugh. I feel ashamed this is in the summary.
No-one eats them. Why do you think the company went bankrupt?
They sold 36 million of them in 2011. That's a lot of twinkies if "no-one" is eating them. I just can't figure out who.
Why do you think the company went bankrupt?
They went bankrupt because their (union) labor costs, pension costs and debt load. Incompetent management probably played a role somewhere in there too. They had significant revenue but their costs were out of line with the amount of revenue.
I honestly have not noticed that until just right now.
Oh man I need a minute to digest this.
The reason that Hostess went under is that management refused to play nice with their unionized workforce, and they decided that they'd rather have no company than a union shop. Now that the union is busted, they've restarted production with a non-unionized workforce, "generously" allowing those workers to return to their old jobs at about 1/3 what they were paid before.
And if you're wondering which side to blame: Before the strike that ended Hostess, there were a couple rounds of the union taking pay and benefit cuts followed by management giving themselves bonuses for convincing the union to accept the cuts. That's why the union didn't buy the "but if you don't take the cuts, the company will go under" argument.
I am officially gone from
This is another case of corporate S.O.P: declare bankruptcy for one reason; to void any and all obligations to current - and especially - retired employees.
So as you gorge on your new Twinkiees, try to ignore that no doubt they were made by newly or re-hired workers from the now-permanent underclass: longer hours, lower wages, little or no benefits, and laughable health insurance.
Not that much of this will matter to the increasingly Randian crowd on Slashdot.
Twinkies and other processed foods aren't the problem. One Twinkies a week isn't likely to make a person gain weight, unless they're taking in exactly the number of calories that they're burning.
The problem is that people aren't moving enough and are eating too much. The fact that Twinkies are effectively just a source of calories without any redeeming value doesn't really factor into it.
I remember having a Twinkie once, and it was one of the most disgusting "foods" I've ever eaten. And I've eaten spiders, scorpions and tripe.
It seems wrong that a brand discontinued by its owner should sell for $400 million.
Perhaps I just don't understand the consumer business.
Maybe that's why I'm a hardware designer...
It's not really the consumer business, it's the corporate chop-shop/knacker business.
"Hostess Brands" has reasonably strong product lines and revenue; but it was having trouble with those pesky 'employees' who wanted 'the wages and benefits specified in their contracts', like some kind of parasitic commies or something. Some of them even had the temerity to suggest that demanding that they take major cuts when the 'Chief restructuring officer' and other higher ups had received 80% raises was a show of rather bad faith.
By chopping up the company for parts, the various brands, which are valuable, can be divorced from any "legacy pension and medical benefit obligations and restrictive work rules"(as the company describes them, in the self-pitying tones of one who has conveniently forgotten agreeing to them...) and turned into sweet, sweet cash, any facilities worth keeping can be sold off, and operations and creditors who actually matter can continue as normal. (Thanks to a little strategic-under-funding of the pension plan, American taxpayers will get to do their part to ensure that real creditors come out unscathed.
The reason they are known to have a long shelf life is because they use banana cream instead of dairy cream, giving them a comparatively longer shelf life.
They have used vanilla cream instead of banana cream since around WWII when there was a banana shortage.
The union took cuts twice, and each time management gave themselves huge bonuses (million +), . SO after that, why would the union cut yet again?
The union played a game of chicken with management and lost. I think it is clear the management was incompetent (and greedy) but apparently so was the union. The company had already been through bankruptcy once before. The union leadership BADLY misread the strength of their position and it cost a lot of people their jobs.
I think the negotiation went something like this.
Mgt: We need wage concessions, etc.
Union: We're going on strike
Mgt: We're going to liquidate the company if you do that
Union: You're a bunch of liars and poopyheads
Mgt: We warned you
Mgt takes company into Chapter 7
Union: Oh shit, they weren't kidding.
Mgt: Let's pay our selves some handsome bonuses before this thing completely goes under [/evil cackle]
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Same great product! Without that heavy union after-taste.
At least they didn't say 390.625 Mebidollars.
The kilometer was 1/10000 of 90 degrees of latitude. Which of course was for less natural for navigation than the nautical mile, which was 1 minute of latitude. The metric system is just a relic of the days when calculations were done on paper, and needs to be abandoned in favor of the One True System of measure: the Furlong-Firkin-Fortnight system!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I've got MOD points but I can't let this slide. The management was very, very competent. It's just they were after something other than a successful company. To wit: The Pension Fund. The hard part about stealing a pension fund is doing it legally. It requires enormous skill, business and legal knowledge to do it.
What Hostess' management did wasn't just mismanagement, it was a complete lack of management. The bought the company, paid themselves just well enough to stay within the bounds of legality, and then ignored the company entirely. They put no effort into expanding, into controlling and managing the supply chain, or into anything else. Then they sat back, waiting for the company to die and used the pension to pay back the creditors they'd racked up debt with.
The last part that makes it all nice and legal is when a judge ruled that the creditors get paid before employees do. If you paid your own cash money into your pension while working at Hostess you literally got robbed. As an added bonus they killed a major Union without any bad press.
But nobody talks about that. All they talk about is playing an imaginary game of chicken. FYI: You can't win a game that the other side isn't really playing.
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