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Hostess Saves Twinkies By Automating, Fires 94% Of Their Workforce (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes:
Where Twinkie once employed 22,000 workers in more than 40 bakeries, their workforce is now down to just 1,170, reports the Washington Post, relying mostly on robotic arms and other forms of automation. "This 500-person plant produces more than 1 million Twinkies a day, 400 million a year. That's 80% of Hostess' total output -- output that under the old regime required 14 plants and 9,000 employees."
"We like to think of ourselves as a billion-dollar startup," Hostess chief executive Bill Toler said Tuesday, announcing that Hostess Brands, which had twice filed for bankruptcy, now plans to become a publicly-listed company valued at $2.3 billion.
"We like to think of ourselves as a billion-dollar startup," Hostess chief executive Bill Toler said Tuesday, announcing that Hostess Brands, which had twice filed for bankruptcy, now plans to become a publicly-listed company valued at $2.3 billion.
They used real cream back in the 1960's.
that's what led to bankruptcy and buyout.
They didn't fire everyone because of automation. They fired everyone because the business was grossly inefficient and bankrupt, and it happened over several years. They automated because it was the only way to compete in their market and survive as a company.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
Before Hostess filed for bankruptcy, WSJ reported the delivery of Twinkies alone was controlled by two unions. Their work rules stated: "Drivers can't help with unloading, and products like Wonder Bread and Twinkies are not allowed to ride on the same truck." As a result, a one-man job has to be split into two or more. Now the new Hostess apparently doesn't have this trouble.
The moral is, if you realize you are a dinosaur, evolve now! Otherwise, extinction is guaranteed. Labor unions are so 19 century.
While the Automation kick is an interesting angle, lets not forget what actually killed Hostess -- vulture capitalists. These are Mitt Romney style assholes who swooped in, loaded the company up with debt, then pawned it off after leeching all the money out. Somehow though, it's not embezzlement when an investment company does it.
But it gets worse. The unions that took the blame? They were having their workers give upwards of a THIRD of their paychecks just to try and save the company they helped build. And that just caused the vultures to trade the company around more and more.
So yeah, the automation is interesting, but lets not forget what brought us to this point. Vultures bought the company, embezzeled a shitload by loading on bad debt and pawning the company of as well as flat out stealing from the pension fund, and passing the buck to the next leech until they couldn't pass it any further. And now instead of having good quality Wonder Bread and tasty, if not exactly healthy, sweets like the Twinkie, we get mass produced automated crap.
The local Hostess bakery re-branded as a Franz, and the quality is really good. They also have a direct-from-the-baker storefront that you can go in and get bread at a huge discount. Oh, and they're union and pay their workers a good wage -- around $17 an hour starting.
As I said the last time this came up, no American should EVER support Union Busting. Hostess is dead to me, and besides You can clone a twinkie pretty easily, which lets you do stuff like a fresh baked chocolate twinkie with cherry filling.
Pretty much sll pre-packaged baked goods have a sweet chemical taste. It's technically food but everything is processed to hell.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
The productivity gain is 18 times given the reduction in the number of employees given. I do not suppose that the current employees earn 18 times what the old employees earned. So who did get the benefit of the 18 fold increase in productivity? Answer me that you thieving bastards.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
What is sad is the fruit pies are complete garbage now, in fact the cheap generic fruit pies actually have more fruit in them than a Hostess does. It used to be a Hostess fruit pie was the best you could get, you couldn't take a bite without just piles of fruit, now you are lucky if there is 3 pieces of fruit in the whole nasty thing, its just gross HFCS with artificial flavoring.
BTW before anybody brings up the fact that Wonder Bread is still good? A different company bought the Wonder Bread brand and they still make a quality product. I've tried all the "new Hostess" products and frankly the generic knock offs taste better, Hostess snacks now taste like overpriced cardboard and is one of those companies like Atari that lives solely to mine whatever nostalgia they can because their new products simply cannot compete with their old ones.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Yeah. And when you scope out the very chart you linked to, that same rate during the 1950s and 1960s shows that metric barely ever climbing over 60%, only starting to rise about halfway into the 1970s. It plateaued in the 1990s and has been on a gradual decline since 2002.
That big hump couldn't have anything at all to do with the baby boomer generation entering the workforce en-masse in the '70s, and now starting to retire. Nope. It's all Obama's fault. That's the ticket.
Imagine all the people...
Real cream never had the shelf life.
I was whipped sweetened lard, then it became whipped sweetened hydrogenated vegetable oil.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It's 66% of the population age 16 and above, with some minor exceptions.
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics glossary:
Labor force participation rate
The labor force as a percent of the civilian noninstitutional population.
Civilian noninstitutional population (Current Population Survey)
Included are persons 16 years of age and older residing in the 50 states and the District of Columbia who do not live in institutions (for example, correctional facilities, long-term care hospitals, and nursing homes) and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces.
It includes everyone who has retired and who lives on their own, and yes, the baby boomers have had a large effect on it. Ben Casselman at FiveThirtyEight discussed this a couple of years ago, noting that the LFPR began declining in the early 2000s. Short version: about half, maybe a little less, of the decline can be attributed to Baby Boomer retirement. Other factors, including more people in school and some people not returning to the workforce, account for the rest.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
They used real cream back in the 1960's.
Welcome to the modern era of cost-cutting, shortcuts and quick profits. Long-term strategies need not apply.
No they didn't, that was back in the 30's when the twinkie underwent a big change, and the reason they changed it was because the key ingredient of a twinkie no longer existed. They made twinkies out of actual bananas. The reason they stopped doing both bananas and cream was because both were rationed in WWII (partly due to the gross michel extinction, with the cavendish not making it to mass market quite yet, among other general supply problems that existed at the time caused them to switch to vanilla creme.) After that period, everybody's palate changed and they adapted to the new taste. Depressions tend to do that.
Even if they wanted to go back to the old taste, they couldn't. The gross michel banana is gone and it's not coming back; instead we have the cavendish now which is very bland in comparison, and even it is going to die soon because like their predecessor, all cavendish bananas are clones of one another. This MUST be the case though, because real bananas that can reproduce on their own don't have much actual fruit in them, and have seeds that are as hard as a rock and will break your teeth if you try to chew them. We might be able to resurrect the gross michel with GMO to make them more resilient to the fungus that killed them, but who knows because we can't even have golden rice because Greenpeace declared war on it.
At any rate, back in 2011 Hostess reintroduced the original twinkie (as best they could; remember, no more gross michel, so it's literally impossible for them to reproduce the original taste without adding sugar and other stuff) only nobody really bought it. People got used to the post-depression twinkie as its taste had already become so iconic over the years, and so that's what people want.
They wouldn't have this problem if the baker's union didn't decide to be dickholes back in 2012. The management wasn't bluffing; there was a big consumer craze at the time for weight loss so their sales tanked. Other pastry makers ran into similar problems but they didn't have a union making unreasonable demands that they had no choice but to follow. (Krispy Kreme had to close a lot of their restaurants, Dunkin Donuts has turned more into a coffee shop than a donut shop.)
Remember, the teamster's union saw what was going on with the market in general and chose to accept the terms offered by the management, which was a wise decision because, remember, if you price yourself out of the market, then you won't be in it anymore. But the baker's union leadership really didn't give a fuck about the jobs of their employees, and Frank Hurt, a very rich union boss (with one of those "Cadillac" health insurance plans that Obama granted special exemptions to just because he wanted to favor unions) effectively spun it as "it's all the management's fault" while he could go home still having a job while the people he supposedly represents lost theirs, all because he refused to budge in light of an obviously changing consumer mindset, and the management doesn't have the ability to change that.
People just don't buy twinkies and donuts like they did in the 90's, and it's not likely they ever will again because now people have a lot more access to information than they once did, which means they're going to make different decisions than they once did as well.
Oh I think there was plenty of greed involved, just not on the part of the factory workers: Hostess Executives got Raises While Filing for Bankruptcy
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