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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.
Two ways to look at things.
1) Its a shame that we now have more unemployed people. While many of them are somewhat to blame in terms of not taking the initiative and updating their own skills having a post Hostess employment plan etc, I think we can agree there were challenges as well. Society has failed structurally to provide many with the opportunities and tools to keep a viable career path open for their working lifetime.
2) This is really pretty cool. There is a lot more competition in the packaged food space than when the twinkie first graced the scene. Its also true the relative cost of the goods twinkes were originally created as a substitute for have pretty well fallen to levels where twinkie does not make a lot of sense as a replacement good in economic terms. So what we have here is a very niche product, one that could not be offered economically using last centuries technology. Thanks to labor savings and efficiency though the die hard twinkie lovers can get them, and the rest of use vary occasional twinkie consumers can know there will be on on the shelf of our local grocery! The production, supply, and distribution chain is efficient enough to give us a crazy amount of choices!
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
What would you prefer? Force the company to rehire 22000 people for 5 minutes before it goes bankrupt again? Force then to raise the price of Twinkees to $10 each so they can make money with 22000 workers? Force us all to buy these $10 Twinkees? Subsidize the company so they can afford to sell Twinkees at a huge loss?
Please let us know what the best choice is.
Assuming you don't have issues with Walmart, you may want to check out the fruit pies they are selling, two for a dollar I believe. They come in a little square box, each pie in a metal pan. Just enough for one serving. Usually multiple flavors of these things are stacked on a table somewhere in the bakery section.
The notable thing is a real award-winning pie bakery is the supplier for these things and they actually, astonishingly, taste like homemade pies. They're not frosted like the old Hostess pies but the pie itself is much better.
If you really need the Hostess style of pie, the ones made by Tastykake are good. Flowers Bakeries, the owners of Tastykake, also own Wonder Bread in the US. Flowers is known for being much more focused on quality than some other companies.
Sig for hire.
What the OP means is that if say, you learn to do something new but can't get a job because no one will hire you due to your age, that is in fact a structural problem...
Our society has a very elaborate system where you must have the right credentials from the right places - and earning those credentials typically is a very long and expensive process yet most of the knowledge taught you will not use - and be the right age, and these days you need an internship where you worked for free for a period of time for a job you had to be competitive for, and so on and so forth.
Then you do everything right and they hire an H1B by scamming the Federal government.