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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.
As if the taste was any better before.
They are all walking my neighborhood playing Pokenmon Go. Every freaking one of them.
But really, 22,000 humans making Twinkies and Ding Dongs is a major waste of humanity. I could justify having like 13,500 making Snowballs, cuzz those rocked.
I get really strange results in 2016 when I Google twinkie, snowball, ding dong, and cupcake. Mom!!!!!
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
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)
Thanks for the info, i will now boycott all hostess products. Twinkies suck anyways lol haven't eaten one in 20 years.
Go ahead and eat one of those still left in your pantry, 1996 was a good year for twinkies.
You do realise that the computer you're using is mostly made via automated processes, don't you? Are you going to boycott that as well?
If you're going to boycott everything that's made by a machine you're going to find yourself living in a cave and reverting to a hunter scavenger state.
Automation poses a lot of challenges for our society, but employing people just to give them something to do is not the answer. Personally I think we should reduce the standard working week by one hour per year until we reach a 20 hour standard week. That would allow society to adapt to the changes progressively over the period of a couple of decades while ensuring there are enough jobs for those who have been left unemployed due to automation.
To be fair, the teamsters were making concessions, while the baker's union was playing hardball. IIRC it got to the point where the teamsters were actually complaining about the other union, which is pretty unusual.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
What's passed along is the cost of supporting the thousands of unemployed.
The old company went belly up, so those jobs were gone anyway. This is a new company and new hires, so nobody is "passing along" anything.
Even if that weren't the case and this had been accomplished by restructuring the old company, that's still good. Productivity gains are achieved by getting the same or more output using fewer resources.
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.
I don't get this attitude that Unions destroy everything, was management sitting on their hands. Looking into shenanigans of management.
The raises management gave themselves right before the bankruptcy
Brian Driscoll, CEO, around $750,000 to $2,550,000
Gary Wandschneider, EVP, $500,000 to $900,000
John Stewart, EVP, $400,000 to $700,000
David Loeser, EVP, $375,000 to $656,256
Kent Magill, EVP, $375,000 to $656,256
Richard Seban, EVP, $375,000 to $656,256
John Akeson, SVP, $300,000 to $480,000
Steven Birgfeld, SVP, $240,000 to $360,000
Martha Ross, SVP, $240,000 to $360,000
Rob Kissick, SVP, $182,000 to $273,008
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.
I do not suppose that the current employees earn 18 times what the old employees earned.
Of course not. Productivity gains don't stay concentrated in one company, they are spread through society. Overall, American productivity has improved by a factor of 20 since the late 1800s. So has the average worker seen their standard of living improved by that much? Yes, mostly they have. Improvements in productivity not only improve living standards, they are the ONLY thing that improves living standards.
If you really feel otherwise, then you can go live in a country that has not seen productivity improvements. Somalia, Ethiopia, Congo, and Afghanistan are good choices. None of those have greedy rich people suppressing the workers by investing in capital to make them more productive.
"They used real cream back in the 1960's."
Hardly. I ate a few from the early sixties yesterday, and they tasted just like the 'new' ones.
So it's society's responsibility when it's a matter of deference to business friendliness, but it's the fault of individual when they can't second-guess the desires of employers?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Less than that, even. You forgot the 7+% for employer's part of FICA and Medicare. You forgot whatever unemployment insurance costs in the states of operation. You forgot whatever the employer's portion of various health insurance or other benefits. Taking the general rule of thumb that employer costs are 1.25 to 1.5 times the salary, That $6.3M is only 120 to 144 jobs at $35k- so significantly fewer than your estimate even.
I think most of the complaints about executive salaries aren't really because that money could be used to pay employees more or pay more employees, because those numbers don't really add up; I think the complaint is more just in order of magnitude - 10 times might be palatable, but someone making 100 times the salary of another means that person earns effectively an entire lifetime of the lower salary in a single year.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
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.
You can't say that for certain. Running machines requires skilled labor to maintain and program them. Pulling trays out of an oven all day doesn't. Programming and maintenance skills have a higher value, not to mention that the employee generates more revenue per hour than the manual laborer.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
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
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
True, but there's a bit more to the story.
What drove Hostess into the bankruptcy in the first place was bad management, lack of investment into their plants, etc., you know the usual. That management squeezed what they could out of the company, took their bonuses, and left the sinking ship.
They then brought in a new CEO, and he put out plan to right the ship. That included pay freezes/cuts. Two of the unions agreed to the new contract, and one of them double-checked the numbers, and they agreed management was not lying about this being needed.
One union refused. The union leaders recommend to their members to let the company go bankrupt, go to auction, and then the new owners would give them a better contract. Now, it should have been obvious that the new owners are likely going to be company in the same business, and like any merger, a ton of jobs would be lost. Indeed, that was the first thing that happened, where 2/3 of the plants were closed. These were well-paying jobs too, not something you can find baking just anywhere.
In conclusion, irresponsible management drove Hostress to the brink, and that one stupid union put the final nail in the coffin.
It sucks to be in the path of progress; that's why we have welfare. Unemployment is transitional, and it sucks to lose your job and wonder if you're going to spend 5 months or 5 years trying to find a new one; at the same time, unemployment tends to stay in the 4%-8% range, and 5% unemployment means either you or someone else is that guy wondering about where you're getting your next paycheck.
The difference is whether you stay in your comfortable seat and we all stay as poor as we are, or you get moved out of your comfortable seat and the other 95% of society enjoys growing wealth. The middle-class get to buy more toys (e.g. computers, cell phones, the things that made your programming job worth $144k/year in the first place); the poor get to eat more frequently, and maybe get access to medical care; you get to look for a new job, and a highly-wealthy society can supply better welfare to keep you from ending up as a beggar on the street with no job and no food while you do that. Probably less-good for you than not losing your job, but a lot better for everyone else at that moment, and better for *everyone* over time.
You would be wearing a loincloth and hunting in the wilderness right now, probably ill, with no healthcare and the constant uncertainty of where your next meal is coming from, if we didn't progress in this way. Your comfortable life today is built on the cycle of technical unemployment.
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