Look fairly similar...
Posted on 11/18/2012 7:51:43 AM PST by jdsteel
I went to buy some Ho Ho’s but they were gone, and so was a part of America.
When I heard that Hostess was declaring bankruptcy it made me sad. Probably not as sad at the 18,000 people that used to work for them but it did affect me.
Oh, I knew that I was partly to blame. When I was a child I would gobble down Ho Ho’s and chocolate cupcakes with abandon. I could burn through a half of a box of Ho Ho’s and a half gallon of Vitamin D milk in about 15 minutes. My elementary school lunches were almost always peanut butter sandwiches made with Wonder Bread. I was a happy repeat customer even if my mom was the one that did the buying. Now, like most baby boomers I try to keep sweets, fat and carbohydrates to a minimum. Pasta is a guilty pleasure and the snacks made by Hostess just aren’t worth the extra time on the treadmill to me. I am sure that I am not alone with these changes to my life and my diet.
Still, when I heard the last straws that broke the back of the once mighty Hostess were the deadly combination of unions and Obamacare I decided to buy one last box of Ho Ho’s for old time’s sake. So off I went to my local Giant Eagle, the largest supermarket in my suburb of Pittsburgh.
By the time I got to the grocery store the shelves that once held Hostess products were laid bare. All that were left were a few sad looking Sno Balls. Gone were the Ho Ho’s, the Ding Dongs, the Donettes. Gone were the Dolly Madison cakes and yes, gone were the Twinkies.
A woman standing beside me in the grocery aisle turned to me and said “I can’t understand the people that blame our current President for Hostess’s problems. Twinkies are so good I can’t believe some other company won’t start to make them”.
I looked at her and said “Hostess said that if they were to survive the costs of Obamacare the unions would have to renegotiate their contracts, and they wouldn’t do it. So they are shutting it down. For 10 years after the steel mills closed here in Pittsburgh I kept hearing about how the mills were coming back and so were all of those jobs. Guess what; they didn’t”.
I had gone to the store to buy some Ho Ho’s but they were gone, and so was a part of America.
What are the political affiliations of Brian Driscoll and Rayburn, the past two CEO’s of Hostess? Are they part of Obama’s plan to raid and destroy businesses and assets? Are they just predatory CEO’s that raid dying corporations? Driscoll is now at Diamond Foods whose stock has plummeted since Mar 2012 and is now worth half of what it was then.
Loocal media is reporting that the closing was a complete surprise to workers and they were sent home mid-shift.
My God...you just brought back one of my very fondest memories of my Dad.He had long been widowed and as he approached 80 he started to decline mentally so he spent the last 8 years of his life in my home.He was a serious junk food junkie...his favorite junk food being Hostess cupcakes.I have pictures of him,after he got into a newly purchased box,his face covered in chocolate with that big grin of his on his face.I'm starting to tear up right now thinking about it.Thanks for the memory!
I understand there is interest in the Hostess brand. Some other companies might be producing Hostess products.
There is hope. :)
After my grandmother’s sudden died, my grandfather was forced to move in with my parents. He was dying from leukemia, but my mother couldn’t bring herself to put him in a nursing home and he was unwilling to have a private nurse live with him. Every few days she had to drive him all over the region in search of those peach pies made by Hostess. The apple and cherry were ubiquitous, but the peach were hard to come by. Whenever she found a supply she would buy the entire stock. For whatever reason those Hostess peach pies were one of the few things in this world he still enjoyed.
I should have been more clear...those union punks who *called* the strike...the baker's union leadership,I guess....and the workers who stayed on strike *to the end*...are the ones I'm talking about,nobody else.
Pssst, jds....limiting carbs and sugar is certainly healthy, but you need good fats. Don't keep them to a minimum.
A Freeper posted that Little Debbie Cloud Cakes are that brand’s version of Twinkies. If you’re a Twinkie fan, maybe you’ll find those a decent replacement.
snipAccording to the Christian Science Monitor, while food producers ConAgra and Flowers Food, the American company behind Nature Valley granola, have expressed interest along with Little Debbie baker McKee Foods, Mexico’s Grupo Bimbo may hold the inside track.
Grupo Bimbo is the world’s largest bread baking firm, which already owns parts of Sara Lee, Entenmann’s and Thomas English Muffins and previously made what was considered a low-ball offer of $580 million a few years ago, Forbes reports. Now Hostess may only be worth $135 million.
Economists say high sugar prices tied to US trade tariffs were a big reason Hostess was struggling, but a Mexican company could be a lifeline for Twinkies because it would be able to take advantage of access to lower-priced sugar in Mexico.
While Hostess was clearly struggling, analysts believed Grupo Bimbo had an eye on them since the early 2000′s because they saw Hostess as a key ingredient for North American expansion with delivery routes that penetrated across the country into convenience stores, gas stations and grocery markets, according to Forbes.
end snip
A free bong in every case of Ding Dongs!
Well, get used to it. More and more of what we have come to expect in our stores is going to be “gone.” As time goes on, this contagion will spread.
I notice that in a LOT of stores, there just isn’t the selection there used to be ...of anything.
I remember visiting East Germany back at the time the wall fell. (hubby was stationed in Germany at the time). There was a store with ONE set of dishes in the window. That was IT. Just one set.
This is communism, folks ...this is what it does. Freedom, choices, competition....there will be none of it. You will bust your butt for very little in return, and will “accept” what “they” give you.
They were turning out junk and I was one of many that said it was junk.
There was nothing unusual in getting a 25% reject rate on oilfield pipe coming from American mills.
Japanese pipe was less than 1% reject rate.
The risk of junk being put downhole and getting a blowout was just getting too high.
Thanks .... I’ll have to check them out! Twinkies were a rare treat, but it was still depressing to think they didn’t exist any more.
Look fairly similar...
I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
But something touched me deep inside
The day the Twinkie died
So
[Chorus]
Bye, bye Hostess Apple Pie...
Those are the ones! Thank you.
Off to the HTML sandbox...I really need to be able to post pics.
Right out of engineering school, I took a field service job starting up power plants. On one job in Arizona, I needed to make a very simple adjustment to a coal pulverizer. I picked up a wrench and nearly shut the entire plant down with the unions going nuts. That simple 10 minute job that would have cost $10 if I did the work took SEVEN trades a total of three hours — probably $1,000 or more. Then there were the electricians in Longview, WA who proudly called themselves the “FLEs” — Fat Lazy Electricians. They could featherbed a job at the tail end like nothing I’d ever seen. You couldn’t get them off the job.
Five years in field service gave me a lifetime of education about unions.
We managed to get some chocolate donuts for Sunday School. Everything else was gone.
Tears with you! We were lucky to have them in our lives so long. Sadly for me my mom died at age 44 and my dad at 68. I hope I get my Great Grams “genes”!! Other then the broken hips she was so strong healthwise until the very end.
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