http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/1...n_2145851.html
Comments:
"Realistically the reason Hostess failed is down to one thing:
products of poor nutritional quality, made with poorly-selected
ingredients, and to poor recipes. Many decades ago they might have cut
it because the buying public wasn't conscious of nutrition and mass-
produced foods seemed somehow "futuristic", but they didn't grow with
the times, and now seem bland and uninspired.
Hostess' products had little differentiation beyond color and shape.
They shared same texture, and barring the addition of a coating here
or a jam / cream layer there, the same bland, overly sweet flavor and
greasy mouth feel. They were to food what supermarket sheet cakes are
to a home-baked cake: almost totally unrelated.
And the slight additions to the basic formula like "chocolate"
coatings or creams bore essentially no relationship to their claimed
ingredients. I don't think anybody believed the waxy coating of a Ding
Dong the or artificially-flavored "chocolate creme" filling of a
Twinkie bore even the most slender relationship to real chocolate. The
same is true of the other additions; the "jams" were artificially
flavored corn syrups, the "creams" had never been near a dairy product
in their lives, and so on.
The products, in a word, were junk. And that is what sank the company.
Not CEO pay, not union demands, not anything else -- just a simple and
fundamental failure to provide what the public wanted: food that was
actually tasty.
Goodbye, Hostess. It's a shame about the lost jobs, but most won't
miss you. "
"The CEO tripled his own pay and the execs pay went up too, knowing
full well they wouldnt be able to pay for the pensions of the union
workers. It was vulture capitalism. "
"When I first heard the story I blamed the unions. But looking closer
at the story: top management took 80% pay increase this year, and the
ceo's salary was raised from 750k to 2.25 million / year, while the
company was going through bankruptcy and the workers had gone through
a round of paycuts / concessions. This is the kind of hypocrisy
today's vulture capitalism and the likes of Bain Capital and Romney
represents."
"This is exactly the kind of things Romney's Bain did... harvest
companies value i.e, take over a company, make them go into debt,
extract the cash to Bain...
Bain would get free money from banks while the company goes BK.
Remember his advise about GM? Make the workers take the hit for bad
management. No regard to the community.
But of course, folks getting $200 a month on food stamps... they are
the takers!
HYPOCRISY which, for any Christians who know their Bible, offended
Christ more then anything.
Hostess going BK was the plan people, either way the workers were
going to take the hit. "
"Now investors will come along and buy the brand. Hostess products
will live on, but made by non-union workers, probably very low-paid
illegal immigrants in right-to-work states or perhaps in Mexico. RIP
baker's union"
"They filed for chapter 11 in 2004. It took them almost 5 years to
restructure, form that filing they gained concessions from the
workforce but NOT from management. In the meantime, the American
appetite for fatty, sugar infused unhealthy snacks subsided quite a
bit. Other competitors adjusted more quickly, Hostess did not. That is
classic mismanagement. "
"... what’s happening with Hostess Brands is a microcosm of what’s
wrong with America, as Bain-style Wall Street vultures make themselves
rich by making America poor. Crony capitalism and consistently poor
management drove Hostess into the ground, but its workers are paying
the price. "
"The ultimate goal of private equity firms is not to return companies
to profitability and eek out meager profits year after year. It's to
maximize their ROI, which generally means saddling a company with
debt, bankrupting it, and breaking it up for profit. Equity firms do
this again, and again, and again, and yet the public still hasn't
caught on to the scheme. In other words, regardless of whether or not
the bakers union accepted the contract terms, the end result
ultimately would have been the same anyway. That is evident thanks to
previous filings from Hostess where it made it clear it intended to
move to a BK and that it intended to shut down factories, and by the
report from the mayor of St. Louis that he was told months ago by
Hostess that the factory there would be closing.
The strike simply makes the unions a convenient scapegoat and
conservative talking point, because conservative dittoheads will not
look beyond the union to see what actually has occurred at the company
over the past few years to get to the real reasons for it's demise."