Stop making stuff up. Hostess is going under due to corporate and union greed. Nothing more, nothing less. Please people, just read the history of Hostess that you can find through that thing, oh I think it’s called Google?
I spent about an hour or so last night researching Hostess’s internal problems that caused the downfall, a history that has spanned for more than a decade and none of those issues has anything to do with our government; in fact their problems have spanned over the rein of 3 Presidents so why skip the other two Presidents and just blame it on Obama? Hard to believe I know! I went into an entire discussion with this guy who I kept trying to tell him the same thing but he was so hellbent on it being “Obama’s fault” that he was trying to convince me that a union supporting Obama, foreign policy, the “Muslim brotherhood”, Hamas and Israel caused the downfall of the Twinkie. I can’t believe that there are people in this country that actually believe that.
But for those who are too lazy to Google it but keep spreading misinformation about it that Obamacare or Obama in general had to do with it, I’ll give you a really brief synopsis of why Hostess went down like a HoHo.
Hostess had filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and then again earlier this year 2012 and had already accumulated more than $1 billion in debt to its employees alone, not even including other debts & costs of production and just staying in business, while hostess only makes $2.5 billion. How can any business stay at full capacity while about half their revenue is nothing but debt; 97% of Hostess’ debt was nothing but employee and union related money. But the CEO wasted no time giving himself a raise from $750k to more than $2.5million and his cronies from $330k to $660k a year for no reason at all. My guess is that once they saw the company had no way to recover, they cashed out with no intentions of reviving the company and that’s why they never met any of the union’s demands on the contract because they were letting the company die. Hostess wanted the employees to work more hours, with less pay, and the whole nine-yards, so you see Hostess workers were kind of pushed into a corner to strike. Meanwhile the union was doing dirt of their own, sucking the company dry probably with insane rates of raises, pensions, retirement plans, and benefits and then an untimely decision to strike when the company was already hurting. I’ve worked at a job with a union before so it would not surprise me at all that Hostess workers were getting overpaid and the company didn’t have the money to pay them as a result of not only of corporate corruption and the union, but also slack sales.
Slack sales resulted from people just not buying their products anymore along with too much competition that they couldn’t match up to, plain and simple. I mean think about it, when’s the last time you have even bought a Hostess product? I haven’t had one probably since I was a kid more than 15 years ago. Even so the grocery stores here don’t even carry Hostess products anyway. There’s just no market for them. People have stopped eating white bread in fact there have been entire documentaries about how Hostess White Wonder Bread is bad for you and contributes to child obesity so naturally people are not going to buy it anymore. More Americans are eating healthy and there is nothing healthy about any of their products. They did try a low calorie snack but 1 healthy snack when the other 99% of them are junk food isn’t helping much. Also, since the company was near bankrupt, they couldn’t afford the technology to research on how to make healthier snacks.
So people there is no government conspiracy against the Twinkie. It sounds to me that both Hostess and the union took advantage of the employees, knowing full well the company was a sinking ship and tried to take the money and run, although Hostess themselves were the real culprits and the union got stuck with the baggage but they probably could have found another method of negotiation if both sides had not tried to prove their points. It’s a sad story about power on both sides. The executives get paid anyway. The union gets paid anyway. And the lucrative Hostess items like Twinkie and Wonder Bread are likely to get bought by another company anyway so they will live too. The only sad ending to this story is to the employees because now 18,500 of them are now out of a job in an already unstable economy.
Nowhere in this story does Obama fit in and even if Romney had been elected, the same thing would have happened. So please people stop grasping for straws.