Let me tell you a story about a snack cake. One that may be overlooked.
Like a million or more others in America, I grew up with Twinkies and other
Hostess snack cakes in my household. They were as abundant in my ‘hood
as bodegas and storefront churches. But for those of us who grew up in the
Southeast part of Queens, you could also get your Hostess snack cakes AND
Wonder Bread from the Hostess Bakery Outlet right on Douglas Avenue by
the National Guard Armory. Every so often we’d go there and get bread for
the house, and a box of Twinkies or Cupcakes. My grandmother and two of
my aunts lived a few blocks away off the Ave. You couldn’t miss the building,
huddled up against the elevated tracks of the Long Island Railroad above it,
no neon, beckoning with bright sales posters. It’s a part of my childhood like
many other things. Most of all, I remember all the folks that worked there.
Some of them from the same immediate neighborhood. So the news that
Hostess Brands is closing its doors and shutting down on Friday hit me in a
way I didn’t expect.
Sure, I’ve joked about it. I’ve seen the obituary of Huffington Post and had a
chuckle or two. Some folks have cited ‘Zombieland’ again and again. Others
are circulating memes of Hostess cakes in different stages of burial. And yet
others wanting to snap on people for lamenting the loss of a junk food brand.
But all of them don’t see the real side of it. Hostess decided to close and in turn,
liquidate its assets. A process that closes 33 bakeries, 555 distribution centers
and leaves 18,000 people out of a job in these hard times 6 days before
Thanksgiving. Hostess made this decision claiming they could not survive a
prolonged strike by unionized workers. Some would blame the unions for this,
but it’s hard to do so given that Hostess filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2004
and managed to come back. And in the process, the CEO at the time gave himself
a 300% RAISE along with raising the pay of 9 other executives as this was going
down. All of this while stopping payments to the pension of employees, owing them
160 million dollars. It’s another case of the rich getting richer while the poor get
their crumbs snatched. Even if they sell to another company, those people won’t
get their jobs back. And those execs in place will probably keep their salaries.
It’s a story that’s well known around these parts, and somehow not surprising. I
remember 2004 when Hostess was on the brink. Folks got worried because the
Hostess outlets actually were a good alternative to get bread at a cost that wouldn’t
dent their pockets too much. There’s some who’ll front like they didn’t get down
with Wonder Bread or Nature’s Pride in their house, but we all know better. When
there were no shutdowns, people kept buying from there. The saddest thing about
Hostess shouldn’t be that people lost a brand that made their favorite snack cakes.
The saddest thing is that Hostess is another age-old company that bought into the
‘greed is good’ mentality at the top of the corpoate ladder and in the process, means
it caused its own demise with the only victors being the private equity investors who
took over. Think about that while trying to make a killing on eBay with those boxes
of Ding Dongs you were saving for a rainy day.