The Post Modern Twinkie

You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit.
Death of a Salesman
Willy Loman, Act 2

I guess it was destiny that the Twinkie would die but then be resurrected.  It was too much of an iconic brand name that could disappear and be buried by the dust of time. Though it could be possible that a Twinkie as old as the mummified Pharaohs would still remain spongy soft and eatable.

A much more perishable commodity were the people who once made Twinkies. As Bruce Springsteen sang In My Home Town "those jobs are gone and they ain't coming back".  The new factory / bakery will be highly automated so it will take less people to make a truckload of Twinkies. The workers that have to be hired will not be unionized.  The unions that were once the portal where ordinary people could enter the middle class are now made to be the villains. It has almost become a crime to demand humane working conditions and a livable wage.

Wouldn't it wryly funny if the new Twinkie didn't sell. If working people said "no I'm not going to buy Twinkies because they're an unhealthy junk food that also undermines the American Dream". 

When does raising productivity and lowering costs go from being good business practices to being morally wrong. It like the old idea of usury, that it's morally wrong to charge excessive interest rates on a loan. I can remember a time when charging 20% interest could get you arrested. These days it's the default interest rate on many credit cards if you fall one payment behind. The old time loan sharks had a reputation for brutality but today's banks and credit card companies have the power of the courts behind them. Debts that could have been forgiven in bankruptcy are now forever attached to the person or the person's estate.

 

So the headlines read Billionaire Investors Gobble Up Twinkies: Hostess Snacks Sold For $410 Million. Apollo Global Management  and Metropoulos & Company are private equity firms that have turned around other aging brands like Chef Boyardee, Bumble Bee and Pabst Beer. I find Pabst Beer amusing because it has become the darling of frugal hipsters that like to say they can get just as drunk on Pabst at half the cost. Part of the Pabst stable of labels is Colt 45, the malt liquor that was edgy urban long before the gangsta lifestyle and the big 40 in a paper bag was hip-hop chic.

The sale of Hostess Cakes is just another small story in the business community of America. It's easy to go into a supermarket and be overwhelmed by all the names and varieties on the shelves. But this is only an illusion. Out of the thousands of items on the store shelves 90% of them are owned and controlled by ten corporations and about 40% are subsidiaries of only two - ConAgra and Kraft Foods.

Will Twinkies be the newest success story that will justify the chant of "profits uber alles". Possibly it could become the official snack cake of the Tea Party. My friend Harrison, who is reading over my shoulder, is all for that. He believes that continuously feeding Twinkies to the Tea Party is a good thing, that the Twinkies will shorten their life spans and save the government billions in Social Security benefits.  

You can look at every overweight kid as a job generator and their rights to a Ding-Dong or Ho-Ho Cupcake are forever protected.

Harrison likes the fact the resurrection of the Twinkie is just in time for Easter. He suggests a TV ad with Jesus rolling back the stone of his crypt with the golden snack cake in his hand and the tag line "worth coming back for".  Maybe that's too blatant, I'm thinking an Easter basket filled with candy. On top is a Twinkie and of course the hand of an overly cute child takes the Twinkie first.  

Other than being the perennial  punch line of a bazillion jokes, like Twinkies makes "food" a four letter word, I will not miss them or buy them. My sympathies are still with the workers who lost their jobs in this deal. For the last thirty plus years inflation has been controlled by suppressing workers wages. As production levels rose the profits off of that were passed on to the owners and not to the workers.  Now I live in a small but nice town. As nice as it is, it's still very unlikely any billionaires -or even millionaires will come here and spend their money.  The businesses that once catered to working people are disappearing. Sometimes they are being replaced by chain franchises that offer "bargain" prices by paying their workers the lowest possible wages, negotiating unfair tax abatements and collecting corporate welfare.  

In the feeding frenzy of little fish being eaten by bigger fish and the eaten by even larger fish; I wonder where is the logical conclusion of this. What is does it mean when Twinkies are more available than fresh fruit?  When virtually every prepared food product is loaded with high fructose corn syrup and breast feeding a child is treated almost as a crime... what does this say about our values?

In the sage of the Twinkie there seems to be multiple morals. If you're a worker, don't dare be like Tom Twist and ask for more. If you're an investor there looks like there's more money to wrung out of the public, here in America and now in a globalized market place.  In another few years I just waiting to hear some clueless plutocrat to say "let them eat snack cakes".  

Harrison dredged this up online. He wanted to find a connection between Jesus and Twinkies but only found a Gospel singer named Twinkie Clark.

Maybe this is the best note to end this post.