Twinkie Offense

(Editorial cartoon by Joel Heller for the Green Bay Press-Gazette and featured at Ladysmith News.  Click on image to enlarge and then buzz on back.)

I must admit that I've been amused by all the reminiscing about Twinkies the past couple of weeks.  Oh, I've had a few in my youth, but I don't recall actually eating one in the last 45 years or so.  When I was  attending a small Mid-Western college, the English majors would gather in the school coffee shop ("The Pit"), take over several tables, and engage in "Twinkie Punching," an activity that involved buying a couple of packages of the delectable dessert, placing them in the center of the tables, and bringing our fists down on the packages to see if we could get the cream filling to escape the packages.  A juvenile activity?  Of course, but we didn't actually eat the product.

What I have not been amused by is the news reports on the demise of the Hostess Company via bankruptcy (the second in less than ten years), all of which linked the company's failure to the unions involved.  Michael Hiltzig was just as unamused as I am.  Here's some of what he had to say in his latest column.

Let's get a few things clear. Hostess didn't fail for any of the reasons you've been fed. It didn't fail because Americans demanded more healthful food than its Twinkies and Ho-Hos snack cakes. It didn't fail because its unions wanted it to die.

It failed because the people that ran it had no idea what they were doing. Every other excuse is just an attempt by the guilty to blame someone else. ...

Hostess management's efforts to blame union intransigence for the company's collapse persisted right through to the Thanksgiving eve press release announcing Hostess' liquidation, when it cited a nationwide strike by bakery workers that "crippled its operations."

That overlooks the years of union givebacks and management bad faith. Example: Just before declaring bankruptcy for the second time in eight years Jan. 11, Hostess trebled the compensation of then-Chief Executive Brian Driscoll and raised other executives' pay up to twofold. At the same time, the company was demanding lower wages from workers and stiffing employee pension funds of $8 million a month in payment obligations. ...

The company had known for a decade or more that its market was changing, but had done nothing to modernize its product line or distribution system. Its trucks were breaking down. It was keeping unprofitable stores open and having trouble figuring out how to move inventory to customers and when. It had cut back advertising and marketing to the point where it was barely communicating with customers. It had gotten hundreds of millions of dollars in concessions from its unions, and spent none of it on these essential improvements. ...

As management experts such as Peter Drucker have observed, the goal of a successful business must be to find and serve customers. Do that, and the numbers take care of themselves. The Hostess approach was entirely backward — meeting the numbers became Job One, and figuring out how to grow the business became Job None.   [Emphasis added]

In other words, the executives and owners had squeezed out just about every last dollar they could from the company and decided to shut it down, blaming the unions for the problems.  Shades of Bain! 

Hiltzig goes into greater detail with respect to the dealings with the unions and with the other shenanigans of the company's leaders, and his column is worth reading in its entirety.

It's just a shame that most of the rest of the mainstream media decided to take the easy way out and report the news based on the company's blast faxes.  As far as most Americans can tell, this is just one more case of the unions over reaching. 

And that really pisses me off.