Hostess and Me

A small break from the Disney stuff to lament the passing of Hostess Bakeries, makers of Twinkies, Cup Cakes, Fruit Pies, Ding-Dongs, and many other bakery treats. Oh, yes, they made Wonder Bread too.

The company fell on its own sword this week, giving itself up in bankruptcy after being crippled by a strike where its workers said they just can't afford to give up any more. There's probably no winners here but you have to wonder why a company and its leadership would just give up and shut its doors. Something tells me there is some sort of financial shenanigans going on here - a common practice in today's business world.

I grew up on Hostess products. I grew up in San Francisco, a city littered with corner stores supplying grocery needs to neighborhoods. Some of my earliest childhood memories have me going to the corner store for my mom to pick up the essentials - 2 quarts of milk (a half gallon was just too large of a container for little kids hands), a loaf of bread (Wonder of course), and maybe a couple of rolls of toilet paper. If it was in our budget, sometimes she said I could also get cup cakes or a fruit pie for my lunch the next day or perhaps just as a sack. Those words were golden to me - Hostess cup cakes or a berry pie (sorry, never cared much for Twinkies).

Back then, cup cakes or Twinkies cost 12 or 13 cents. A fruit pie was more, all the way up to 15 cents. And trust me, they tasted much better than what Hostess was putting on supermarket shelves up till a few days ago. Through the years and decades, my Hostess treat of choice was always a berry pie. I think they stopped making berry pies some time back. Haven't seen one for a long time. Probably got to be too expensive or the artificial flavoring that they pack into all the products now just couldn't cut it.

And its funny, I would meet various people through the years who thought the same thing I did when I entered a supermarket, corner store, or even a gas station - "I feel like having a Hostess berry pie today"

But that's all gone now. Or is it? Something tells me you haven't seen the last of Hostess. They name itself is worth a ton of money. A Hostess company will probably resurface sometime in the future making inferior products with cheaper labor. That's kind of how it works.