Obummer's America: Greedy Union Pigs May Kill Off Twinkies, Breitbart reports

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Hostess Brands has been at death's door for a while now, and the only thing that would happen if it died off is that its brands would be replaced in what markets it still has with other brands and/or the brands would be bought by other bakeries during liquidation.  Note tat I said the bands would be bought, not the bakeries.  The slim profit margins and overcapacity in the bakery industry essentially means that these workers have killed off their jobs.  It might take a few months for the new owners to start distributing the brands from their own existing facilities, but the Twinkie will endure.  So will Wonder Bread, especially if Bimbo, which already owns the Wonder trademark in Mexico, buys the US rights to the name.  I just hope Zingers survive.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Anyway, it's official.  Hostess Brands is closing down and entering liquidation.  If the unions thought management were bluffing here, they were sadly mistaken.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/16/news/companies/hostess-closing/

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[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Conservative bloggers were more likely to be eating Little Debbies anyway.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Put a poll up on Off-topic as to which product people will miss most.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

The company likely wants to kill the union, and they gave them an offer they had to refuse. Now they'll just liquidate, the owners and shareholders will get richer, and someone else will pick it up with a chance to be non-union. Got to love the USA.

Actually, it probably was a case of the management wanting to kill the company.  Hostess Brands corporate and labor structure was riddled with tons of inefficiency because it was created from buying up various smaller bakeries and consolidating them.  That's why they had twelve different unions to deal with and multiple legacy benefit systems.  Plus the facilities in many cases were antiquated.  Few, if any, of the bakeries they ran will be reopening even after the assets are sold, and the same with the distribution centers.  There is sufficient spare capacity elsewhere for whoever buys the brands to start making the products without reopening the facilities Hostess used.

Even if management had killed the unions, they still would have had the infrastructure problems.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Not really.  The bankruptcy judge wasn't willing to sign off on the bonuses to the management to keep them around for the dissolving of assets just yet.  (Why the heck they should be kept around for that eludes me.)  And so he forced them to a last-ditch mediation that I expect to go nowhere.  Hostess Brands is worth more dead than alive.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Not really.  The bankruptcy judge wasn't willing to sign off on the bonuses to the management to keep them around for the dissolving of assets just yet.  (Why the heck they should be kept around for that eludes me.)

Someone has to manage selling the assets off, ensuring that bakeries and whatnot are closed down and waste disposed of properly, etc. I imagine it may be more efficient to have the people who actually know about Hostess's operations to do it than hire outsiders and have to train them. It also may be hard to find people willing to do the job in the first place - it's not a job with long term prospects, after all.

There's little evidence that the current management has done much of anything properly.  There are people and firms who specialize in handling bankruptcy liquidations.  If they were still trying to do a reorganization, I could see the point in trying to keep around some of the old management, but since they are now in liquidation (delayed a couple days), I say go ahead and liquidate the current useless management as well.