Hostess Brands Says It Will Liquidate

[Razgovory]

The company made extremely unhealthy, shit products that no one in their right mind should consume. I feel as bad for them as I would if a giant meth lab blew up.

Kraft or some other megacorp will aquire the various brand rights and continue selling lardass, type II diabetic Americans their beloved hydrogenated vegetable oils smothered in HFCS, wrapped in sugary corn starch.

I hope multiple crazed fat people beat you to death right after raping you for a half hour.

Okay, but we don't work cheap.  Law of supply and demand and all.

[frunk]

The assumption being of course that any negative outcome for the company, such as fewer people eating Twinkies, must be a result of bad executive decision-making.  Similar to the concept that a poor economic situation is a failure of presidential leadership.

One of the jobs of CEOs should be to look at the future environment and try to adapt the company.  It's not like people wanting to eat healthier is a trend that's come out of the blue.  A CEO has a great deal more control of a company than the president has over the country.

[dps]

It is supply and demand.  There are not many CEOs and they demand a lot of money.

Actually, there is an immutable 1:1 ratio between the number of CEOs and the number of companies, even if some of the people who are CEOs don't technically have the title.

The assumption being of course that any negative outcome for the company, such as fewer people eating Twinkies, must be a result of bad executive decision-making.  Similar to the concept that a poor economic situation is a failure of presidential leadership.

When you're in charge, you're responsible for outcomes, good or bad, even if those outcomes aren't your doing.  If you're running a company that's losing millions, you haven't earned a raise.

[Admiral Yi]

Not at all.

Then you should take up the issue with dps, who seems to believe otherwise.

But if you're complaining that unions are being unreasonable for demanding companies be bound by their contracts, it's weird that you gloss over the fact that Hostess gave its executive officers raises in the face of impending bankruptcy.

I'm not complaining that unions are being unreasonable for demanding companies be bound by their contracts.  I'm complaining that unions act as if they're totally oblivious to the market conditions for the product or service their members are producing.

[Faeelin]

You keep ignoring the CEOs' actions. Odd, that.

[Admiral Yi]

You keep ignoring the CEOs' actions. Odd, that.

Very odd.

What the fuck are you talking about?

[DGuller]

When you're in charge, you're responsible for outcomes, good or bad, even if those outcomes aren't your doing.  If you're running a company that's losing millions, you haven't earned a raise.

That's a pretty stupid way of looking at it.  CEOs should be paid for doing the best they could in the circumstances, which sometimes may involve losing less millions than a lesser CEO would've lost.  Holding the CEOs responsible for things outside of their control is a pretty unhelpful compensation system, if you want to attract good CEOs rather than lucky ones.

[The Brain]

What matters is the owners, not the CEO.

[CountDeMoney]

QED.  You and the Elizabeth Warrens and the Martim Silvas and the Occupy Wall Streeters of the world think that if sufficient public opinion is mobilized then the laws of supply and demand can be negated.  If only the 99% is sufficiently energized, and attains sufficient political consciousness, then Twinkie assemblers will all keep their jobs, receive generous raises, and get free lunch vouchers.  All without you and I having to eat any more Twinkies or pay more for them.

Or they could stop giving CEOs multi-million dollar bonuses for driving companies into the ground.  Either one would work.

No, it doesn't work that way;  you see, Free Marketeers like Yi believe in the invincibility of the top-down model--one where executive management, with their countless useless books on "leadership", their useless Executive MBAs, their statistically based management models like Six Sigma or the latest bullshit invention du jour give them all the moral elasticity needed to treat their employees like chattel, squeezing them for their own bad decisions and their incompetency.  The "Job Creators" always get a pass with this crowd.  But those with the jobs?  Fuck 'em.

Profits down because of our fuck-ups?  Shave off some employees.  Reduce their hours, cut their benefits.  Work longer.  Work harder.  For less money. 
Profits down because we can't innovate?  Get rid of pensions;  force everybody to play the Wall Street casino, and let their retirement hopes rest on finding the occasional dropped chip from the big gamblers.

The Japanese build cheaper cars with better fuel efficiency?  Blame the UAW;  after all, even though they don't design the fuckers, or the fucked up and over-saturated dealership model or install planned obsolescence as a corporate strategy, hey, they're a convenient scapegoat, because they're overhead.  Always easier to blame the commies rather than the capitalists.

Never mind that successful companies have no problem investing in their workforce, that a happy workplace is a union-free workplace, that truly successful companies are those that understand that living wages, investment and retention is a force multiplier.   You want to bitch about Teamsters?  Fine, but some of the biggest retail distributors like Wal Mart and Best Buy have non-unionized trucking fleets, and why do they not need the Teamsters?  Because they're paid the best.   But their in-store staffs?  Faceless, replaceable chattel.  But they knew enough not to fuck with their distribution network by paying truckers enough not to get unionized, or even want to.  There's no need for unions when corporations ran their businesses more on basic fucking humanity than greed and venality, and guess fucking what, basic humanity doesn't cut into shareholder value that fucking much.

So Hostess had a "supply and demand" problem;  funny how the other players in the shit-for-food market don't.  I don't see Little Debbies or Entemann's or anybody else's product having trouble finding their ways onto shelves.  But hey, let's keep 570 Hostess bakery outlets as a relic of business model from 40 years ago, and instead blame the union representing bakers making shit for wages instead, because they dare to say that enough is fucking enough.  The only "supply and demand" Free Marketeers are interested in is an endless supply of low wage workers that can't demand shit, like a living wage.  If Hostess' incompetent management could've figured out how to outsource Twinkie production overseas, we'd have been buying them from the Chinese, complete with lead paint and sawdust, in a fucking heartbeat.  For half the production and twice the retail.

Yeah it's "the market",  it's always "the market".  For a bunch of snot nosed atheists and agnostics, you all sure put a hell of a lot of blind fucking faith in the "Invisible Hand" and the infallibility of its Wall Street priests.  Pretty fucking ironical.

The suits get a pass to drive their companies into the ground, hit their silk parachutes, and move on to the next company they can drive into the ground, all the while guiltless and blameless for perpetuating the same upside-down and fundamentally immoral model over and over:  stagnated wages, slashed benefits, and on and on.  But unions are the bad guys.  Always the same with you people. 

[The Brain]

TL;DR

[dps]

When you're in charge, you're responsible for outcomes, good or bad, even if those outcomes aren't your doing.  If you're running a company that's losing millions, you haven't earned a raise.

That's a pretty stupid way of looking at it.  CEOs should be paid for doing the best they could in the circumstances, which sometimes may involve losing less millions than a lesser CEO would've lost.  Holding the CEOs responsible for things outside of their control is a pretty unhelpful compensation system, if you want to attract good CEOs rather than lucky ones.

Well, there's at least 3 problems with that.  To start with, it's arguably better to be lucky than good, but that's a pretty minor issue (I think most people would agree that while it's arguabaly better to be lucky, hoping that someone's past good luck will hold true in the future isn't really a good reason to hire them).

Second, while in theory someone running a company that lost $100 million in the last year might be doing a good job because with anyone else in charge, the company would have lost $200 million or more, how would you know?  Maybe instead, with someone else in charge, they would have broken even or turned a profit.  It's one thing to say, "Well, we think the CEO made good decisions even though the conditions he had to deal with were so bad that we still lost money, so we think he should be given more time to turn things around."  It's another to give him a big raise or a fat bonus when you're losing money.

Third, even if the CEO (and other executives) really deserved extra compensation because they did a really good job in the bad situation the company found itself in, giving raises and bonused in those circumstances is a horribly bad idea if your workforce is unionized, because it makes it that much harder to sell the union on the idea that cutbacks are needed.

[Neil]

If you didn't want to take part in a race to bottom Seedy, you shouldn't have globalized the market.

[CountDeMoney]

If you didn't want to take part in a race to bottom Seedy, you shouldn't have globalized the market.

What's this "we" shit.  I don't have a Harvard MBA, you flanneled socialist.

[chipwich]

You keep ignoring the CEOs' actions. Odd, that.

Very odd.

What the fuck are you talking about?

A responsible CEO would have forseen that fewer people would eat junk food and moved the business away from it.

[Neil]

If you didn't want to take part in a race to bottom Seedy, you shouldn't have globalized the market.

What's this "we" shit.  I don't have a Harvard MBA, you flanneled socialist.

It wasn't the Harvard MBAs who globalized the market.  It was You, The People of the Traitor States.