Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Minyanville on why Twinkies will live and the Volt should die.
Reports of the death of Twinkies have been greatly exaggerated. You can bet your less-than-a-UAW-worker’s next paycheck that the delightfully unnatural confections and wondrous white breads from Interstate Bakeries Corp. are not going away, news stories to the contrary notwithstanding.
I wish we could say the opposite about the financially disastrous, US-government-subsidized Chevy Volt, but we can’t. The fact that the Invisible Hand will ultimately keep us in golden sponge cake reveals everything about what goes wrong when the bumbling hand of politics intervenes in free markets, as it did in the case of General Motors (NYSE:GM).
As you’ve by now read over and over via today’s dominant Facebook (NASDAQ:FB)/Twitter meme, we are about to see the death by liquidation of Interstate Bakeries Corp., maker of Hostess Twinkies, Ding-Dongs, and Wonder Bread, among other nutritionally vacant delights. The sentiment behind most of the posts is one of sadness at the pending disappearance of the products, along with rampant nostalgia for the days when we all carried them in our lunchboxes.
Dry your creme-puffed eyes, my friends. The spongy confections with all the qualities of tasty blown-in foam insulation will almost certainly not disappear from store shelves for very long, if at all.
Why not? Because the economics of selling Twinkies still work just fine. The economics of making Twinkies with a grumpy, highly unionized labor force don’t. And our system can and will correct that.
Interstate said its Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union-member line workers would need to take significant wage and benefit cuts to allow the company to bring its operating costs into line with other industry players. As a result, the workers told the company where it could shove its Twinkies. Interstate’s ownership group essentially responded by saying, “You Ding-Dongs — forget it. We’re closing it all up and selling off the assets.”
Which virtually guarantees Twinkies will survive. Given their notoriously long shelf life, my guess is they’ll be back in production before your stash even runs out. Why? Because the products made by Interstate are still in high demand. They wouldn’t be on every store shelf in America if they weren’t, so the brands will be revived and improved. …
Just two items today because of the length of this piece from Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine. It is the story of a man who tends a graveyard that sits abandoned next to his home. See if it affects you the way it did Pickerhead. You’ll want to know more about David Young and also Rachael Maddux who made his story so engaging.
In ancient Greece, the story goes, there lived a man named Sisyphus—a powerful man, the founder and king of Corinth—who was so proud that he spurned the gods and tried to cheat death. For these transgressions, he was punished, banished to the underworld and made for all eternity to roll a boulder up a hill, reach the summit, watch the rock crash all the way back down, follow it, then start all over again.
Here is another man, in another time, another world. David Young is not overly proud and he is certainly no king. But he too once stood at the bottom of a hill, looked up at the summit and saw his fate—his own land of the dead, the crumbling, overgrown cemetery that he has shouldered all responsibility for over the last three decades and counting.
Like Sisyphus, David toils alone; unlike the punished man, David’s burden was a choice. Yet no explanation of his devotion seems to suffice. He values the cemetery’s history, enjoys the feeling of working hard without hope of reward or recognition, thrives on the structure and sense of purpose it gives his life—yes, all these things are true.
But he has committed himself to the cemetery so fully, it is as if the cemetery owns him, as if his actions are nudged along by some force much greater than mere human motives. There is something else at play, that unknown element complicit when a person commits to an act beyond standard human kindness—that mystery of service, the ineffable arithmetic of someone giving and giving and giving of themselves until they are both nearly gone and, somehow, even more fully alive.
David H. Young III is 71 years old, thin-framed; he used to be all right angles, but time has rounded most of his corners, and there’s a hunch to his shoulders that suggests he’s perpetually shrugging something away, a worry or a compliment or a question too big to answer. His hair, once nearly black, has finally decided it’s time to turn gray, though his brows are holding out, almost as dark as when he was a boy.
He grew up in Georgia, Macon and Rockmart. His father was a Tech alum, an insurance agent and a smalltime farmer; his mother, an Agnes Scott graduate, helped her husband with his business. David was sent up to the DarlingtonSchool in Rome, then graduated with a degree in industrial management from Georgia Tech in 1963. He met a girl in college—Barbara, another Scottie—and, once he’d paid his dues to Uncle Sam, he came back home and married her. Barbara found a job up in Chattanooga, and he enrolled in the accounting program at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; they bought a little white house in Chattanooga’s Shepherd Hills neighborhood, settled in, never left.
They bought the house for the closets—Barbara required closets—but the backyard was nice, too, a green lawn stretching out then ascending in a series of terraces, like an amphitheater. David kept it tidy, tended to the whole swath of it right up to the chain-link fence that marked the back property line. Every so often he’d climb the stair-stepped slope and do battle with the ivy and weeds that never stopped seeping through the fence from the wooded lot beyond.
Standing in his dining room, looking out his big picture window and up at that beautiful backyard, he could see points of a wrought-iron gate and gray crests of tombstones among the dark tangle of vines and trees at the top of the hill. …