Up until today, I didn't know Hostess existed as its own company. I always thought they were an absorbed brand line for a larger manufacturer -- if I thought about it at all, which wasn't exactly often. (There is a Hostess outlet within a few miles of me -- or was: I've never been in there and don't know if it's still around. Last chance to see...) So news that Hostess was losing money would have been met with a shrug and 'Giant Food Company can afford it' plus the assumption that Tastycake was kicking their rears, at least on the local scale. As part of a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, they probably would have survived. And I'm surprised no one's taken this dark opportunity to make an assimilation attempt.

But they were on their own. And if a company that size had lost, say, five million dollars last year? They're Hostess. Make a couple of tweaks and tough it out.

The last number I saw was $340,000,000 in the red.

No, they are not under any obligation to stay open just so people can keep collecting paychecks. The strikers may have legitimate gripes about salary and benefits, but here we have a company which can't afford to increase either one. Years of sports lockouts and teams claiming to lose money have made me look at declared loss as an aggressive negotiating tactic: we're eight digits in the black, but not on the books you're going to see. But then the Teamsters took a pay cut. That kind of made the ownership side look as if it had a legitimate point.

(Yes, I'd be curious to see what the executives pulled out during that period. No seven-digit bonuses, please.)

I don't know what the employees were making on the baking side of the factory. Maybe they were at that Walmart level of full time being just enough to die on. But that wasn't going to change because the company couldn't afford to alter anything. All striking did was pull the plug that much faster. Good luck explaining that to some of the union heads.

No profit, no hopes for same coming soon enough to save anything, no investors, and no government bailout. They exist to make money. They couldn't. And now they don't exist.

The cupcakes. Eat two in the morning and your body won't digest anything else for the rest of the day.