Hello once more! I was stunned when I visited three different locations today and seen the racks of Hostess items virtually gone from the shelves. I visited a local Wal*Mart, a local UDF, a Speedway, and a local grocery store...and in each location the shelves which had been lined with Hostess products 2 days ago were almost completely empty. There were a few left-over items in three of the locations and so I picked up something from each store. Chances are you'll never see these items again, except on nostalgia sites that cater to advertising from the past, and so I wanted to take a few pictures of what could be the last Hostess snack cakes available in my area. There's all kinds of rumors about other companies buying the Hostess name and continuing it but it's hard to tell what will happen and so for now Hostess products in my area have vanished pretty much. I asked a worker at Speedway if someone from Hostess had come by during the overnight hours and packed up everything and she said that people were buying them like crazy. Boxes of Twinkies and Ding-Dongs and individually wrapped Ho-Ho's and fruit pies were literally wiped from the shelves of that particular fuel station. The only things they had left with a Hostess logo were a few sacks of miniature muffins but the iconic snack cakes were gone.
These particular snacks are rounded cream filled cup cakes with a coconut and marshmallow topping. My mother once had an appetite for these in their original color. For whatever reason she never wanted to try the pink, green, or orange colored versions even though to me they all tasted the same. I don't think there ever were any animated commercials for the Suzy Q or the Sno Ball. While it's true that other companies have their versions of these snack cakes I happen to feel that the reason why there's a segment of the population somewhat unhappy to see the brand disappear is tied directly to nostalgia and childhood. As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, the animated commercials for the Hostess brand of snack cakes appeared on television for multiple decades and they were permanent features in comic books for multiple decades. So, as corny or baffling as it may sound to those who consider themselves hipper and healthier than everyone else, something like a brand name vanishing from the marketplace is quite capable of being emotive for a lot of people. Even more important are the thousands of jobs being lost.
One of my least favorite Fruit Pie variants is peach...but that was all that was left remaining at a local UDF store. The apple, blueberry, cherry, and lemon fruit pies were gone. My personal favorite was the blueberry and rated just behind that was the apple and then the cherry and then the lemon. There were other products from Hostess in the same design filled with a chocolate pudding product that I liked, on occasion. Again, this may sound baffling to many, but you almost had to be in a mood for certain snack cakes. I was always in the mood for blueberry but if there happened to be a cherry fruit pie sitting around and next to it was a twinkie, well, depending on the mood I'd choose one or the other. Some people may eat whatever regardless but if I wasn't in the mood for a twinkie then I'd not eat it. By the way, the chocolate and the yellow cup cakes were nowhere to be found in any of the stores I went to, either. I was less of a consumer of those cup cakes. I came across the mascot for the chocolate cupcake while doing a Google image search. You can easily Google these snack cakes and find the mascots that I've written about. In the previous blog entry I included links to various Hostess commercials that I came across on You Tube.
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