News this week that a strike at Hostess Brands Inc. may be death knell to Twinkies came as a surprise to me. I thought the cream filled snack had already gone the way of pudding pops and vanilla coke.
An article in this week’s New York Times by Bich Minh Nguyen provides a fitting epitaph for this eighty year old confection.
She writes:
As a child of Vietnamese immigrants growing up in Michigan in the 1980’s, Twinkies were a ticket to assimilation: the golden cake, more golden than the hair I wished I had, filled with sweet white cream. Back then, junk foods seemed to represent an ideal of American indulgence. They’ve since become a joke, a stereotype of shallow suburbia.”
Indeed, Twinkies may have disappeared in America but shallow suburbia has not.
The cover story in USA today this past Tuesday entitled 5 Steps to help tackle Black Friday makes me think that many Americans have learned little from the recent economic downturn.
The article reads in part:
Rank the deals you need or want the most, and consider when the stores offering them are open. Long lines to get and pay for products may make it impossible for you to get to a second store in time for those deals. It may be necessary to divide and conquer if you’re shopping with family, or to settle for one store’s deals.
When I discovered that Good Friday is not even a school holiday in California, I realized that for some, Black Friday has become the new day of worship.
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