The old Hostess eschewed a warehouse delivery model, since Twinkies only had a shelf life of thirty days (so much for that myth), meaning they had thousands of delivery trucks running around, and delivery costs were 36% of revenue. Not surprisingly, the new owners have fixed that issue.
(h/t +The Bruce, Mile High)
The rise, fall, and rise again of the Twinkie
Handling the Twinkie empire hasn’t been a piece of cake.
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Horifyingly, I've seen them on sale in Britain. There is no escape.
Not mentioned: How changing the delivery model locked out unions.
+Theron Bretz This article (http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/07/15/2300111/hostess-twinkies-jobs/) talked about the locking out of the union, but not necessarily how that tied into the delivery model. That said, if the delivery workers were unionized, this change would have an impact.
They were Teamsters.
+Theron Bretz I can't quite bring myself to condemn a model that is as much more efficient as the stats in the article describe. That said, locking out unions from the jobs involved is not something I can necessarily support, either.
Anybody spot the irony of a post about Twinkies in the collection "Serious stuff"/
+Tim Hall Yeah … that just shows the difficulty of categorizing things (esp. with broad categories). In this case, I was thinking about it from an economic perspective.