Amazon Wine and the Death Of Twinkies?

I've had a busy week, and there are some new wine reviews coming, but here's some news posts in the meantime.

Amazon.com has decided to get into the wine biz.  The gigantic online retailer has started selling and shipping wine to 12 states, and North Carolina is one of them.  Here is a peek at what they are doing.  This article tells you about the move in greater detail.   I'm curious to see how this is going to work out for them. 

The success of this new venture is going to be very contingent on the location of the potential buyers.  Wine is a delicate (though not as delicate as you may think) product, and shipping it all over Creation in the back of UPS or FedEx trucks is not exactly an ideal transportation method, especially if you are buying during the warmer months.  Shipping costs may make some selections less attractive for customers who already have a well-stocked local retailer.  For those of you living in East Overshoe, this may however, look more attractive.  And if they intend on specializing in hard to find, rare selections (which doesn't seem to be the case), there are other online wine stores that already have great catalogs and a devoted customer base.   It is an interesting development, and it will be sure to make for a good show.   Being the mammoth that they are, they obviously have the legal department to oversee the wrangling of local laws that shipping to the other 38 states (and hundreds of counties within) with weird and ornate alcohol legal wrinkles will entail.   I'll be interested to see how competitive they actually turn out to be.  Stay tuned for details.

In other news, there is much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth over the decision of Hostess execs to proceed with liquidation and shutter the factories that produce the snacks that our moms tried in vain to keep us from spending our allowances on.  There is a lot of noise on both sides of the Labor vs. Capital line about this development.  This article breaks it down a bit and gives us a little more nuanced view.

I think that a lot of the trouble here comes down to two things that the article only marginally touches on: incursions of competitors like Bimbo into their market, and the fact that a lot of Americans are eating less WonderBread and Twinkies.  Which, really, isn't bad news, in the opinion of Your Humble Narrator. 

I suspect that someone will scoop up the brands, if not the factories themselves, and you'll see Twinkies, etc., on the shelves in the future.  If not, there are lots of Submarinos and Pinguinos to go around.