Spamalot

At Hormel, staff members "are working at a furious pace and piling up all the overtime they want" to crank out tins of Spam, "perhaps the emblematic hard-times food in the American pantry," according to a recent New York Times article.

Working in two shifts, seven days a week, the Spam staff is hurrying to get Spam into stores to meet a recession-driven spike in demand. But that doesn't mean that Hormel is doing particularly well, at least not yet. On Tuesday, the company reported that, although revenues are way up, profits dipped 33 percent in its fourth quarter.

The rise in demand for Spam and other inexpensive Hormel products, such as Dinty Moore canned stews, combined with price increases, helped boost sales by 12 percent. But profits fell from $101.2 million to $67.8 million, due in part to higher costs.

Another reason: the "rabbi trust" that the company uses for deferred employee compensation lost $20.4 million. That has to be reported in the company's results, but it says little about the company's operating performance.

More to the point is the company's exposure to the horrifyingly bad poultry business through its Jennie-O Turkey line. Costs for feed and energy caused that unit's earnings to drop by 44 percent.

The bad news will likely continue for at least a few months. Costs have already fallen, but CEO Jeffrey Ettinger told analysts that after a slow start, the latter part of fiscal 2009 will pick up.

He would never say this, but as a Spam salesman, he might be hoping for current conditions—falling energy and commodities prices and a faltering consumer economy—to continue. Indeed, he's probably banking on it.

As the Times' Andrew Martin put it: "Through war and recession, Americans have turned to the glistening canned product from Hormel as a way to save money while still putting something that resembles meat on the table. Now, in a sign of the times, it is happening again, and Hormel is cranking out as much Spam as its workers can produce."

Workers on Hormel's Spam lines, Martin reported, "have been told that the relentless work schedule will continue indefinitely."