While the Hostess Twinkie may not be as central to the U.S. economy as the mail, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe sees uncomfortable parallels of iconic products within unworkable organizational structures.

"Companies and industries have gone over their own fiscal cliff because they can't sit down and work out their differences," Donahoe said in an interview last week. "Like Hostess."

Like Hostess Brands Inc., where a labor impasse prompted the snack-food maker's liquidation, the Postal Service, with 28 times Hostess's workforce of 18,000, has been squeezed by labor costs and changing consumer tastes to the brink of extinction. The post office's insolvency is less imminent while no less ominous, with Donahoe projecting that the service expects to run out of cash next October without intervention from Congress.