The article in Tuesday's Daily News seems a fairly unbiased accounting of how Hostess Brands teeters on the edge of non-existence.
I was a 17-year employee of the Anchorage bakery, retiring in 2000. In those 17 years, the company was owned by three parent companies — IT&T, Ralston Purina, and then Interstate Baking Co. With the first two owners, the company thrived, and Sunrise Bakery was a great place to work.
With Interstate Baking, we lost market share with one bad management decision after another. In the Seattle-Tacoma area, they built a multimillion dollar super bakery, fully automated and requiring little labor, that eliminated other Northwest bakeries. Guess what? The super bakery simply would not work! It closed and Wonder Bread lost its market share in the Northwest.
The company's solution to such mismanagement was to cut employees' pay. Since 1998, Anchorage employees have taken huge reductions in pay and benefits to keep the company profitable. My heart goes out to the hard-working people who will lose their jobs —all while CEOs will still get bonuses.
— Bill Bailey
Sterling