BRATTLEBORO — The shelves were emptying fast at the J.J. Nissen outlet store on Old Ferry Road on Saturday morning.
Bread was marked down to 50 cents a loaf. Boxes of Devil Dogs and Ring Dings were three for $3. The Twinkies were long gone.
The markdowns were part of a nationwide liquidation of Hostess Brands products, including the Nissen bread and Drake's cakes that were staples of the store since it opened in the 1980s.
Hostess shut down its bakeries on Friday, after it asked a federal bankruptcy court to close its operations. Company officials blamed an ongoing labor dispute for the shutdown, while workers blamed financial mismanagement by the group of investment firms that now owns Hostess.
The shutdown left nearly 18,500 workers nationwide without jobs and closed down its 33 remaining bakeries, 563 distribution centers, and 570 outlet stores around the nation.
The Brattleboro outlet store, which sold Nissen, Drake's, Wonder, and Hostess products near the end of their “sell-by” lives at reduced price, is scheduled to close on Nov. 21. By Monday afternoon, the only items left on the shelves were non-Hostess products.
Workers there said they did not want to speak on the record, but they said that the news of Friday's shutdown came without warning.
Hostess bought the Portland, Maine-based J.J. Nissen and the New Jersey-based Drake's in 1998, and consolidated their operations under the Hostess banner. Many of the products sold in the Brattleboro outlet came from the former Nissen bakery in Biddeford, Maine.
The company filed for bankruptcy in January of this year, the second time it had done so in less than a decade. It is expected that other baking companies will buy the brands and the bakeries from Hostess, but there are no guarantees that any of the Hostess workers will get their jobs back.