Blurring the line:
Whoops the gyrofrog beat me; I missed it.
I do believe you may have hit the nail on the head. You’ve just uncovered their plans to diversify into the edible underwear market, and the reason for pre-emptive brand protection becomes explicably sane. There’s an opportunity for a bit of insider trading here. Keep shtum, everybody.
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And I’m sure we’re all happy that you were the only one to see that particular issue
For the record… Hanes (underwear) used to be wholly owned by Sara Lee, who also owned such fabrically-lacking brands as Hormel and Ball Park (of the frank variety), and will be known as Hillshire in the future.
Plain Jane “Hanes” was bought by the mega-conglomerate through a series of takeovers in the late 80’s through the early 90’s… and Sara Lee essentially ran the once famous name brand into the ground. They did similar things to once-was corporations like Senseo, who developed a Keurig style single serve coffee maker nearly 20 years ago.
Case in point: Hanes operated two “plants” in the Winston-Salem area, about ten miles from each other on the same road. Part of the Sara Lee plan was to buy foreign cotton (remember, this is in the SE US, a couple hours away from the largest cotton farms in the US), have the fabric refined in Puerto Rico, shipped to one of these plants where it was cut into patterns, ship the cut fabric back to Puerto Rico to be folded, sewn and put into bags, and then the bags would be sent to the second plant for distribution. All so your underwear can cost a few cents less to make. What they didn’t plan on was the price of fuel increasing, and having such a strict “flight-plan” made it so that they couldn’t just adjust to outside changes in the market, and instead of having a more rational plan their solution was to just buy cheaper cotton elsewhere and keep up the international shipping.
Like I said, ran the company into the ground.
Because Hanes was once affiliated with multiple food companies, people still maintain that association. So while HanesBrands Inc. no longer part of an edible mega-corp, that does NOT mean that everybody is aware of this.
Interesting. And yeah - idiots. But, there was a long, long stretch of time when people got used to stable gas prices, and you could do tricks like that. They tried it past that time. Still a dumb idea, considering location, though. I’d bet they thought that, just because you could do some neato stuff with computers and production planning, they could pull that off without problems? Because, at that time, there weren’t a lot of corporate execs who really knew much about how to do that - but it was all the rage. Business Week said so! And I assume this was also before ‘Buy American’ became a cliche just about the time Chrysler nearly went under and used it as a marketing line, too? But…still a dumb idea for the location.
(I’m just kinda laughing, because in those years, I had some client s who were from China and Korea and India - and not one of them wanted to try that kind of stuff. They already knew it couldn’t work, lol.)
But - if people no longer associate Hanes with any food businesses, then how is Hanes Hummus any threat?
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