Hawaiians bring a bittersweet aloha to a long-loved bakery.
Love’s Bakery will close at the end of March, after the COVID-19 pandemic brought the operation to its knees, SFGate reports.
The bakery spread the love of 1851 and first set fire to the kilns more than a century before Hawaii became the 50th state.
The mainstay in Honolulu has 231 employees – who will lose all their jobs – and normally distributes about 400,000 loaves of bread to 1,800 customers each week, the website reports.
The demand for bread decreases during the pandemic, with hotels and restaurants closed. Increased local competition would also have taken a big cut from Love’s dough.
Loves said he was “seriously delinquent” in rent payments and also spent $ 2.8 million on COVID-19 federal aid loans to maintain his salary, according to the site.
“We have worked hard to reduce costs, maintain market share and address our operational difficulties, however, in the current business environment we can no longer continue operations,” the company said in a statement to the media. “The media,” the press said. .
Hawaii’s geographic isolation has also contributed to the bakery’s pandemic troubles.
“COVID-19 has also influenced many of our continental suppliers, causing delays in ingredients and spare parts for our aged bakery equipment,” wrote its letter of federal notification of adjustment and retraining of workers (WARN) and the opinion Displaced workers’ law in Hawaii. “With declining revenues and rising expenses to keep a bakery running, we have made the difficult decision to stop operations as a hesitant business.”
When Love’s Bakery kneaded the first bread 170 years ago, King Kamehameha III was on the Hawaiian throne.
Love’s home operations expanded rapidly during the world wars, and by 1943, the company was baking bread non-stop in a 144-foot-long oven that produced 8,000 loaves of bread per hour, SF Gate said.
By 1945, bread would have flown to neighboring islands on a charter plane as Hawaii’s population grew rapidly.
Businesses across the nation and around the world have been struggling to make bread since the pandemic shut down trade. According to a study, more than half of US businesses forced to close will never reopen.