Sara Lee to close outlet stores

Sara Lee is exiting the outlet store business where it sells Sara Lee products at discount prices.

The company said it expects all company-owned retail outlet stores to close by the end of November. Nine of the company's 11 outlets are in the Chicago area.

The move comes as the Illinois company is splitting into a global coffee business and a North American meat business to be named Hillshire Brands.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ ... 1938.story

Bummer. My guilty pleasure was eaing the large pans of brownies still frozen. Pepperidge Farms got out of the outlet business too. The only one I know of is at the Michigan City Outlet mall. There is another bakery outlet store in Niles on Milwaukee across form Golf Mill. It is really weird but has been there forever.

Elfin wrote:Bummer. My guilty pleasure was eaing the large pans of brownies still frozen. Pepperidge Farms got out of the outlet business too. The only one I know of is at the Michigan City Outlet mall. There is another bakery outlet store in Niles on Milwaukee across form Golf Mill. It is really weird but has been there forever.

There is a Pepperidge Farm Outlet in Oak Lawn also, 9900 Southwest Highway

And Pleasant Prairie, WI in the Prime Outlet Mall has a Pepperidge Farm Outlet. My source for double chocolate Milano's.

I used to frequent Sara Lee outlets with my husband til the one in Skokie stopped selling the orange muffins I adored. We asked and asked about them and they had no clue why they were not getting them anymore. This was about the time they started jacking up their prices, maybe four or five years ago. I also noticed about that time that they started overloading on the Market Day stuff which I don't care for. But I will miss the cheap pies and cakes, always very well done.

Thanks for the info re PP Farm outlets nearby. I have fond memories of the original Sara Lee outlet at its factory in Deerfield just off Waukegan and Lake Cook Roads.

Does that mean the prices will be even lower? I am not too far from the one on Oakton in Skokie and another on Touhy in Park Ridge; I had a pie from there that was quite nice, especially at $3.50.

Hearing Sara Lee talk about "focusing" its business is sort of ironic. Sara Lee Corp., along with fellow Chicago-based behemoth, Beatrice Foods, led the merger madness that went on in the mid 1980s. They bought up dozens of businesses that manufactured everything from Hanes underwear and Wonder Bras to Kiwi Shoe Polish, a far cry from the frozen chocolate cakes and brownies for which they were best known (those popular and much loved products were discontinued almost 2 decades ago). At the time, many business analysts claimed that their voracious appetite for targeting and consuming other non-bakery related corporations was not a sustainable model. In the end, I guess those analysts were right. It is sad that Sara Lee ended up selling off the bakery operations on which its reputation was originally built. It is now primarily a sausage company that will shed the Sara Lee name. Grupo Bimbo (the purchaser of SL's baking division) will allow Hillshire Brands to continue manufacturing frozen deserts under the iconic Sara Lee brand, which still evokes memories of the cold dense and moist chocolate cakes that "nobody doesn't like". They will make food service cheesecakes, but I don't think there are any plans to revive the chocolate cakes I loved as a kid. Sadly, those beloved childhood favorites have been permanently relegated to a series of "does anybody remember..?" message threads. BTW, the actual Sara Lee, for whom the original baking business was named in the 1940s by her father, is alive and well.

d4v3 wrote:Hearing Sara Lee talk about "focusing" its business is sort of ironic. Sara Lee Corp., along with fellow Chicago-based behemoth, Beatrice Foods, led the merger madness that went on in the mid 1980s. They bought up dozens of businesses that manufactured everything from Hanes underwear and Wonder Bras to Kiwi Shoe Polish, a far cry from the frozen chocolate cakes and brownies for which they were best known (those popular and much loved products were discontinued almost 2 decades ago). At the time, many business analysts claimed that their voracious appetite for targeting and consuming other non-bakery related corporations was not a sustainable model. In the end, I guess those analysts were right. It is sad that Sara Lee ended up selling off the bakery operations on which its reputation was originally built.

I stopped buying Sara Lee products the day they closed Best Kosher Foods.

d4v3 wrote: BTW, the actual Sara Lee, for whom the original baking business was named in the 1940s by her father, is alive and well.

Yep... about 20 years ago I worked her daughter's wedding and got to meet the granddad who started the company and named it after his daughter. He even helped with the wedding cake (he was in his mid 80's)

Artie wrote:

d4v3 wrote:I stopped buying Sara Lee products the day they closed Best Kosher Foods.

Yea, that was another reason why I didn't care to shop at their outlets anymore. The most boneheaded move ever for any company of that stature.

My old law firm did a lot of work on employee benefit plans for Sara Lee back in the 1990s - that's where I found out about Michael Jordan's lucrative 'personal services' contract for the company, which explained why he started showing up in odd, disparate commercials for Ball Park Franks, Ray-O-Vac batteries, and Hanes men's underwear. SL seemed to want to play Kraft Foods's game, but never has gotten it quite right. My take is that Kraft has a LOT more respect for its brands, new and old, and has prospered as a result; when it has divested itself of lines, or gone through corporate divorces or reorganizations, it has emerged just as strong. Sara Lee? Not so much.

mhill95149 wrote:

d4v3 wrote: BTW, the actual Sara Lee, for whom the original baking business was named in the 1940s by her father, is alive and well.

Yep... about 20 years ago I worked her daughter's wedding and got to meet the granddad who started the company and named it after his daughter. He even helped with the wedding cake (he was in his mid 80's)

That is so cool he actually helped with the cake. What a great anecdote.
Apparently Sara Lee (the woman,not the organization) has started and contributed to several organizations which promote the study of science and math among girls and youg women . My mother is a 90+ year old ex-Bio-Chemist (with a second degree in mathematics). She spent most of her life battling the notion that a wife's place in the kitchen and a mother's place is at home with her children. I've got news for her critics, my mother was (and is) an absolutely wonderful cook, who prepared equisite and exotic meals for her family every day, while heading a research lab at a major university. I never felt she neglected my sister and me and think we turned out all right. She not only battled the glass ceiling and those who thought she did not belong in her position, but she also had male co-workers who were constantly stealing credit for her work. I guess (in the case of Sara Lee) it helps when Dad is the cook in the family.

Hi I was at the Sara Lee Outlet store on Dempster in Skokie today, and they are having their going out of business sale right now. The sign in the store says that they are closing on 8/18, but that is only if they have stuff left to sell by then. The market Day stuff was hardly marked down at all, but most of the frozen Sara Lee stuff was considerably marked down. They had the individual pieces of carrot and chocolate cake marked down to 3/99. Most of the pies are marked down to $4 or less. The cheesecakes are more expensive. The cheesecake looked really tempting, but I decided I did not need it. The only thing I ended up getting was 4 jars of Lambs Farm jam. They had the pumpkin butter for 99 cents a jar, and the rest of the jam was $1.99 for a 10 ounce jar. I am going to go back there next week, to see if any of the stuff gets marked down further. Hope this helps, Nancy