I think the issue is, the locations where the bakeries were enabled them to deliver fresher products to these markets ... don’t know if this was critical in their business model.
I buy chips made in North Carolina all the time in Washington.
So..
There can be a rational argument that the free market killed this company (we will never be able to prove or disprove this) but there is an absolute proven fact that the union kept them from having the flexibility for the Hostess company to have an opportunity to reinvent themselves to save these jobs.
They were on their SECOND trip through bankruptcy court ~ obviously a management, technology and marketing problem.
We have no free market. This would tend to disprove it, don't you think?
When we have places where bakeries are banned from producing an aroma, when sugar prices are artificially high (2x) by government barriers, when corporations are taxed the highest on Earth, when some companies are given government handouts (Solyndra, etc) and protectionist laws (domestic sugar for instance), when union goons make sure in some states that bread and snacks get different trucks (as an earlier poster noted) and likely make it hard to near impossible to fire bad workers (normal for unions).....
can anyone really pretend we have anything close to a free market??