Governor Of Illinois LOSES IT As Snickers & M&Ms Factory OFFICIALLY Shuts Down After 95 Years!

本站添加: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Right now, a big blow to Chicago's west side. The Mars Candy Company just announced it's moving most of its operations out of its Westside factory in the next two years. Mars Wrigley Company has operated here in the Gailwood community since 1929. M&M's, Snickers, Milky Way are among the products made at that plant.

[00:00:19]>> Every Halloween, kids in Chicago's Gailwood neighborhood would line up outside this factory to get candy straight from the workers. Snickers, M and M. Milky Way. All made right here for 95 years. And then one day it was gone. This isn't just a story about candy. It's a story about what Illinois does to the things it builds. And it's a story about who pays the price when a 95-year institution decides the math no longer works.

[00:00:53]Let's start at the beginning. Because this factory didn't just appear on Chicago's west side, it was chosen. In 1928, Frank C. Mars, the man behind Milky Way and the growing Mars Candy Empire, looked at his operation in Minneapolis and made a decision. He was going to build something extraordinary.

[00:01:15]He picked Chicago, specifically 16 acres in the Gailwood neighborhood on the city's west side. And what he built wasn't just a production facility. It was called at the time the most beautiful factory in America. Spanish revival architecture, ornate tile work, manicured grounds, the kind of building that told a neighborhood, "We're not just here to make money, we're here to stay."

[00:01:41]And they did stay for nearly a century.

[00:01:44]Through the depression, through World War II, through every recession, every mayor, every property tax hike, every pension crisis that Springfield could generate. The factory kept running.

[00:01:58]Snickers rolled off the line. The bestselling candy bar in the world, made right here on Chicago's west side. Em and Miz got their shells in this building. The same shells that made them one of the most recognized products on the planet. Milky Way, Twix, Three Musketeers, Skittles, all of it right there in Gailwood. At its peak, this single facility made Chicago the candy capital of the world. That's not a marketing slogan. That's what the industry called it. Other cities had factories. Chicago had an identity built around them. And then after 95 years, the line stopped. The announcement didn't come with fanfare. There was no press conference with cameras and prepared remarks. Workers found out the way workers usually find out in Illinois. Through notices, through internal memos, through the kind of quiet corporate language that means the decision was already made long before anyone in the building knew it was coming. The Gailwood factory was closing permanently. And on the last day of production, the machines that had been running since the Roosevelt administration went silent for the first time in nearly a century. Mars, Inc.

[00:03:13]announced the closure. 280 jobs gone.

[00:03:17]Not temporarily, permanently. Production shifted to other US facilities. The workers who had spent years, some of them decades, inside that Spanish revival masterpiece were handed notices.

[00:03:30]The neighborhood that had built its identity around that factory that had given its kids Halloween memories that no other block in America could replicate was told the building was being redeveloped into apartments.

[00:03:45]Now, here's where this story gets complicated in a very Illinois way.

[00:03:49]Because the city of Chicago, the same city that watched this factory operate for 95 years without doing much to keep it, decided to landmark the building to protect its historic architecture and to make sure nobody tore down the most beautiful factory in America. They did it literally as the factory was being shut down. That timing is not an accident. It's a pattern.

[00:04:15]Illinois is extraordinarily good at celebrating things it failed to protect while they were still worth protecting.

[00:04:22]The landmark designation came with no jobs attached, no community facility, no commitment to the 280 workers who just lost their livelihoods.

[00:04:34]Just a legal acknowledgement that the building looked important right as the people who made it important were walking out the door.

[00:04:43]And the community noticed. Gailwood residents didn't just accept the apartment redevelopment plan. They organized. They showed up. They demanded that at minimum the new use of this 16 acre site include a library and a job training center. Something that would give back to a neighborhood that had given its workers, its streets, and its identity to a candy company for nearly a century. And here's what makes this story urgent right now. That fight is not over. The developer plan still calls for residential units. The neighbors are still pushing back, attending zoning hearings, circulating petitions, showing up to aldermanic meetings, and demanding to be heard. Community organizations in Gailwood have been explicit. A neighborhood that lost its largest employer deserves more than market rate housing on the same footprint. They want a branch library. They want job training infrastructure.

[00:05:45]They want something that absorbs the loss rather than just replacing one use of the land with another that serves a completely different demographic.

[00:05:55]Springfield is still watching from a distance. City Hall has offered process, landmark protection, community meetings, the standard framework, but no binding commitment to the community infrastructure that residents are demanding. The gap between what Gailwood is asking for and what it's being offered is still wide. And every month that passes without resolution is another month that 16 acres of the west side sits in legal and political limbo while a neighborhood waits to find out what replaces the factory that defined it. That fight matters not just for Gailwood, for every Chicago neighborhood watching this play out and asking if this is what happens when a 95-year anchor institution closes, what protection do we actually have.

[00:06:43]Now, let's follow the money because this is where the Illinois pattern becomes impossible to ignore. Mars, Inc. did not leave Illinois entirely. They kept their global headquarters in Chicago's Goose Island neighborhood. The executive offices stayed. The corporate address stayed. The ribbon on the annual report still says Chicago, Illinois. But the factory, the soul of what made Mars a Chicago company is gone. If that structure sounds familiar, it should because it's the same move JP Morgan made when it kept its New York headquarters and built its economic gravity in Texas. It's the same move Starbucks made when it kept its Seattle address and announced 2,000 jobs in Nashville. The headquarters stay because they're useful for optics, for legacy, for the story the company tells about itself. But the jobs, the production, the growth that goes somewhere, the math makes more sense. And what does the math look?

[00:07:49]Illinois has one of the highest combined tax burdens for manufacturers in the country. The state's property taxes are the second highest in the nation.

[00:07:59]Illinois carries over $200 billion in total unfunded pension obligations, the worst in the country on a per capita basis. The state has lost more residents to out migration than nearly any other state in the union for seven consecutive years. And Chicago's manufacturing sector, which once employed hundreds of thousands of workers on the city's west and south sides, has been contracting for decades with no credible reversal plan in sight.

[00:08:28]Mars didn't close the Gailwood factory because the building stopped working.

[00:08:33]They closed it because after 95 years of absorbing Illinois's cost structure, the arithmetic finally stopped making sense.

[00:08:42]The taxes compounded, the pension obligations compounded, the cost differential between operating in Illinois and operating somewhere else compounded. And when a company that has been absorbing those costs for nearly a century finally runs the numbers one more time and decides the production needs to move, that's not a sudden decision. That's the end of a very long calculation.

[00:09:08]Now, here's the moment that should stop every Illinois voter cold. Because when news of this closure became public, when 280 jobs and a 95-year institution were officially gone, Governor Pritsker had to stand up and answer for it. And what came out of Springfield was not a plan.

[00:09:28]It was not accountability.

[00:09:31]It was not even a credible explanation for how the state that watched this factory survive the depression couldn't hold on to it in the 21st century.

[00:09:41]What came out was a landmark designation, a certificate protecting the building's architecture and talking points about workforce transition resources.

[00:09:52]That was it. That was the answer for a 95- year institution, for 280 families, for a neighborhood on Chicago's west side that had given a century of its identity to a company that just moved the work somewhere cheaper.

[00:10:12]The governor of Illinois pointed at a plaque on a wall and called it a response. And if you want to know why businesses keep doing the math and keep coming up with the same answer, that's it right there. His administration mentioned that Mars was maintaining its Chicago headquarters as a sign of ongoing commitment to the state. But here's the question that statement doesn't answer.

[00:10:38]How many more 95-year institutions have to close before Illinois asks itself what it's doing to the businesses that chose to stay?

[00:10:49]Because this wasn't a startup that came and left. This was a company that moved to Chicago in 1928 and built what contemporaries called the most beautiful factory in America. It survived everything. the depression, the war, decades of tax increases, regulatory changes, and pension obligations that kept compounding long after the original decisions that created them were made.

[00:11:17]It survived all of it. And then it didn't survive the combination of Illinois's cost structure and a corporate calculation that said the production could happen somewhere cheaper. And the governor's answer to that, a landmark plaque and a press release about headquarters retention, is not a strategy. It's a caption on a photograph of something that's already gone. The 280 workers who lost those jobs are not abstractions.

[00:11:46]They're people who woke up one morning and found out that the place where they made Snickers, the place their parents might have worked, the place their kids stopped by on Halloween was being converted into apartments. They probably can't afford to live in in a neighborhood that already has limited transit access in a city where the west side has been waiting for reinvestment for decades.

[00:12:09]The factory was that reinvestment. It was already there and now it isn't.

[00:12:16]That's the real cost of what's happening in Illinois. Not in one dramatic announcement. In a slow compounding erosion of the manufacturing base that once made the state an economic powerhouse, factory by factory, job by job, neighborhood by neighborhood, until the landmarks are preserved and the livelihoods are gone. and a developer is planning residential units where the M and M's used to be made while the community that lost the most is still fighting at zoning hearings to get a library. That's not a coincidence.

[00:12:52]That's a pattern. And Illinois has been running it for a long time. The building is still standing. The Spanish revival architecture is still there. The tile work, the manicured grounds, all landmarked, all protected.

[00:13:07]But the line isn't running. The workers aren't coming back. And the kids lining up on Halloween for candy from workers dressed as M and M's. That's a memory.

[00:13:20]Now, Illinois kept the building. It lost the point. And right now, today, the people of Gailwood are still in the middle of a fight that Springfield and city hall should have made unnecessary.

[00:13:36]They're not asking for the factory back.

[00:13:38]They know that's gone. They're asking for something, anything that acknowledges the century of value their neighborhood provided to a company that just moved on. A library, a job center, infrastructure for the people who are still there. That's not an unreasonable ask. It's the minimum. And it's still not settled until the people making policy in Springfield and city hall reckon honestly with why a 95-year institution decided it was time to move the work somewhere else and what they owe the communities left behind when it does. The pattern is going to keep repeating. Just with different factories, different neighborhoods, and different workers handing in their badges on the way out. What happened in Gailwood isn't the last chapter. It's the latest one. And right now it isn't even finished yet.