The article didn’t mention that their prices have really ballooned. My family of four can’t get out of there for less than $50 anymore. At that price we might as well go to a restaurant with wait staff and fresher foods.
And that their food quality has opposite-of-ballooned. Deballooned.
Deflated (in quality, not price)
I never got to try it out when it was supposed to be great. My only experience was a few weeks ago, and the quality was subpar.
10ish years ago it was pretty good. Somewhere around 2015 I noticed the size and quality of some items take a massive dive.
Want some hard bread and lunchmeat with a slice of tomato and wilted Lettuce?
That’ll be $14 please.
Their bagels used to be ok but I haven’t tried them in awhile.
The inconsistent quality of the mac n’ cheese is so irritating. And their home version absolutely tastes like plastic no matter how you heat it.
Unfortunatelly I cannot compare the quality with what it was in good olden days, but Panera is my family go to place whenever we are on the road. It’s the only place I know in US where you can quickly get a decent salad or soup with predictable quality, and not a bad one. And being a large network I can find it practically anywhere.
Soups and salads in other common eateries, like diners etc are usually awful.
It’s more about how it started as a sort of anti-McDonalds and it’s becoming more and more soulless corporate. No more couches and armchairs, no more bread baked fresh in the restaurant…
Oh, did they stop baking bread fresh in the restaurant in order to circumvent the California minimum wage increase that was going to exclude them?
The article says they now ship frozen bread which is baked locally.
This is in contrast to what used to be mixed on site. Like an actual bakery.
Now it’s a fresh as subway, which also distributes frozen dough that is baked on site.
Subway also used to mix and bake on site…
I worked at Subway in 1993, frozen tubes of bread dough we would pop in the oven. although I do remember my manager one day making a giant braided bread out of fresh dough.
It’s about saving money, but they didn’t say what prompted it other than corporate mergers.
Wait, fresh baked bread is what made them exempt from California minimum wage laws.
How?
I stand corrected. Looks like they cleared up the exemption for businesses that bake bread for sale on premises.
https://abc7news.com/panera-bread-california-minimum-wage-newsom/14496645/
Capital markets, where profiteers provide ZERO labor but expect virtually ALL profit, merely by presenting the chips from their last trip to the exploitation casino rigged in their favor, is destroying entire economic sector’s ability to provide the goods/services they existed to provide in the first place.
A long time ago, business understood customers came first and employees came second if investors wanted eventual return on investment. Investers had nothing to do with the labor that went into making the money, so they obviously came last. Then the owners of the capital markets used their power and governmental capture to demand “ME FIRST AND ONLY! ALL OF IT!”
WarnerBrosDiscoveryHBOetc as just one example is more eager to shelve projects for tax breaks and lay off the talent that facilitated their success to pay for mergers to eliminate competiton than to make content, and when they do, they take zero creative risks because fuck you they eliminated actual content creation companies so where you gonna go? Here’s 2 hours of the laziest, most incoherent appeals to nostalgia from when we made actual movies that you ever did see.
But the shareholders get their short term profit bump and that’s all publicly traded companies care about. The shareholders are the customers, we are the product. Consumers no longer matter to them, their products/services no longer matter to them. This is a perversion of an economy that has abandoned the very point of its existence: a lowly tool to maximize the efficient distribution of goods and services for the benefit of the society it is a lowly tool for. The tail is wagging the dog. We live in servitude to feeding the cancerous economy.
This is happening in every market sector. It’s a fire sale. Entire economic sectors eating themselves to survive and please investors isn’t a business model, it’s a slow motion collapse.
This race to the bottom with no new unexploited markets in which to grow/metastasize on a conquered monopoly board isn’t sustainable in any way, but the owners don’t care beyond their next quarterly earnings report.
Collapse by lazy, do nothing, profiteering, insatiably greedy capitalists who demand we burn it all to feed them ever moooaaaaaar.
I agree with the take even though it’s depressing. I just wonder sometimes if a business that does the right thing (focus on the customer, pay a fair wage, good quality, etc) can even survive anymore.
I’d say I have a burger joint that is bees knees near me that I go for the vegan options, but I think those people barely pay above minimum wage….
Walmart proved that they can’t 20-30 years ago by providing a level of cheap in every sense of the world that no new business with honest intent could ever match, killing small town main streets.
And in an economy full of desperate people, cheap > quality or community.
This economy’s incentive structure waved bye bye to the honest provision of goods and services between citizens half a century ago.
I agree it’s depressing, It’s just what I observe.
What I think is even sadder is that even if a local small business makes a good, honest product and values consumers and employees and even if it miraculously doesn’t get decimated by cheap>quality and becomes successful. It will still get destroyed because private equity or another large soulless corporation will swoop in and make an offer the owner can’t refuse which then starts the the good business down the road of being sucked dry by the corporate vampires.
I do my best to go out of my way to patronize small businesses first, but too many times I’ve seen this happen. Every time it’s so depressing. What’s more depressing is that it really doesn’t need to be this way, and yet we continue as is.
The article doesn’t even go into the regulatory capture where they were almost written out of the California minimum wage requirement.
Yeah, someone else said that had something to do with ending the fresh-baked bread thing. Do you have the details?
Thanks!
They rocked 25 years ago. Haven’t had what I would call a good meal from them in a decade.
