Thursday, February 7, 2019

Panera Bread's Socialist Restaurants Failing, Shutting Down

I know, right?  The headline that a restaurant which is socialist in concept is going out of business is probably the least surprising headline in the world.  For me, the only surprise was that Panera Bread had started the chain called Panera Cares in the first place.
...Therefore, it created Panera Cares. The cool and different restaurant’s MO? It offered food at a “suggested donation” price.

Doesn’t that sound nice? Let’s all join hands and sing “Imagine” and just pay what we can afford. Personally, I’ve had my eyes on the Mercedes-Benz Maybach Exelero, suggested retail $8 million. I appreciate their suggestion; I’d like to give $124.92 — I have that exact amount on a Kohl’s merchandise card. I hope they like (sorta) high-quality yet affordable clothing and jewelry.

Now here’s a shock to us all: Panera Cares’ll be officially closing on February 15th. As it turns out, when you don’t make people pay for stuff, people don’t pay for stuff. Though there’s no “I” in “team,” there’s a big one in “Incentive,” which the non-capitalist Panera Cares (initials = PC; coincidence?) failed to grasp.
Panera opened the first Panera Cares in 2010 in a suburb of St. Louis, the corporate home town, and eventually extended the chain to Chicago, Boston, Dearborn, and Portland.  When they started the chain, their initial model was that they'd make it if 60% of customers paid regular price and 20% paid somewhat more, allowing the remaining 20% to eat for little or nothing.  Founder Ron Shaich coordinated the launch of the first store with a Ted Talk, saying:
“In many ways, this whole experiment is ultimately a test of humanity. Would people pay for it? Would people come in and value it?”
To me, it's surprising the company kept the chain afloat but I guess the love of socialist ideals dies hard.  One of the capitals of fail was Portland, Oregon, a city apparently striving hard to win the coveted title of Most Dysfunctional City in America.  The Portland restaurant was recovering only 60% of its costs.
[S]ix months after opening in 2011, leaders saw things at the Oregon cafe they hadn’t seen in Missouri or Michigan. Grant High School students mobbed the cafe daily, ordering multiple meals and not paying for them. Homeless people came for every meal — every day — as if the cafe was a soup kitchen. Hollywood neighbors complained of an increase in crime and loitering.

Many problems came down to “a sense of entitlement,” said Panera spokeswoman Kate Antonacci. Though the cafes are an experiment, they must become self-sustaining to survive. The money coming into the Portland cafe was so far below meeting costs at one point that the cafe seemed poised to close.
Founder Ron Shaich delivered an empassioned message in which he tried to convince the Free Shit Army that colonized his store that it wasn't a hand out; it was a “a café of shared responsibility”.  The response was what we've come to expect: “let someone else pay for it”.
By 2016, the Panera Cares experiment appeared to be winding down. The Dearborn restaurant shuttered in 2016, followed by the Chicago and Portland locations. Panera was sold to a private equity firm, JAB Holding Company in 2017. Shaich stepped down as CEO of the fast-casual chain in January 2018, around the same time that the pilot Panera Cares in St. Louis closed down. Shaich told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at that time that all the Panera Cares restaurants together served roughly 2 million meals during their operation, but “the nature of the economics did not make sense.” With only one location left in Boston, Fast Company rang the death knell of the pay-as-you-go experiment last June, with official confirmation of the final closure coming earlier this week.
The Boston Globe reports the story saying their store will be the last one to go dark on the 15th.
“Despite our commitment to this mission, it’s become clear that continued operation of the Boston Panera Cares is no longer viable,” Panera Bread said in an emailed statement. “We’re working with the current bakery-cafe associates affected by the closure to identify alternate employment opportunities within Panera and Au Bon Pain.”
Another stellar success for the root socialist concept: “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs”.  The concept has been flawless in its history, never having its perfect record of 100% failures ever marred by success. 


(Panera Cares' Boston location.  John Tlumacki/Boston Globe Staff photographer)


18 comments:

  1. I didn't know Panera had a separate chain. We like their food, and I didn't know the founder's political beliefs.

    I hope now that he's "sold out to Da Man", he's happy, and that the stores continue to have decent food.

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  2. One thing about socialism...the results are completely predictable.

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  3. I tried eating at a Panera once. So-so sandwiches at exorbitant prices. It's the sandwich version of Starbucks.

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  4. Socialism, and big government, REQUIRE good in people - limited government and democracy admit that people, especially in aggregate, don't act good, so they limit what can be done in aggregate.

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  5. I really really liked being an investor back in the 80's when a company would be in business to generate a profit for its owners. Things were so simple then. *sigh*

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  6. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
    AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
    AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
    AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
    AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
    AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
    AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
    AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

    Marcellus Wallace called: he said to tell Panera Bread that sudden stinging in the back of their heads was reality slapping the stupid out of them.

    Then he said their Idiotville privileges had been revoked.

    Farking moonbat morons.
    The stockholders should sue the board and CEO for deliberate malfeasance, and fire those idiots, while siccing an SEC investigation on them and their parent holding company.

    This is actually criminal conduct by a publicly traded company.

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    1. Do you really believe the left-wing SEC is going to work with the left-wing DOJ to bring charges against a left-wing company for being too far left?

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    2. Sorry, I was talking facts.

      If you wanted a religious discussion, we can switch gears, but the rules for that are different.

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  7. George Orwell's concept of doublethink is method acting. A way of partitioning the knowledge and computing in your brain so brain activity can't be monitored from outside. Prep some portions of your brain with lie data, so they produce a face-visible result consisted with the lie.

    What I am supposed to make of Panera Cares? Liberals aren't supposed to be stupid enough to actually do the stupid things they advocate and lose their own money. Maybe the CEO actually believed the socialist nonsense. A generational dynasty-preserving error where the upper-middle class children are not taught kingsmanship, but rather the lies intended to confuse and neuter the middle class and drive them into a blind canyon.

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  8. "Portland, Oregon, a city apparently striving hard to win the coveted title of Most Dysfunctional City in America"
    and a stone's throw from the epicenter of the measles epidemic.
    OT, I know, but it seems related somehow.

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  9. Ask the typical lefty and they'll STILL tell you that it was a "good idea"....just that it wasn't implemented "correctly". In other words a lefty will NEVER admit that people are people.....and can be counted on to take advantage of ANYTHING that is offered for "free". Instead they just keep right on doubling down on stupid. This little episode is a blatant example in microscale of what the left wants to do to the entire country.

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  10. I'm surprised that anyone would try this concept for more than three days.

    Now me, I don't eat at Panera's anyway. I can't make sense of the menu, the customers tend to be rude young women with delusions of grandeur, and the food isn't all that great.

    Maybe the rest of the chain will sink into the swamp along with this feel-good whatever it is.

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    1. I ate at the local Panera's years ago when they first opened - I found the food pretty average but overpriced. Liked it so much I never went back.

      My wife says she went to lunch with a group of friends recently and it was worse than it used to be.

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  11. Three quick thoughts:
    1) It is a sad commentary that people can obtain MBA's from 'Elite' schools and never once have encountered the Mayflower story and the lesson learned that first winter in Massachusetts and the reason for the first Thanksgiving (that God had delivered them from socialism).

    2) In a sense this was an example of the successful application of Marx's “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs”. The people of PCtopia had the ability to deliver a lesson to the Pantera suits that they needed to learn. Question is, after years of American educational torture were they able to internalize squat.

    3) At 9:18 Anonymous said, "Liberals aren't supposed to be stupid enough to actually do the stupid things they advocate and lose their own money". I would be willing to bet none of them lost jack. Are the Madero's broke, the Chávez's, the Castro's? Guaranteed Mr. Shaich et. al. walked away with a huge pension, stock options, etc. (the little old lady whose pension fund got screwed, they had no obligation to her whatsoever). As Andrew Wilcow often says, "Socialism is for the people, not the socialist."

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  12. that God had delivered them from socialism

    Who? I missed the part in the governor's diary describing the technological effect which was unmistakably of non-human origin. Mile-high flaming letters in the sky saying 'let each family work their own food plot, dummy'.

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  13. The universe creator presumably has debugger-level access to the human-perceivable universe; can breakpoint it, stop the clock, and make anything happen. Why isn't every tenth human made to fart "I am the LORD thy God" in Morse code with a CRC check digit? When people conclude 'without faith he is nothing' they are correct!

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    1. "The universe creator presumably has debugger-level access to the human-perceivable universe …". Typically it is considered poor form to demonstrate extreme shallowness of knowledge in the opening clause of one's argument; but, atheist essentially have nothing else to work with, so it ends before it can begin.

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