In the seven years since, “we served probably a half-million meals through this cafe, all at no set prices, as a gift to the community,” Shaich said in a phone interview with the Post-Dispatch. He said customers paid, on average, about 85 percent of the suggested price, proving, he said, “that people are fundamentally good.”
“We loved it, it worked well, it proved that the idea would work,” Shaich said.
The company opened similar cafes in Chicago; Dearborn, Michigan; Portland, Oregon; and Boston. Only the Boston location remains open.
The Chicago location, called Panera Cares, opened in June 2012 in Lakeview, on Diversey Parkway just east of Clark Street. It closed in January 2015. At the time, reports said the Panera Bread Foundation, which ran the nonprofit cafe, didn’t renew the café’s lease “due to changing economics.” Panera didn’t immediately respond to a request for more information on that closure Thursday.
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People are fundamentally good?
Then why are you shutting down? The reason set prices are enforced is because people ARE NOT FUNDAMENTALLY GOOD. The good people couldn’t overpay enough to keep the deadbeats from having the doors shuttered.
People shoplift, people steal, people scam welfare benefits, they jump borders, they rig elections with voter fraud, they leave men to die at an invaded consulate, they laugh about getting child rapists set free, they donate used underwear to get a tax deduction. There are all sorts of rotten people.
Please. Socialism does not work.
Even with ‘proof positive’ evidence the socialist purveyors of utopia will not admit the facts.
Hmmmm….sounds mostly like Hillary is NOT fundamentally good!
whaaaa??
NO BREAD FOR YOU,
Hate the place. You stand in line. You get your own drink, your condiments, napkins, utensils. Find your own seat. Go pick up your food from the kitchen. When you’re done, you bus your own table. And they have the nerve to ask for a tip, before you eat. Hell, they should be tipping me.
Worst chain in the country. Whopper with cheese ftw!
Hmmmm, this charitable community appreciation business model didn’t seem to harm Starbucks in those cities.
Homeless making the food for alms. Didn’t know what latex gloves for. Load in pants gave an unsavory aroma, but still smelt better than food.
Expenses in a restaurant usually break down to ~ : 40% food cost, 40% labor, 15% semi-fixed costs like facilities/utilities/compliance costs. That leaves 5% profit if everything is done well. I am not aware of an industry that even has a 15% profit margin, but I do know that in food 5% profit is as good as it gets for repeatable performance. This was no doubt a feel-good decision made by upper management, without the benefit of critical analysis.
While people may not be fundamentally good, there are a great deal of fundamentally good people. I would argue that the mere fact of our (USA) existence is proof that there are more people who are “good” and want to live decent lives than there are that are “bad” and want to steal, loot, and rob their neighbors and friends. Of course, the ratio isn’t fixed, and changes from city to city, state to state, region to region, and sometimes block by block or neighborhood by neighborhood – maybe even street by street.
But that ratio does seem to be changing. It APPEARS that there exists more evil in the world (today), but a historical view doesn’t bear that out.
The simple fact is that a restaurant is NOT a charity, but a business. If they desire to establish a soup kitchen, they should do so, and not attempt to cloak it as a “restaurant.” The “logic” of these people is impenetrable.
izlamo delenda est …
If closing proves the idea works,what were they trying to prove?
@ Anonymous,
MUCH larger margin on $3 a cup coffee than any food (as Zhytamyr so eloquently pointed out above..). As I recall from some business classes a hundred years or so ago, most restaurants survive on the drinks. $5 for an once of Jack! or $1.98 for four ounces of soda (the rest being ice).
“Speaking the truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act.” Geo. Orwell
It’s been my observation that fundamentally good people are fundamentally intelligent people – so they eat at places wit h good food for reasonable price not pretentious overpriced slopholes
Sometimes it’s not a matter of good or bad, it’s a matter of information. Sometimes I just don’t know what a business needs to charge for a product in order to survive. That’s the function of pricing; the seller tells you what he wants and needs for a product, and the buyer decides if it is worth it based on that information.
I think Paneras was hoping many people would overpay and that regular customers would know what a Paneras meal should cost. It wasn’t benevolence; it was an underhanded attempt to make more money.
People that can pay more are just going to step up and subsidize it for those that can’t. Really. And there is a form where you can pay extra taxes or just not hire an accountant, take the lowest basic deduction. Do any of these rich liberals do that? Hell no.
@Crackerbaby. I was being facetious in that Starbucks former activist CEO preaches a socialistic philosophy & demands/shames those who disagree, yet their actual business model is purely capitalistic. In other words, they don’t give shit away. Hypocrisy thy name is Howard Schultz.
The problem with socialism is not that it doesn’t work, but that it DOES.
Let me explain…
A husband and wife work at separate jobs doing separate things and earning separate salaries. They place the earnings from their jobs into a single bank account, withdrawing funds from that single account as they have need. Sound familiar? This is a communist economic model. But it works. Why? The identities of all participants in the system are known to all participants in the system. If one of the participants chooses not to contribute, it is recognized quickly and dealt with personally.
Proponents of socialism see how it works in households and strive to employ it on a national scale. What they don’t see is the reason it works in households is the reason it DOESN’T work on a large scale. Exponentially increasing the number of participants grants each participant greater anonymity, leading to half the participants abusing the system by not contributing to it, and the other half becoming so frustrated at having to carry the load for the first half that they shut down. (see also Atlas Shrugged)
Only ate there once, a long time ago. Must not have been worth going back.