Loaves of bread sit on a table at St. Louis Bread Co. Cares Community Cafe, part of Panera, in Clayton, Mo. The restaurant, where patrons pay as much or little as they want for a meal, is closing its doors Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2018
Posted on 02/13/2019 7:52:09 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Panera Bread has shuttered the last of its ideologically driven "pay what you want" restaurants. The socialist-tinged ventures were called "Panera Cares" and the higher-ups have finally figured out that "caring" is not synonymous with "viable business model." On February 15, the final Panera Cares, located in Boston, will close.
The website Eater gives Panera Cares' history and provides the company's motivation behind the now-defunct mission:
The chain opened its first donation-based community cafe in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2010. Under the model championed by the company’s founder Ron Shaich, the restaurant operated like a typical Panera, but offered meals at a suggested donation price, with the goal of raising awareness about food insecurity. “In many ways, this whole experiment is ultimately a test of humanity,” Shaich said in a TEDx talk later that year. “Would people pay for it? Would people come in and value it?” It appears the answer is a resounding no.
Food insecurity? While having a pretty good idea of what the term means, I still looked it up. According to Feeding Texas, "Food insecurity offers an accepted method for measuring food deprivation."
You know who's probably suffering from food insecurity? The employees of Panera Cares who are no longer employed and no longer receive paychecks. You can't buy food if you don't have a job, and providing jobs is only assured if companies are focused on making money. If Panera had cared more about making money than promoting a constantly refuted ideology, its employees would still be receiving paychecks. Frighteningly, though, a growing segment of the populace seems to be allergic to common-sense economic principles.
Resources and wealth do not exist in a vacuum. Someone had to provide and pay for the tables, chairs, ovens, checkout computers, et al. that allowed Panera Cares to provide a service to their customers. And that's not to mention the food costs, salaries, and the overhead that come with doing business in a building that requires electricity, climate-controlled temperatures, and, well, walls and a ceiling. Making money costs money. This is why businesses that give their stuff away or sell it below the market rate go out of business. All the caring and empathy in the world can't change the fact that it cost money to provide Panera Cares' customers with food. And if the money that the company receives back is less than the money the company spent, everyone eventually loses.
The other side of that is that humans tend to be greedy and all about self-preservation. If you offer a customer the option to pay whatever they want, the vast majority of customers are not going to inquire about how much it cost the restaurant to put the food on their plate. Instead, as a general rule, customers are going to approach payment in terms of themselves. Which, to be fair, was Panera Cares' stated desire — you know, raising awareness about food insecurity and providing people the ability to eat regardless of their economic status.
Dumbasses. Stockholders should demand a complete cleaning out of their management.
I wouldn’t eat at Panera even if it was free. Over priced, terrible food.
“Pay what you want” makes about as much sense as AOC proposing to pay people who don’t want to work.
Market Economies understand, and make use of, human nature. It is what it is, and using self-interest and self-preservation as part of the foundation of the economic and political system is just smart. It works.
Socialism just ignores human nature and pretends that we are all self-sacrificing angels who will behave well and care more about others than we care about ourselves. This never works.
Take what you need and leave your ‘fair share’
Well, at least they know what some people think of as their ‘fair share’. Perhaps ‘they’ should only charge ‘the rich’ whatever ‘the rich’ think of as their ‘fair share’. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
Their broccoli-cheese soup is the shizznit though.
I’m glad that Panera tried this. It’s one thing for leftists to go around spouting these ideas that common sense would tell you are ridiculous. It’s another level to actually attempt it. And it’s failure should prove that the people with common sense were right.
Free markets are in fact more altruistic than socialism. In their purest form a free market motivates people to maximize the goods and services they provide to their fellow man. There is no such motivation in a command economy.
i like their bread and pastries but hate their seating configuration.
and the principle that profits are the means and motive of increased total productive ability works best in a free and rational society.
In reality free markets operate in a geopolitical milieu. So free markets end at the border.
Panera has lost its way. Its food is way over priced, and they haven’t upgraded their menu or stayed true to their original mission of nutritional whole foods. Their coffee is awful, giving Starbucks real competition for “worst coffee”. If they were to ask me to pay what it’s worth, they’d get $3 for a sandwich, $1 for a pastry, bagel, or two slices of toast, $2.50 for a smoothing or designer coffee.
Market economies do this because people naturally act of self-interest, and this provides an efficient means of increasing wealth.
Altruism implies that I will sacrifice my own interests in an attempt to help you rather than to help myself. I don't think this works at all. Self-interest is good. Altruism is bad.
Sorry if I'm being pedantic about word choice. Ayn Rand made me do it.
The left- Denying human behavior for eons.
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