Posted on 09/29/2011 1:19:33 PM PDT by Daffynition
Panera Bread's noble experiment in pay-what-you-want retail has been successful at its first two restaurants in St. Louis and Detroit, taking in about 80% of the retail price of the food they serve. They serve as shining reminders of the fundamental goodness of people. In the Midwest, anyway. Until recently, the third free-will restaurant in Portland, Oregon was faltering, not attracting enough paying customers and losing money.
(Excerpt) Read more at consumerist.com ...
That's success? Show me a restaurant running a 20% margin. There ain't none. So, even these 'successes' are losing money.
ya mean this doesn’t work, dang gotta go back and fix my business plan
Don’t be too harsh on them. Communism implies people forced to donate to the “common good”. On the other hand, Panera is free to do whatever it wants, including throw money from the rooftops.
It’s an interesting experiment.
Why is this a surprise? Portland is loaded with liberals. And liberals are notorious for giving minimum amounts to charity. And they basically believe in taking, not giving.
Making 80% of the retail price is a “success”??
How many of these leftist coffee shops and stuff have we heard about that always go belly up?
Besides what’s so terrible about an unusual way to do charity anyway?
Liberals will lap this sh*& up on a national level. Panera knows damn well there wouldn’t be any money in it, it just “feels good”.~sarc I personally will avoid Panera at all costs however.
Ya greedy, capitalist pig! :P
Maybe part of the problem is the general public has no idea how much it actually COSTS to run a business. I’m sure many of our customers see their bill and assume we just pocket all of it. Some have even suggested as much.
They have no idea that just one software program we use is $200/month. $5k for a tool here, $10k for a piece of equipment there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money. That’s not even counting all the additional expenses from payroll to advertising to toilet paper and hand soap for the bathroom.
This isn’t all Panera’s restaurants, just a select few. They can write off the losses on their taxes and then jack the prices at the paying restaurants to cover it.
See, it works! lol
you provide TP and soap in the bathrooms? man you are nice
I’ve researched Panera’s pretty thoroughly before I knew you needed several million bucks to buy the franchise. As far as I can tell they operate on a 30% gross margin, depending on sales volume of course.
With free or significantly reduced food I’m sure their volume went up and the margin down. I’d bet they lost their shirts on this hair-brained scheme.
Whats stupid is they already had a pay what you can afford program. If you can’t afford the food you order something cheaper or go elsewhere.
Stupid commies, hope they all choke on rotten smoked turkey sandwich meat.
Socialism takes all the juice, all the color, all the fun out of life. It’s gray and dreary and joyless. Imagine running a business where there’s no incentive to please the customers, because they probably aren’t paying anyway. What kind of thrill do you get when you look at the balance at the end of the day and see that you almost broke even? What a nutcase.
It is just so easy to understand why.....Communism is about The Big Lie. All is deception (no trust can exist). Economy can’t flourish without trust—neither can families. Communism destroys families on purpose.
Why is it all lies—because of the underlying philosophy——The End justifies the Means. (Lying is permissible—just like in Islam, if it furthers their goal. Trust can never exist with people who believe it is good to lie. Good character does not exist in liars—with bad character, no loyalty and trust exists.).
It denies equal worth and dignity of all people (unlike Christianity). In other words....whoever holds the power can destroy or kill whomever makes the collective a better place—it is why trust can not exist. A few elites have control over life and death.
Societies in Communist nations have no trust of anyone—not even their state controlled children. No trust fosters fear and solitude. All organizations like the feminist ones, homosexual ones, ACLU (legal), Planned Parent, La Raza, Black Power—etc., were founded by Communists....to destroy Christianity and the natural family-—the teachings that it is wrong to lie, wrong to adhere to principles of chastity, etc—things which are known to promote trust.......These groups were designed to destroy trust and unity and separate.
Cultural Marxists want to destroy Western Civilization and remove the idea of private property rights which is the only thing keeping human beings from being treated like a termite colony. Agenda 21 is to create this termite colony.
Free food in St. Louis!!!!???? What’s the address????
In addition to encouraging piople to do nothing egalitarianism also leads them to demand everything. It is tantamount to the abolition not only of causality in the earning of income, but also of cost in the spending of income.
Bet the model would work in an upscale neighborhood. Just have a big screen showing everybody paid.
Bet the model would work in an upscale neighborhood. Just have a big screen showing everybody paid.
Note this restaurant lasted in the Wall Street era from 1885 until 1963 based on the honestly of its customers. It survived WW I, WWII, even the poor times of the depression. The affluent age killed it.
The first Exchange Buffet (”E & B”) restaurant opened in 1885 on New Street, near the New York Stock Exchange. The restaurants operated on the honor system—patrons took food from the buffet tables, then told the cashier what they had taken.
The system was called “eat ‘em and beat ‘em” (or “eat it and beat it”), after the “E & B” name. Most customers were honest, although some did “beat ‘em.” The Exchange Buffet went bankrupt in 1963 and the term “eat ‘em and beat ‘em” is no longer used.
Well, it does prove that socialism goes broke even faster when most of its constituents are smelly hippies than when they are normal people.
A restaurant that doesn’t require you to pay *is* a called a *soup kitchen.* in these parts.
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