Panera Bread Pay-What-You-Can Store

Description

Amy Sullivan:

"Look closer and you'll notice something unusual for a restaurant chain that brings in more than $3 billion each year. There are no prices listed next to items on the menu boards and no cash registers. Instead, donation boxes sit on the counter, with signs telling customers: "Take what you need; leave your fair share." Panera cashiers take meal orders, hand patrons receipts indicating how much the items would normally cost, and let them decide how much to leave in the donation box or to take off their credit cards.

Panera Bread opened its first pay-what-you-can store in a St. Louis suburb in May 2010, and now operates five such cafés through its foundation. In 2013, these five locations are expected to serve more than 1 million people. Panera funds the initial conversion or build-out of a Cares Café and then donates it to the Panera Bread Foundation. From there, each café is expected to cover its operating and food costs.

The goal, as Kate Antonacci, Panera's Director of Societal Impact Initiatives, explains is to provide a way for some of the millions of Americans who are food insecure to have a regular meal while paying little or nothing. "These cafés prove that people can eat in a warm and welcoming place, and be served the same food as everyone else," says Antonacci. "It's not compromising the experience, but just changing who would be able to access that food."

The bet Panera has placed is that other customers will pay more than their meal costs in order to subsidize those who cannot afford to pay full-price. So far, it's worked. Most of the cafés are consistently self-sustaining, with approximately 60 percent of patrons paying the suggested price, 20 percent paying less or nothing, and another 20 percent paying more than the cost of their meal.

The concept of a pay-what-you-can restaurant isn't new—several dozen small independent coffee shops and restaurants around the country have tried the same experiment. But it's not easy and many, like Seattle's Terra Bite coffeehouse, don't last more than a few years. Even those that do survive are often housed in low-traffic locations like churches and serve at most a few hundred people in a week.

Panera Cares is the first time a major corporation has put muscle and resources behind making pay-what-you-can work." (http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/06/how-store-no-cash-registers-and-no-prices-makes-money/5908/)