Panera overnight baker. I got hired as a warm body to stop them from having to fly someone in and put them up in a hotel. I did not have any relevant qualifications. My training was rushed and done by someone who wasn’t qualified to train me. Then when I was doing the job too slowly, they decided it was cheaper to bring someone in than to keep paying me overtime. I almost cried. I’d never made more than $10 an hour prior to that job, so I thought I was making good money. I wasn’t. Panera and their overpriced shit can eat my whole ass.
Panera, at least around where I am, used to allow employees to take away discarded/unused/expired bread for personal use. But that was too nice to the poors so that ended eventually.
A lot of that is about the bread wall. You can buy the full miches, among other things, off the bread wall behind the counters. I guess they’ve found that having all that fresh bread out front increases sales (kind of like how groceries stores out fresh flowers out front and then having the produce section be right near the front door), but a lot of the big ones sell really inconsistently. Not many people are doing grocery shopping at Panera, you know? Some days the bread wall empties. Other days, it’s half full at the end of the day with bread that’s only a couple days away from being moldy or so hard it’s not edible. So they mark up the bread that’s most likely to remain on the shelf anyway and it becomes tax deductible when they donate it to a local charity. They get their pretty bread wall that sells out two days a week and they get to write off their losses.
But if they don’t donate the bread, it’s not deductible. And if you let employees take enough extra bread, they stop buying as much on their lunch breaks and you start getting empty bags arriving at local soup kitchens, which is a bad look and can jeopardize the arrangement.
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I work at a chain bakery and it’s the same. Every day there’s so many sweet + savoury goods left over and they just get thrown away. It used to be allowed that you could just take them home but that got banned for…no particular reason. The managers at the place I work are really nice but I guess they’re sticklers for the rules as they don’t ignore it-which I don’t blame as apparently the loss prevention team already installed a secret camera in there (they came in overnight!) because people kept messing up the tills and they think people are stealing money. Plus I guess if they don’t get enough food waste they get suspicious. It’s a load of shit…
