Monday, September 24, 2007

How many extra dressings does a person REALLY need?

What most customers don't understand is that Panera Bread employees bake the baguettes ourselves, are constantly running back and forth to stock our stations with cheese, meat, and vegetables and most importantly, we have to portion out our own salad dressings.

Every shift a salad person comes in, they are usually forced to spend an hour plus making dressings to prepare for "the rushes."

We don't do this because we think that we won't have enough for all of our orders, we do it becaus customers are continuously asking for extra dressings.

Here is another story to illustrate why it is annoying when customers ask for extra, extra items with their orders:

Sunday night, I worked a 3 p.m. until close shift, and the person who worked the morning shift left my station stocked with dressings. Knowing that I would get some customers that would ask for extra dressings, I worked until about 4 o'clock filling every extra inch of my workspace with these dressings.

Sure enough, a woman came in around 4:30 and ordered a Fuji Apple Chicken salad and a Asian Sesame Chicken salad, both with extra dressing.

After checking through her order, the woman went back to the cashiers to ask for more dressings...not just Fuji and Asian dressings, but 2 Caesars and 4 Balsamic vinaigrettes, which come with completely different salads.

It was probably the most blatant case of taking advantage of free dressings I had ever seen.

It is because of cases like this that facilities such as Panera are eventually going to be forced to charge 30 cents a dressing.

My advice: Seriously don't take more than you need for the salad you buy. You are eventually going to ruin this for yourself and other customers.

The complaint is not giving one, even two dressing for a full salad, but do you seriously need 6?

Just something to think about.

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