Pros
$15 daily meals, $14 an hour, and a safe, quiet environment to work in. Its also incredibly rare to have managers that care about you as much as mine did. This is a great place to decide if you want to continue in this industry.
Cons
Unfortunately its quite apparent that upper management couldn't care less about us despite how important we are to the company. First and foremost you'll be working mostly nonstop from the second you come in to the time you leave. It's mostly 8 hours of manual labor doing production work as opposed to actual baking and more often than not you do so alone. Despite making 90% of Panera's menu, the thing customers come for, you also won't make tips. It's also incredibly unlikely that you'll stay at one specific store, you might interview for one but after training you will have to drive to ones all over the district depending on who's off for the night. $14 an hour is also not worth the amount of work you do especially since it's below the $15 daily meal. If one hour of work spent preparing an entire days one variety of bread isn't even enough to buy one $15 meal, thats an issue. A bigger issue however is that you won't actually have time to eat a meal or any way to prepare one while at the store. Preparing bread takes HOURS so if you don't care about quality you can get out early but it's only $14 for 1 hour of your time so you really shouldn't care a whole lot anyways. Day time management has very little regard for making your job easier or safe either. Oftentimes the walk in freezer is blocked and boxes are in places where they can fall on you. They also don't have proper baking equipment so you usually have to bring your own in because while going to different stores already and slows you down, they also just might not have what you need. This means knives, gloves, dough scrapers and any other thing you might need. Depending on the store you also might end up spending the first 30-40 minutes of your night cleaning up after others and reorganizing so you can work. There are often missing ingredients too. Usually by the end of your night you'll be too exhausted to do a whole lot other than sleep through the 9 to 5 work day so be sure to get important stuff done on your days off. Understaffing will also cause you to sometimes work 6 or even 12 days straight without a day off, especially during holidays.