Assistant Manager - Assistant Manager Panera Bread Employee Review

1. Training is touted heavily at Panera Bread. Prepare to likely receive below standard training though as a manager. Then prepare to be held accountable for things that were taught to you wrong, or completely not at all. Prepare to be completely frustrated in this area for at least your first year. The program for training associates is excellent in theory.... however, it usually falls even further short than your training as a manager. You will be expected to provide about 100 hours of training (according to the guidelines set forth in Panera Bread's standards) for each associate, but be pressured from upper management to push them through in under 20. You receive no credit for training associates as far as labor is concerned, but you will be allowed 20 hours a week for it in total for the store. Try training even 1 full time associate for 20 hours a week or less. 2. Prepare to work way more than the amount of hours a week they tell you that you are going to work. The job is said to be 50 hours a week. Its going to be closer to 60 on average. Each assistant manager has a certain area of the administrative work they must perform. You will be given much less time to fulfill those duties than it actually requires, then be expected to stay after your shift is over to finish those duties. Depending on which area of admin duties you receive, your admin time will often be completely skipped because of other priorities. If you do the food cost section, your work must be done at a certain time, so your usually given enough time to do it. If you do the schedule and ordering forecasting... well that could always be done tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow ect).. And if you are the training specialist... expect to be given very little to no dedicated time to get the job done... but training is so very important to Panera Bread (as it should be).... wait a second, on nevermind. 3. Expect to see very little to no bonuses. It will probably be emphasized how great their bonuses are when you get hired (to make up for the slightly disappointing base salary offered). For example: If the customer survey for the month/quarter is scoring too low, you will receive reduced or NO bonus. Which makes sense in my mind and is a great idea, however, the last month I worked there, only 2 cafe's out of 40+ in my company received full bonus potential. More than 60% of the cafes lost their bonuses COMPLETELY because of the scores. Something is wrong when less than 5% of the stores make the goal. Food Cost: I only remember making food cost maybe 3 quarters of out of the 3+ years I was there. I worked in several cafe's under several different store managers and a few different district managers during that time. I doubt there was ever a quarter that food cost was made in all 4 cafes in my district. There were several quarters that no cafe made food cost. Also: Panera Bread has several menu items with higher than 40%-50% food cost. Labor: the allotted labor given is pretty tight to begin with. Its possible to do, but only if everything is going 100% right. In order to make labor you need VETERAN associates with no new hires coming in. Expect to actually make labor less than 50% of the quarters. Cash Flow Through: The company I worked at uses cash flow through rate as the ultimate caveat to whether or not you will receive bonuses. The cash flow through rate can be unsatisfactory and the company still be profting. However, if the cash flow through rate for THE ENTIRE COMPANY is lower than they projected last year, you will receive reduced and in most cases NO bonus. That right... do everything right in your cafe by some miracle and if other cafes are not doing it right, you will lose your bonus that YOU EARNED. Yearly Evaluations: You will receive a raise once a year as a manager. The highest raise is 5%, but dont expect anywhere near that amount each year. Panera Bread's evaluation process is completely flawed in my opinion. It is mainly subjective. In addition, on a 1 to 5 scale, 3 means you are doing your job perfectly fine. Do your job perfectly fine and you will get all 3's which will get you a 2.5% raise each year. I would only guess than maybe a third of managers got a 3 or higher average on their yearly evaluations. 4. Turnover is a HUGE company wide problem with the company I worked for. I get the feeling its also an issue nearly across the entire country. The associates that work for you have an extremely difficult job compared to other jobs available in this area of work. It takes the average associate 6 months to become just proficient at their job. The starting pay is low for associates. Its almost impossible to give associates merit raises. The most an associate can get in raises each year is 5% normally... but no associate will ever see that much (5% on 8.00/hour is 40 cents). The average associate will get about a quarter an hour raise each year. 5. The company I worked for had a habit of moving managers around to different locations pretty often. This might work for Wal-Mart but was one of the very big problems in my opinion. Store managers would often come and go, assistant managers moved around even more. Associates had no loyalty to managers because it was always someone new. One way you could tell if the upper management thought you were doing a good job, was how often you got moved around to a new store. If they thought you were doing poorly, you got moved around A LOT. There are also an abundance of below average managers working for this company, both in lower and upper management. 6. I witnessed other managers getting 'picked on' (for a lack of a better word) by upper management for no reason other than they just dont like you. I even felt like one store manager was ridiculed extra hard because she was female. Once a different, male store manager, who was under performing was put in place, all the extra scrutiny stopped (the male manager was then fired a couple years later by a different district manager for under performing). Im a male myself, so seeing this happening in today's workplace should have been my final warning sign. Several different managers often felt alienated by upper management (regardless of their performance as a manager). District managers I worked under were unethical, made poor decisions, and just did very little to actually move the business in a positive direction. 7. Everyone has certain areas they need to work on for professional growth. Everyone has certain areas they excel in. Expect to be constantly reminded how lacking you are in your weaker areas, no matter how good you are overall or not. 8. Expect to hear this phrase or a form of it on a regular basis: "Im sorry that you took what I said so personal." or "Its not my fault you took that personally." In my opinion when someone said that, they realized they were caught being an a** to someone, and that was their way of trying to get out of it. Its way over used in the company I worked for. 9. When you are hired and several times through out your time at Panera Bread, you will be told and reminded that this company expects a profit margin of 1-2%. If all is going well, they are happy making 10,000 to 20,000 profit for every 1 Million in sales. If you have worked at other concepts before, this should be your first warning sign that something is WRONG at Panera Bread!! At first I choose to be in denial and believed they had to be making more than that, but it really is true. If everything is going excellent (and if you have read everything up to now you know it usually is not), Panera Bread runs at 1/5 of the profit margins that most fast food places expect and achieve on a regular basis. 10. Recent developments are making Panera Bread less attractive from a job standpoint. Longer late night hours, addition of drive thru's, conversion to full service restaurant without the support to make this possible, and in place culture values and concepts essences are taught but not practiced as they use to be. 11. The average meal with a drink is well over $10 at Panera Bread. The guests expect full service restaurant in exchange but we are only given cafe level tools to accomplish. I would expect the same as a guest at Panera Bread which is why I don't eat there since I left. I cant tell you how many times a month someone would walk up to me as the manager and expect me to justify why their ticket was $50 for 2 adults and 2 kids... or something of that nature. If I was being honest, I would have to agree with them but instead I tried to convince them the quality of the product was the reason (not the portion sizes or service).