Skip to main content

Limitless Tea

This subscription offer from Panera Bread appears to a prefect value for the customer. I am regular at Panera but not a big spender. For customers like me this could make sense and yes, sometimes we may buy some food too. What is more, we may likely look to stop at a Panera for our coffee on a road-trip and that would be at the cost of Dunkin or McDonald's which are our current options. Once a customer signs-up, which is likely the biggest hurdle to overcome for Panera, the rest will likely go pretty easy. 

 The question is does at what point does the customer cost them more than the $9 they bring per month. The old ladies from the knitting club at my local Panera could keep those refills coming for hours and only share one bear-claw between the four of them. They are they to knit and chat- such a monthly plan could help them hang out more often and longer. The trick would be to get the mix right - not much different than keeping the vacuum cleaner category of buffet customers at bay for the venture to be profitable. .

As we all wait for normalcy to return those long hang-outs at Panera with groups of people may be a dream right now. But a ritual of grabbing a cup of coffee every day just to step out of the house maybe actually be therapeutic right now.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more