Photo shows the Recycle logo, comprising three bent green arrows forming a triangle. Slicing the Line Topic: Decision-making process, creative problem solving

Panera Bread Company is an American chain of bakery-café fast casual restaurants based out of St. Louis, Missouri. Founded more than 35 years ago, Panera is now an enterprise with more than 2,000 bakery-cafés, 100,000 associates, and annual systemwide sales of more than $5 billion.68 As an extremely popular destination for hungry customers, Panera had a problem: lines and lines of customers. A bottleneck at the registers for placing orders. Then, another bottleneck of customers waiting to pick up their food. Panera Bread’s CEO, Ron Shaich, called it a “‘mosh pit’ of people ...

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