The Huffington Post reports that Panera Bread Company, known by its original name in St. Louis – St. Louis Bread Company, just opened its first “pay what you want” cafe with the same menu as their 1,400 other locations. Customers are asked to donate whatever they want in exchange for the meal.
Via Melanie at Folks Gotta Eat, who enhances my pinko street cred just by being friends with me.
2 Responses
A PWYL mini-chain called Lentil As Anything (a very 1980s Australian pun, I’m afraid) has been doing a roaring trade here in Melbourne for years, and in fact has become a bit of an institution.
The PWYL model is a really interesting one. In Tallahassee we were trying to open up a coffee shop in a 1950s Presbyterian Center but needed to adopt a new pricing scheme because we couldn’t get a business license (If you bring one portion of the business up to ADA code and fire code you have to bring the whole enchilada up to code —the cost went up by a factor of ten!) This motivated my friends to write a theoretical paper on the subject of PWYL firms http://myweb.fsu.edu/jlightle/wgrepd.pdf