Or, before you know it, you’ve taken advantage of those free lemonade refills a few times too many, and oops-you’re 1,000 milligrams of caffeine in the hole and have spent the past four hours inside Panera reading the Wikipedia pages of each of the 10 largest airports in the world. Maybe you’ll enjoy a quick cup of homestyle chicken noodle soup and a half-size Fuji apple salad with chicken, and then be on your way. It beckons you in with its informal comforts and asks you to sit back on one of its many lightly cushioned, vinyl-coated sofas. And what else would you expect? Panera, which has been strategically arranged to make you feel a vague sense of familiarity, is a monument to quiet American hedonism. That it’s even an option to sit down, open up your computer, and drink cup after cup of extreme sugar-lemon water for 40 cents a day is uniquely Panera. This content requires consent that you have not granted on Slate. At Panera, the mayhem is merely disguised by the presence of words like Napa and brioche, and the dissonance of it all abounds. Panera seems so innocent-until you remember that they’re essentially feeding you a loaf of sourdough with every meal. And that’s weird-a Charged Lemonade would be a better fit for the X Games vibe of Taco Bell, a chain that already flavors everything with Mountain Dew and Doritos dust. Instead, it’s this suburban-feeling sandwich retailer that has shaped itself as a simulacrum of the neighborhood cafe. If it were a 7-Eleven selling chaos in a cup, nobody would think twice. Maybe It Should Be.Īll of this helps explain what makes this Panera lemonade situation so compelling. The Royal Family Is Freaked Out by Prince Harry’s Court Testimony. I Finally Asked My Second-Grader What Happens in Her Lockdown Drills. When I Tried to Help, I Saw How Deep Our National Crisis Really Is. My 10-Year-Old Daughter Wants to Be Dead. Particularly with its Unlimited Sips program, Panera has shaped itself to be a third place where people can hang around with a low barrier to entry-even more so than Starbucks, where two drinks would cost as much as a month’s worth at Panera, and there aren’t even free refills. As Forbes first wrote in 2015, Panera has increasingly been chasing this idea as well, arranging their stores more like living room spaces and encouraging customers to stick around by offering free Wi-Fi. Starbucks, notably, is explicitly designed with the third place in mind.
The first is the home, the second is the workplace, and the third is any other environment where people can freely gather and exist in public without obligation. This concept originates from sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s 1989 book The Great Good Place, wherein he separates daily life into three distinct spaces. Panera, on the other hand, is what’s known as a “ third place,” a special type of social environment that blurs the lines of work and home. But given that McDonald’s isn’t exactly relaxing, it may not be people’s first choice for a leisurely afternoon hang. Technically, one could do the same thing at a McDonald’s or another more casual fast food spot.
#PANERA CHARGED LEMONADE MAC#
You come for the goblin-level mac and cheese, you sit down and eat your 1,150 calories, and you don’t ask questions. For one, why does a lemonade need to contain the caffeine equivalent of four and a half shots of espresso, two and a half Red Bulls, or a 24-ounce cup of dark roast coffee? Well, why does a meal of cheese and pasta need to be housed in its own vessel of bread? Because this is a Panera, I guess. Even so, the contentious beverage appears to have developed a cultlike following in the past several days, garnering tons of tweets from people who are dying-hopefully not literally-to try them. (Or maybe they’ve just … run out.) Others have called for all three Charged Lemonades to be banned since some people find them “ clinically addictive” and lose entire days of sleep after drinking them. So far, it doesn’t appear as if anyone has taken legal action against Panera, but some people have claimed their party-pooping stores have removed the Mango Yuzu Citrus flavor because of the controversy.
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