I don’t think that most people are fundamentally good, but fundamentally selfish. That’s evolutionary psychology.

up yours, Ayn Rand

I disagree, the lessons is that most people conform to norms. This is why people pay the suggest amount, and it’s why people torture other people just for the heck of it.

Being a sheep doesn’t make you good, it makes you easy to manipulate.

This paints the Panera brand in a rosy light, in a way that slinging overpriced sandwiches can’t do – at least in the eyes of those less cynical than myself.

Moral of the story: It is some gross processed reformed turkey puke that isn’t worth $3.

So the foundation of this is really to build places like this as genuine community centers.

Theoretically, since the person who takes a free sandwich is working within the model that Panera sets up for all, I don’t see how you can say he/she is “bad” but the people who pay are “fundamentally good.”

Still a cool idea. But it proves nothing on a larger scale.

For example, just after the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the Jersey Mike’s restaurants in my area ran a special deal: for one day only, you could get a free regular sandwich in exchange for a donation — however large or small — to the American Red Cross. One would hope that people would go and donate an amount at least equal to what they would have paid for the sandwich, but apparently that wasn’t the case. It’s my understanding that the restaurants really took a bath on this one, because people were lined up from lunch to dinner, their entire families in tow, all queued up to drop a dollar (or even less) for a sandwich that would otherwise cost five or six bucks.

I guess there was some attempt by the poor staff of the restaurants to urge people to Not Be A Dick Because Hey This Is For Charity, but apparently there are considerable segments of the populace whose sense of charity is so small that it cannot even be located so that one can attempt to appeal to it.

I’d like to see them try this model out in places where taking advantage of the system is a way of life.

You mean, like Wall Street?

I’m just sayin’ it probably works better than you think. Of course, they do have a good sized endowment…

I don’t for a second believe that Panera are testing out this business model as a means of illustrating the inherent goodness of people. They’re doing it because they realize they can still pull in a profit while making themselves look good in the process, and apparently it’s working. Call me cynical, but if the business model had failed, would Panera still be lauding the fundamental goodness of their patrons? Or would they instead abandon their own, widely trumpeted spirit of charitability in favor of more lucrative endeavors?

The lesson here is that Panera thinks people are fundamentally good as long as Panera is still in the black. I think a “pay what you think it’s worth” model is a better gauge of honesty, anyway.

Do they claim that it would work everywhere, all the time?

Do you know of an economic/business model would work everywhere, all the time?

Which is why this will not make the nightly news, the show that reminds you that other people are mostly bad.