Word: stilling
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What's the best business reaction to a recession? How about none at all. Unlike many outfits in the struggling restaurant industry, Panera, the soup and sandwich chain with more than 1,300 stores in 38 states, has stayed strong by standing still. "The key to Panera's success lies in what the company hasn't done," says Nicole Miller Regan, an analyst at Piper Jaffray. "Panera hasn't fallen victim to discounting. It hasn't levered up the balance sheet. It hasn't tried to change...
...store sales (down 0.6% in November), Panera's continued growth stands out. "I've never seem restaurants this competitive," says Bob Derrington, an analyst at Morgan Keegan and a 30-year veteran of the industry. "It's a flea market out there. For Panera to keep their prices and still succeed like this - it's an astounding achivement." (See the best business deals...
Shaich's recession-fighting philosophy is simple. "We understood that the fundamentals of the marketplace really haven't changed," says Shaich. "Unemployment went from 5% to 10%. There's 90% of society that is still employed. I couldn't capture all those people that are unemployed. They weren't eating out at all. All I could do was stay focused on who my target customer was, and not be reactive...
...Panera's credit, the company didn't sit completely still in 2009. While the restaurant world cut staffs and shuttered stores, Panera continued to invest. "We've been basically opening up a new store every five days," says Shaich. "This is the time to grow. Real estate costs are down, development costs are down, volumes are up - these are the highest-return investment stores we'll ever generate." Panera has hired 20,000 new workers, rolled out new menu items, and improved the lettuce quality in its salads. Salad sales are up 30%. (Read a brief history of peanut butter...
...Party-shot isn't going to send the amateur photographer the way of the switchboard operator. Still, for version 1.0, it is an adequate stand-in at large gatherings, and can come in really handy at small ones, like a family birthday, when nobody wants to be on camera duty. It guarantees that there will be some sort of photo documentation, making it a fairly cheap form of insurance against a lazy or distracted human photographer. It also guarantees, I suspect, a proliferation of even more mediocre photos on Facebook...