Of Course Panera Workers Don’t Care About Making Money for Stockholders

Every day that I wake up with nagging self-doubt, I have to remind myself how conventionally successful many truly delusional people are. Earlier this month, Business Insider published an article about Panera Bread founder Ron Shaich’s admission that his workers aren’t motivated by the idea of making money for stockholders. “No employee ever wakes up and says, ‘I’m so excited. I made another penny a share today for Panera’s shareholders,’” he told the outlet.

Of course, the internet couldn’t resist dunking on him for his perceived lack of awareness—anyone who’s not completely out of touch understands that normal people work for money, to pay their own bills, not for the benefit of some pale, cash-sick investor terrorizing the cart girls at his local golf course. But I think these comments say more about the culture of corporate executives than they do about Shaich himself.

In a November article also published on Business Insider, Shaich said that he writes his own obituary once a year, trying to view his life from a wider perspective to reflect on how his community and loved ones will perceive what he’s done with his life. He says people should “focus on [their] obituar[ies], not [their] resume[s].” While it’s nice that Shaich has figured out that life is more valuable than how many bullet points you have on your resume or how much cash you can stack in your bank account, it’s worrisome that this can be framed as a profound worldview.

Both of Shaich’s statements reveal the kind of world in which he lives and the people he’s surrounded by—people who think living what most of us consider a good life, focused on relationships and seeking some kind of deeper meaning, is an aberration from the norm. It’s not groundbreaking to care more about the wellbeing of the people around you than your company’s bottom line. It’s literally what every YA novel and Lifetime movie is about. This stuff is basic. But clearly, Shaich believes this idea is profound enough to mention in an interview.

In his book, Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations, Shaich writes about the importance of therapy and how it helped him learn to connect with people and understand their motivations. He says he learned to ask himself: “What motivates them, and how do I help them decide to affiliate with what the mission of the enterprise is?”

I guess it’s nice that he’s going to therapy, but you shouldn’t have to do so to gain some baseline empathy for the people working at your company. Panera isn’t a nonprofit organization helping immigrants find housing or even a company working on the cutting edge of tech. It’s a business that sells mass-produced, under-seasoned cheddar broccoli soup in a bread bowl. Nobody is working there because they’re passionate about slathering shelf-stable pesto on some dried sourdough—they just need to pay their rent. It’s telling that his next question is, “How do I help them decide to affiliate with what the mission of the enterprise is?” But is the “mission of the enterprise” even worth affiliating with in any meaningful way? And couldn’t he just pay them more?

Of course Panera workers don’t care about making money for stockholders, but there are people who think who do, who think everyone at the company (and at all companies) should. Those are the types of people Shaich is talking to. They deserve the derision they receive when they display how deeply out of touch they are.

Samantha Maxwell is a food writer and editor based in Boston. Follow her on Twitter at @samseating.