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Panera Bread Is The Largest Provider Of Free WiFi
ayb11 writes "According to this article, the Panera Bread chain of Bakery/Cafes (think Starbucks that bakes their own bread) is the largest provider of free WiFi in the US. Their web site says, " There are currently 573 Wi-Fi enabled Panera Bread bakery-cafes, from California to Virginia. More are added every day." (Even my retired dad takes his barely-used laptop over there so he can get free refills on coffee.) Their full list of hotspots is here."
Offering free wifi costs them a lot of dough.
"uuuugghhh need more bran"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If only they served alcohol.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
It's just factored into the prices. Panera is good but pretty pricey. I doubt they would let someone who doesn't order anything just sit in their and use the internet for a prolonged period of time. It's a resturant, not a coffee shop.
So their bread is overpriced and burnt but served by attractive female bakers so you keep coming back?
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
I've used the local one more than once. Only thing I've noticed is that it's sometimes fairly laggy even when there aren't more than one or two people on them.
:)
And the sandwiches are pretty good, too. Strong coffee also
Companies act like it is a cripling cost, but what $60/month for cable, when customers will use this feature if you have it, it will even draw people to your store. Giving it away for free should bring them more people one would think.
but then again starbucks has such a big customer base that those people don't care what they pay for WiFi as long as they get their mocacappachino that costs $8
They are still called The St. Louis Bread Company here in St. Louis
Panera's became my home office for 3 months last year. Every day, constant free coffee refills, and plenty of lunch-crowd eye-candy from the local office complex.
Course, there was that time when someone sniffed/watched-over-my-shoulder while I was paying my bills and the next day I had to dispute a bunch of charges... but for just hanging out, a great place.
Had hoped they could force T-Mobile to be more competitive, but this isnt something new and last I looked Starbucks still had ridiculous fees.
I don't think it's unreasonable for businesses to charge for this, but it sure doesn't make a lot of sense to me when many are pushing "subscription" models to their customers.
Went last night to Barnes and Noble and noticed they had a "Wi-Fi" sign. So I figured this is great, I hang around look at some books and catch up on my email, but lo and behold you have to pay for a 19.99 monthly (1-year min) subscription fee! Why would I pay for ISP accesses that is so limited?
Yeah, they have a 2 hour $4 accesses, but this doesn't make much sense to me. The real attraction here is that if you want people to hang around your store, just offere it up for free, or charge a very minimal amount for usage that day (not for time).
- sigs are for wimps.
Has anyone moved next door to a hotspot just to get free access?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
At their Strip location!
Mmmm... Panera.... [droool]....
Best. Shortbread. Cookies. Ever.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
I live quite close to a Panera Bread, and a directional antenna makes an easy way for me to get internet access without actually going into the café. I simply sit in the car somewhere in the parking lot and aim my directional antenna directly at the establishment. There are several businesses in the same strip mall - it would be easy for them to save on buying their own internet access.
--
Dogs are annoying. Go ECFA.
I listened to those guys all the time growing up. Shame about their guitarist.
Now whats this about bread?
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Dude, you live in Wichita. What did you expect?
Frankly it seems to me there ought to be free wifi in :
libraries, shopping malls, hotels, pretty much _anyplace_ that wants to attract foot traffic.
Personally I think eventually free wifi will be as important a piece of infrastructure as free roads. It wouldn't cost that much to unwire the whole country.
Hear that? That's the sound of you not getting the joke.
I used a Panera Bread hotspot last weekend to test my employer's new VPN client software. Needed an environment different from my home to isolate a problem.
Two cups of "Colombian Supremo Reserva del Patrón" later, well, I hadn't solved the problem, but I was certainly focused on it.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
I worked at Panera for a year and the location I worked at had free WiFi. As a result, we had our fair share of business-suit men and tea-sipping hippies who would bring in their laptops and just laugh the day away with their free intorweb access.
It seemed to me that the laptop people were always the ones buying a single cup of coffee or just a soda, rather than a whole meal. This leads me to believe that frequent Internet users are more intelligent than non-frequent Internet users, because who the fuck would buy food from Panera?
www.kiwilyrics.com - a wiki for lyrics
Panera is a St. Louis based company, yet there are no Paneras in the entire city. There, are, however, a few dozen St. Louis Bread Companies. St. Louis Bread Co. is the original name of the chain, but Panera is the name that they decided to expand nationally under. Other than the name, though, pretty much everything else is the same.
I live a couple blocks from the HQ and when I was new to the area, I walked into their offices thinking I'd order a sandwich...the secretary pointed across the street where their closest restaurant is located... Their operation in St. Louis is pretty tight (and called St. Louis Bread Co...we St. Louisans are rather provincial) but I was shocked a while ago when I noticed brochures for their wi-fi access and was very impressed. I almost bought a wi-fi enabled PDA (I was in the market for one at the time) hoping to frequent Bread Co... If you go to their store near Washingtion U. in the Loop, laptop/pda usage there is high and basically, they've nailed it: it's a great way to draw in the young professional/student crowd.
Anyone eating regularly at McDonalds probably has more spots too.
AT&ROFLMAO
I thought "linksys" was the largest provider of free WiFi in the world...
Wifi at a Coffee shop... Has there ever been a more compelling reason to push for an implementation of RFC2324?
Not only did they respond, but they actually left me on the list as they kept hitting reply-all and I got to hear all the details about the progress of the mall's wiring that was holding them back (they told me they had to wait for work being done on the mall).
The service was actually activated months before they told me that it would. I've used it several times since then. Very nice! Now if I could only bring myself to take up a table for 3 hours while enjoying a single bagel...
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
It's rather more of a "press release". The little blurb at the end is pretty much of a giveaway. Go ahead and RTFPR, but don't expect too much of it.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Their food prices are comptetitive and the place is comfortable. The wifi service at my local shop is blazing fast. The signal is from the unprotected dollar store next door, but they don't seem to mind too much.
I work about 2 miles from a Panera in Atlanta adjacent to Emory University. The Panera is within walking distance from the university. Let me be the first to say that free WiFi and a nearby college student population pretty much guarantee that you will be in a line of 30-40 college kids carrying various WiFi-enabled laptops.
Thankfully, many of the college girls wear their PJs to class and lunch, so it makes the line seem a little shorter. Ahhh..."hot buttered buns at Panera." Oh shit! Who turned on the mic?
IronChefMorimoto
Some guy down the street is the closest provider of free Wi-Fi.
Switch to Firefox, it works fine on my mac at the local Panara.
At least at the local Panera, their free wireless connection comes equipped with the SonicWall "firewall" which blocks visits to web sites based on substrings contained in the url. The list of substrings includes things like "sm" and "cum" -- so for instance you can't google for "cosmonaut" or "accumulator" or visit the Southern Methodist University web pages. Unless, of course, you take the care to use the escape codes %xx in place of one or more of these letters...
Just wondering, is this paragon of stupidity in place at other Panera locations?
I actually took a casual look into their franchising program. Apparently you have to make quite an investment; you need to pledge to be the franchisee for an entire city/region, not just for a single franchise. I guess this is the reason why some cities (ie, Towson, Maryland) have multiple Paneras within a few miles of each other, and other areas (ie, Boise, Idaho, my current home) don't have any yet.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
Funny, I just sat down w/ my g/f and our meal, and the first /. article I read is about the WiFi I'm using to post. I thought /. had tapped into my mind causing illusions for a second...
This is marketing hype poorly disguised as a news story. The whole article reads like it was copied verbatim from a press release for large scale wireless network solutions. It begins:
GoRemote Internet Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq: GRIC) today further extended its leadership...
Panera bread is held up as a great success story for this technology. The only mention the article makes about Panera actually being the largest wi-fi provider is the following:
"Panera Bread (Nasdaq: PNRA) is the largest provider of free Wi-Fi Internet access in the United States with 575 bakery-cafes in 30 states currently offering the free service to our customers," said Panera Bread Chief Marketing Officer Michael Markowitz.
So what Slashdot, we are to believe that Panera is the largest provider because their head marketing troll says so? Jesus, have a little journalistic integrity.
------- Was it just a coincidence I got moderator points the first time I logged on to
It can if their proxy automatically routes you to an IP address whenever you start making HTTP requests.
-- Dave
Making fun of dumb people since 2009
The one time I took my powerbook into the local one I found that it was slow as hell and that it erred overwhelmingly on the side of caution in terms of filtering. My blog got hit as "mature-adult" even though there is nothing pornographic about it. Not that I care, but it's sorta funny when I can even post blog entries because it doesn't discriminate between the Movable Type panel and my actual published pages.
Personally, I prefer the starbucks cafe that is practically next door to our Panera. It is $4.00 for two hours but basically is good enough to be like my Adelphia service at home. I haven't tried the local Daily Grind's (Virginia's Starbucks competitor chain) but they have free WiFi and knowing them I bet that it's at least decent.
In the end you get what you pay for. If I am going to be actually staying at a place for longer than to check my email, then I want something reliably usable. At Panera, I am paying indirectly because they factor the cost of the cheap WiFi into their food. At starbucks in our Barnes & Nobles, I don't even have to buy anything other than the access. Not only that, I like Starbucks coffee more than Panera's.
It's one of the great things about living in a growing college town. 25% of our population are college students and that means that local businesses can easily afford to provide these services cheaply or for free. All of our laptops are configured with WiFi cards now because the school has I think between 30 and 50 WiFi points at least now. Though ironically those stuck on campus cannot have WiFi in their dorms, even if they use 128bit WAP and restrict IP addresses.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Or can you do something like this?
As a previous poster mentioned, I would never do anything until I had an SSH tunnel or something.
Someone in promiscuous mode could ruin your whole month.
So you have a magical web browser which can make HTTP requests without any idea what IP address to send them to?
Interesting disclaimer on their website: We regret that the manager and restaurant personnel can't provide assistance with the Krystal HotSpot as they are not computer specialists.
For the Yankees in audience, Krystal is the Southern version of White Castle.
The business model is a great one for not only Panera but also for hotels and such. Hell, hotels probably spend more on the free coffee per month than they would on providing free wifi to customers.
Ponder this. For $60, they get their broadband. Pop in the access point and a gateway and you're good to go. That's it. A one time charge of maybe a couple hundred bucks (including labor) and recurring cost of $60, you'll be getting people coming day in and day out JUST because you've got free wifi. I know companies that have blown ten times that amount on marketing that brought zilch in revenue. This is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to bring people into your establishment.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang