Panera, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down
It begins, I suppose, if you want to get technical, with Joshua, though I don’t blame him — it’s an offhanded comment that I’m not even sure was addressed to me, overheard at the office in my first weeks of gainful employment and postgraduate life (two periods that, mercifully, started relatively simultaneously). When he first moved to New York, he enrolled in every restaurant loyalty program and rewards club he could find, and that way he could eat free all around the city the week of his birthday. I’m frugal, and my birthday is in two weeks. I don’t need to be told twice.
After a night of focused effort in my subletted Brooklyn bedroom (cavernous, fly-infested, writing scrawled on the walls and ceiling courtesy of the previous tenant), I’m sitting on a sizeable virtual stack of confirmation emails in my inbox. Cinnabon and Jamba Juice and Dunkin Donuts and Benihana all perkily welcome me to their families with bubbly fonts and photos of food and ethnically diverse friend groups. Having just moved two hundred miles away from most of the people I care about, I’m grateful to be a part of any community, even one centered around getting smoothies at this place instead of that place. I give each welcome message a ceremonious scan before deleting them.
And in due time, as promised, the birthday gifts pile up: free coffees and donuts and pastas and ice cream cones. What I hadn’t realized at the time is that not all these gifts are entirely convenient: the closest Cinnabon, for example, is an hour-plus train and bus ride away in both directions. (I still force myself to redeem this coupon one spare evening for reasons I now can’t quite bring myself to fathom, marathoning through podcasts as I ride both subway and bus to the end of their respective routes. The resulting Mochalatta Chill is entirely underwhelming.)
I’m willing to call the whole experiment a bust, with the possible exception of a pretty great sushi dinner, and I do — until a month later when I get an email from Panera Bread offering me one free coffee (any size, hot or iced) every day for the entirety of August. I furiously scan for fine print, sure there’s a catch. There isn’t. One free coffee every day. I’m Cinderella watching my pumpkin sprout into a coach: too good to be true, but I’ll take it.
Previously, coffee has comfortably occupied a space in my Mental Catalogue of All Things right next to wine. I would watch my parents drink it and not understand the appeal. Later that morning or night I would stand at the kitchen sink and rinse out the mugs and tapered glasses, catching the odd bitter whiff. No thanks. And so both of these came to represent adulthood as I knew it, a supposedly acquired taste I was certain was the center of a universal conspiracy, everyone insisting it was all delicious as they compared roasts and vintages. I swore I would never indulge in either one. But defenses on both fronts eventually cracked, as adulthood shifted from something whose looming approach I feared to something of which I craved any trace I could find. And now, in the case of coffee, it was looking to crumble completely.
By the end of the first week of August I know the locations of all Panera franchises within a reasonable distance. One around the corner from my job. One across the street from the library where I often hang out. Another a few blocks away from the theater where I’m putting up a show. I hit them all, but mostly end up at the one on Fifth Avenue near my job. I try to go every day, hoping to make the most of my fleeting bounty. At first I worry that the staff will grow to resent me for being such a moocher, but they never seem to recognize me from one day to the next. Bullet dodged.
I routinely show up to work that month toting a bucket-sized iced coffee emblazoned with the rustic, quasi-handdrawn Panera crest. Every time, Joshua rolls his eyes. In part because I’ve so unabashedly become a corporate sellout, but in part, I think, because he’s jealous he never stumbled across this particular perk in his own moneysaving schemes. I don’t care what he thinks, though. I’ve got my free drinks, plus the secret kinship I feel whenever I see someone else sipping an iced coffee, which is very, very often in New York in the summertime. Solid choice, I think, and I imagine them doing the same, two hypothetically cozy members of a club that is admittedly rather easy to join.
Even with milk and sugar, though, I have yet to find coffee a particularly pleasant drinking experience. I choke it down, trying to ignore the acrid aftertaste. Plus the insane size of the coffees I drink — since any size is free, I can’t bring myself to order anything less than the largest one possible — means I find myself fighting back upset stomachs, tight jaws, trembly fingers. But this is what adults do. They do things that aren’t one hundred percent enjoyable because they know it’s the right thing to do. Also they drink coffee. And anyway, it’s free. I keep going back.
In time, I start eating at Panera, too. If I’m out and about and need to grab lunch, and I was also planning to cash in on my free coffee, I might as well combine the trips into one. I eat far more Mediterranean Veggie Sandwiches that August than I would ever care to admit, with a baked good thrown in for good measure if I’m feeling down and want a pick-me-up, or if I’m feeling good and want to keep it going, or if I’m feeling nondescript and want to feel anything at all. Somehow I end up eating a lot of baked goods too.
Without consciously realizing it, I let Panera become my safe haven. Life milestones tick by as I sit by myself in a vinyl booth. I anxiously nibble at potato chips before a big job interview. I calm my nerves with soup before a stand-up comedy performance. I celebrate with a bear claw when my play is well received. I never meet the multiethnic smorgasbord of camaraderie I was promised back in June, although I do overhear a lot of English lessons.
In some ways it’s a nice thing, to have some sense of consistency in a post-graduate world that is exceedingly and terrifyingly without structure. But what I realize before long is that Panera’s flagship product — more than scones, more than sandwiches, more than broccoli cheddar soup in a bread bowl — is an idea. The flavor of their food comes second to the notion that it’s all organic, free-range, GMO-free, and all other ways healthier-than-thou (which, given said alfredoesque broccoli cheddar soup, is honestly kind of ridiculous). I’ve adapted that idea somewhat to my own tastes, telling myself that my Panera routine somehow reflects well on where I am in my new adult life. How responsible I am, I think, to eat such sensible food. How settled I must be to have a regular restaurant, even if that restaurant is a mega-chain squeezed next to the Empire State Building. Rather than go through the effort of legitimately growing up and feeling like a mature adult, I’ve opted to buy into a prepackaged concept of what that means — or looks like, at least.
But maybe it’s silly to judge myself so much. If it makes me happy to eat at Panera, what could I possibly gain by overthinking that happiness? Maybe it’s even more misguidedly romantic of me to assume that there’s some “correct” way I’m going to one day end up feeling like an adult, and that this isn’t it.
Then I realize that I’m judging my own judgment, and what kind of self-obsessed loser even does that, and anyway I was right the first time, my obsession with coffee-as-blatant-stand-in-for-personal-growth is juvenile and shallow. It piles up exponentially, layer after layer.
In many ways, this struggle feels like the nutshell version of the woes of the newly-minted liberal arts graduate — emblematized as much by this neurotic train of thought as by the comma-heavy, em dash-rich, overly winding sentences I can’t seem to stop myself from writing — a constant state of self-doubt, of qualifying, of saying more than we probably need to because we’re worried the words we’ve chosen aren’t quite the right ones to communicate exactly how we’re feeling, and even more worried the way we’re feeling isn’t quite the right way to feel at all. It makes sense. We laud liberal arts educations for the way in which they teach students to think, and they do: we know, from the safety of our solitary bedroom desks and library carrels, how to examine, to scrutinize, to pick apart and explicate and wring for meaning. But outside of academia, is this actually a worthwhile skill? To time and again fall down rabbit hole spirals of inquiry? To seek them out, even? To march around with our own little shovels so we can dig them ourselves? I could spend the rest of my life in paralysis if I wanted to, Hamlet contemplating an iced coffee.
It’s been months now since Joshua quit. Panera’s stuck around, though. On a recent unseasonably warm December night, I run over there to grab dinner on a break from work. When I arrive, the place is deserted. No customers, no visible staff. I place my order at one of a long row of touchscreen tablets. A huge flat screen TV will alert me when my order is ready. There’s a part of me that wants to make something of this vaguely dystopian scene, standing alone surrounded by computers and cookies. Something about the way in which we eliminate human contact and call it progress, the way we fetishize and commodify not needing other people and then marvel that we feel lonely. But I’m not sure what that would accomplish. I notice a woman behind the counter and ask if I can pick up my food. She shakes her head. “Absolutely not.”
I falter. Stammer. Blush. I paid on the iPad thing, didn’t I? Why wouldn’t—
She promptly bursts out laughing and hands me a paper bag. “That was a real Kodak moment,” she chuckles. “You should have seen the look on your face.”
I smile and nod and grab my food, then walk out. I don’t have a camera, of course, so the best I can do is imagine the dumb look of bewilderment I must have made as I push open the swinging glass door and make my way out into the night air, weaving through Fifth Avenue throngs as I clutch my dinner, no coffee this time, so bombarded with headlights and neon signs it never once occurs to me to check if I can see the stars.
