Panera Bread — Restaurant in Madison

I ordered on Tuesday and never received my order, and it was canceled by Doordash...yet, I was still charged. I tried calling the store to get it resolved, but noone answers the phone. I end up calling the Junction Rd. location, and the manager their is very helpful in trying to resolve the situation, however as the stores are separate, the issue needs to be resolved at the West Washington location. The manager from Junction Rd. kindly emails the manager at West Washington regarding the situation, cc'ing me as well. I never receive a response from the manager at West Washington. I called multiple times trying to get through to someone, and yep...no answer.

I called again today, as I really want a refund for the order I never received, and I finally get the "manager." This "manager" was the most unhelpful person, and argues with me, and then tells me I should have called right away, and that since it's a few days after the situation, I need to get a refund from corporate. Seriously??

I call corporate, explain the situation to some lady who just is trained to answer the phone and say "uh huh" over and over, then hand out certificates, sorry but that's how it felt. She tells me I should have called the store right away because now it will take 20 days to get a refund, or I can accept 3 $5 reward certificates and receive those now. I told them I called multiple times, however at no point would the store answer, so how was I supposed to get it taken care of. "Uh huh". Ugh!!

There needs to be some serious management training at this location....

I ordered delivery of a few items. The food was so bad I drove to return items (the turkey bacon avacado sandwich and the green godess salad). The sandwhich had rock hard avacado. Inedible. That wasn't the worst of it. The lettuce was chunks of stem. I don't mean the white inner core. It was literally cubes of rock hard stem that could not be chewed.

Then there was the salad. There was no lettuce. The container was basically empty except for the other ingredients (one of which is rock hard avacados). The lettuce that was there, was some stem chunks and a bit of wilted mushy/old tidbits like you scrape out of the bottom of an old plastic container before throwing it into the trash.

I actually drove there to return it. They did refund me for the items described without any hassle. But when I spoke to them, it was clear they knew the avacados were hard and the lettuce was bad. They cited shortages in being able to acquire good ingredients. If they dont have the ingredients, I would hope they could update their website (which I ordered from directly) or give the customer a call so a different selection could be made).

I wonder if they give the especially bad stuff to the delivery orders because to return anytbing is so much of a hassle. I called them first, but no one answered the phone. I would not order delivery from that location again. I don't usually write reviews and I debated writing this one. But people should know so they can make their own decision on whether it is worth the delivery fee to gamble on...

Excellent customer service experience with them today; they corrected a mistake that WASN'T EVEN THEIR FAULT!!!

DoorDash delivery driver picked up my order, then STOPPED - a few blocks away, for 20 min (I'm 12 min from the Panera....).

Seeing the delay in my delivery time I called the driver, who was rude and admitted he was stopped because he was "waiting to pick up a friend from work". When I responded to ask if he legit stopped, after picking up my food, he yelled back at me "what do you f'ing want to do about it?!"

At that point, the order was on track to be in the driver's car 40 min, so the hot food would be cold and nasty, AND, I was worried he would tamper or mess with our food out of spite.

I called the Panera directly and talked with Paul (or Paulo?), who was the manager, and he apologized for the botched delivery, cancelled the order, and immediately had a new one made up and sent out (with a new driver). He called DoorDash on my behalf and gave me their number to file a report for this driver.

Replacement order was fast & fresh.

AND - the DoorDash rep confirmed that drivers are NOT supposed to stop after picking up food deliveries to run errands, etc. LOL

Give this place a try, and don't be afraid to advocate for yourself if you have a mistake in your order (vs. just ranting in a review). They genuinely wanted to make things right,...