Panera Bread — Restaurant in Town of East Greenbush

Hello, posting 1 start tonight because of a horrible experience with the Panera Bread in Rensselaer, NY. We ordered our food for delivery through the online app, I received a message from the store about 5 minutes later saying they were out of a product and were unable to make a item. When I called the store I was told everything was ok and that they did have the product they needed to make the item, and that the order was being prepared. I waited about an hour and called the store again, the staff was very confusing, so finally I asked to speak with a manager, for some reason this was really funny to the clerk who laughed as she told her co-worker I wanted to speak with a manager. When the manager got on the phone she was really nice, but not helpful. She basically told me that when that the delivery driver from Doordash didn't come back to deliver the order. Her only resolution for the mistake was to have me come get the order my self, which I would have done but I figured it was already an hour this food has been sitting around, so I asked for a refund, which she did. Would just like to say, if your delivery service is now through doordash you might want to figure something out with that company to iron out these bugs. Also it would have been nice to receive a phone call that the driver never came back and the order just sat there at the store for an hour while I am trying to feed my family...

I'm not sure if this is actually a Panera "bread"? 3 out 4 times I've been to this location they were out of all of their bread. The last two times my meal was served to me. While I appreciate the thought the workers here are not servers and it's clear they have not been trained to properly serve a table of patrons. My main problem here is that it is clear there is a lack of training, preparation and management. What really puts the nail on the coffin is how management sent a poorly trained young woman to tell a neighboring table that they were yet again out of all of their bread and only told her to offer wheat bread, they then sent the same server back to inform the table that they were also out of the soup they ordered and the baguettes, again with no alternatives. (This also happened to me on a different occasion.) This is a clear lack of leadership and training. I have a hard time seeing a value in establishments that don't see the value in properly training their employees before forcing them to handle situations that management should handle. I hesitate to return here because watching these employees struggle at the hands of poor management is...

Overall Panera is a consistent and fairly decent chain. However the Rensselaer store is one I would highly recommend avoiding. over the past year, I don't think I have going in once and gotten what I have ordered. Today alone I am eating a salad that has been made for the second time grossly incorrectly. I finally just decided to pick out everything I was allergic to and eat it and leave. This has been pretty regular in the past year or so here. It's also not uncommon to see staff argue with each other.

My recommendation is drive down the road another fifteen minutes and eat at the Troy location- it's better run and you get what you order.

UPDATE 2/28- Today had to be here due to work schedule. Ordered Caesar salad- no croutons, add frizzled onions, cucumber, avocado, napa cabbage. WHat I received: Lettuce, 2 pieces of avocado, 4 cucumber bits, no onions, no cabbage, ONE CUP of sliced apples on salad. MMMM...Caesar dressing on apples! Uploaded a pic of all i picked off, and the sad salad i was left with.

Management does not care, there is no quality control. Would give zero...