Everyone has a problem with the way Panera cuts their bagels, including the very employees slicing into them.
Most are aware of what a sliced bagel is supposed to look like. One clean horizontal slice through the round bread. Ideally, each half is the same size, but if it’s a little top-heavy, bottom-heavy, or at a light angle, it’s not the end of the world.
It’s just gotta be able to hold queal amounts of whatever topping you decide on, whether it’s as light as some melted butter or as heavy as dollops of cream cheese.
But no one wants to deal with a bagel cut as monstrously as this one from Panera.
In a viral video with a whopping 5 million views as of Sunday, a Panera customer, @pradacore, showed the unfortunate thing done to the bag of bagels she had just bought at the pseudo bakery.
Every single one had been cut in a rather unimaginable way. Instead of cutting through the center, the bagels were cut near the very top of the bagel dome, making the slice resemble something closer to a lid on the bagel than a true center cut.
“Whoever at panera cut these bagels really got on my last nerve,” @pradacore said.
@pradacore every. single. one.😭
♬ original sound – Sabrina Carpenter
“‘Just a lil off da top’ type bagel,” a commenter wrote.
The way the bread is sliced makes smearing anything on it highly impractical, and if you plan to make a sandwich, forget about it.
Panera employees get defensive
According to the comments section, the employees say it’s not their fault. They’re at constant war with the unwieldy slicing machine, they say, and when they try to just cut into it themselves to give customers an adequately sliced bagel, they’re turned down by management.
“Ex Panera employee here it’s the bagel slicer and its the bane of their existence too,” the top comment with more than 116,000 views read.
“All the Panera worker’s in the comments fighting for their lives rn,” a person said.
“On behalf of all panera workers its the god forsaken bagel slicer. it ner works and when it does it does this,” another chimed in.
Now, it seems bagel slicers are generally unreliable tools, with some of them gaining a mere three stars from customers and others earning an impressive 4.9 stars.
And it doesn’t seem that price is the difference maker here. There’s a $10 one with 3.8 stars, a $20 one with 3.9 stars, and another $20 one with 4.7 stars.
This isn’t the first time customers have had bagel beef with Panera. One customer felt scammed out of her dollars after Panera sold her a baker’s dozen of “rock”-like bagels.
And who could forget the infamous Twitter moment that put people in an uproar after a customer asked for their bagels to be “bread sliced,” aka instead of one cut down the center of the round bread, they go through a bread slicer and resemble bagel chips more than an actual bagel.
Granted, some people love this method, saying it lets them taste test multiple toppings (from flavored cream cheeses to jams), easier to share, less messy, and that they’re generally easier to chew through (we all know the feeling of chewing through a sticky gob of carb and cream cheese spread).
But others think the method is rather unsightly and just plain wrong.
The Daily Dot reached out to @pradacore for comment via TikTok direct message and to Panera via email.
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