Panera

Seven years ago, Panera had a problem that most restaurants would like to have. It was like a crisis, involving danger plus opportunity. Demand was higher than they could handle. People sometimes stood in line for eight minutes just to place their order. If you have a limited lunch hour, that's a problem. And then the order was wrong ten percent of the time.

The CEO and the Chairman started looking for solutions and solutions started showing up. Online ordering was a big part of their strategy, along with order kiosks inside the restaurant, plus delivery of orders. But that wasn't enough.

Kitchen routines were changed so that employees made fewer mistakes on those customized orders. An executive at Papa John's, Inc., was recruited to help with overhauling Panera. He says, “It was literally hundreds of these little things that we did.”

All together Panera invested $100 million in technology to take their business to the next level. After a few years of flat sales and persistence, sales picked up in 2015. Today, their industry is lackluster but Panera is out in front with sales growing considerably faster than typical of their industry.

That's free enterprise. The store that does the best job of serving its customers earns their business because uncoerced-customers make their own choice.