Au Bon Pain Reviews

Pros

the opportunity for a mildly intelligent person with good people skills is available for growth

Cons

The company is demanding yet thrifty

Advice to Senior Management

You get what you pay for when it comes to creating a quality driven and devoted labor force

Pros

Friendly and a great place to work regarding the clture and atmosphere. Always felt were were all in board to move the company forward.

Cons

The entire organization is a little dishelved at times and lacking a clear organized effort. Steps were being taken to make changes in this effort.

Pros

Its in the airport so you can use them to work somewhere else.

Cons

High volume but its understaffed. No one is held accountable for their work ethic. You'll notice some people do everything and some do nothing. Makes your job frustrating if you have good work ethic.

Pros

Most of the hired staff were like, me, just had the job to earn a living. So everyone was really nice and easy to work with.

Cons

managers didn't give us very much trainibng specific to our job descriptions. Would have loved to learn more before being thrown in.

Advice to Senior Management

Train your staff more so that they can better serve the public and grow through the company. Pay more so you get better staff.

Pros

-good first job
-nice atmosphere
-friendly employees and employers
-organized management
-50% meal discount
-schedules around our needs

Cons

-extremely hard to bag the job

Advice to Senior Management

Sometimes a little too lax on employees and too hard on others. For good reason, but occasionally too noticeable.

Pros

You can get a set schedule if you need it. You attract clean and nice customers. Very negative atmosphere and cranky coworkers.

Cons

No pay raises, they have an incentive program for sales but you magically never get it. I feel the company is too corporate and charges for food, makes excuses for not giving incentives, and puts it all on the backs of the managers. The stores even have to purchase their own promotional materials! Low starting pay and benefits will take most of your check!

Advice to Senior Management

Treat people well and you will have happy workers, with happy workers you get happy customers. Find ways to improve the benefits, either with better pays or more affordable coverage.

Pros

Managers were helpful and flexible with my scheduling and the discount on lunch was pretty good Good work environment and nice people

Cons

Cons were that there wasn't a potential of career growth there and the hourly salary raise was low and slow

Advice to Senior Management

Not much to say about management. They were a good group of people and did their job well. Were pretty much on top of things

Pros

The pay is good and you meet alot of interesting people, most of my managers were young, in college and pretty cool

Cons

the senior management were uptight and always pushing for sales goals even when employee moral was low, you are hardly commended for doing a good job unless you are well liked by the senior manager

Advice to Senior Management

improve employee/employer relations and a lot of behind the scenes incidents will not explode out in front of the customers

Pros

I enjoyed the flexible hours and the friendly work environment. My managers were very accommodating, and the 50% discount on all food was wonderful. I also enjoyed learning about how to make different specialty drinks, and my co-workers were really nice.

Cons

As a Customer Service Representative, I had to sometimes clean off tables, wipe trays, and take out the trash. That's really the extent of the downsides though.

Advice to Senior Management

I enjoyed the level of respect that the managers showed their employees. Also, they were very understanding of times when I had to take days off.

Pros

If you work with competent managers (IF), bonus is 10% of your salary. This is paid quarterly (2.5%) assuming you meet or beat projected sales and profit, while passing a quarterly QSC audit as well. Not a very taxing job mentally or even physically. They overpay for managers and don't ask a great deal in return.
If you don't mind being stuck in position for quite awhile and making low to mid 40s plus bonus, it's a tolerable job. Though working in downtown cafes are more preferable as most are closed on weekends. The hospitals are 24/7 and rely on Associate Managers to work most of the weekend shifts.

Cons

The bonuses for General Managers is disproportionate to the Associate Managers. GM bonus can range from 10% to 40% depending on the volume of your location. GM's are also eligible for a "super bonus" where if they meet their yearly sales and profit goals, they receive a portion of the profit dollars over plan up to $15k. It's a nice gig if you are a competent GM. However, there are very few in Chicago and the Associates do most of the work.
They make it a habit to go on hiring sprees and hire several GM's from other companies hinting about them becoming GM's at Au Bon Pain, however, unless there is an immediate need or opening, they usually just make them Associates and you languish in position.
When the need for a GM does come up, they rush to hire someone from the outside and put them in position right after training, bypassing many of the others they hired before.
I've been here almost 5 years, and have seen this pattern happen at least once each year.
The training is woefully inadequate and the ongoing training they do is simple rehashing of many things learned in your initial training. There is very little promotion from within as they do very little to develop subordinate managers.
ABP believes in abundance in their bakery products, often leading to a great deal of product waste at the end of the day. This is something that takes getting used to and seems very wasteful.
Technology is somewhat foreign to this company. Their computers and registers are quite slow.
This company will not likely grow into the suburbs as their test stores in Boston don't do very well. Surprising as this concept, as well as Panera, were both owned by the same company several years back. Panera has expanded successfully to the burbs while ABP can't make it work.
Their cafes are difficult to navigate as they do not put up any signage stating "order your sandwich or salad here" or "pay here". They believe that it's simply the managers job to help customers find their way around.
They have halted all raises across the board for the latter part of 2008 and all of 2009. This trend will likely continue.
If you work in a downtown store, you will likely work 9-7 shifts or later depending on location. Most downtown stores are closed on weekends. The hospital locations are 24/7 and the shifts tend to lead to a lack of quality time (i.e. working 12-10 consistently).
Middle and upper management, and human resources do not listen to subordinate managers unless there is a serious complaint. It's usually the GMs word over everyone elses.
This is from my own experience as well as taken in experiences of other managers from other cafes too.
Most GMs will work the earliest shifts, rarely working into the late afternoon or evening, as well as taking a lot of time off on weekends (in hospital locations).

Advice to Senior Management

Get into your stores more, even send people undercover. In Chicago, you guys really don't know what's going on in your stores. Downtown has been a real mess, several stores in declining sales for extended periods of time with nothing done to really fix it. You wait too long to replace ineffective or underperforming managers.
Communicate with subordinate managers much more frequently. There is a lot of information that does not make it's way past the GMs.
Get back to basics. Many stores do not follow established procedures. That's why Chicago has underperfomed financially for some time.
Require your GMs to work a variety of shifts including nights/closes and weekends.
Develop your subordinate managers, you overpay for most recruited managers because you don't train your next level of managers for the future.