My Panera Office

Posts Tagged ‘Home Office’

Panera Bread Restaurants opens its first franchise in Brooklyn soon.  Our favorite officing restaurant,  Panera, is right around the corner to most of us.  There are 1,400 Panera Bread Restaurants located in 40 states, yet its 345 Adams Street location will be the first in Brooklyn.  We will soon be reading tweets from that borough.  Believe it or not, there is no Panera Bread Restaurant in Manhattan.  Ouch! Where do people office?

Welcome Panera Bread Brooklyn.  That kind of purses out the lips doesn’t?

Click here to read the entire story of the the Panera Brooklyn opening.

Panera Ranks Number 1

Health.com lists Panera number one among America’s Top 10 Healthiest Fast Food Restaurants. The food at our favorite place to office is appreciated by top health experts.

Health.com say they “scored the chains on such factors as the use of healthy fats and preparations, healthy sodium counts in entrees, availability of nutritional information, and the use of organic produce to determine the 10 highest-ranking restaurants.”

To read the entire article click here.

5 Reasons to Office at Panera Bread

Panera is one of my favorite spots to sit down, open up my lap top and talk to the world and the person in booth next to me.  Here are my 5 favorite reasons for doing so:

• Panera has some of the best coffee around, they serve it in a great mug and I can help myself to fresh refills whenever I please.
• The smell of bread and pastries being baked is much better than grease or incense that I smell in other hangouts.
• There are free samples of fine breads or their newest cookies near the door.
• There is not waitperson coming around to put a check on my table and say “whenever you are ready.”
• Clients love to meet me there.

The large number, almost every five minutes, of tweets coming from people using Panera Bread’s Wifi while enjoying a hot cup or a sandwich are increasing.  Many are using their cell phones.  Look at the Twitter search result for Panera Bread and you will see that you and I are not alone in our appreciation and use of the eatery’s internet connection.

Not all of you are familiar with Skype .  I know those of you who are and are using Skype as your phone service, or at least your long distance phone service, are more than satisfied.  According to the Skype ’s published demographics, only one million baby boomers Skype anyone.  Let me introduce the rest of you to the greatest phone service bargain in the world.

Almost all of us use the Internet to buy airline tickets, books, and connect with family and friends through on-line communities like Classmates and Facebook.  The Internet is a phone service and a darn good one at that.  Not only that you can save money each time you use it.

Let’s get real, how many products, on or off the Internet, save you money, and save you money on something that you use every day.  Just like electricity and water, usually tv provider bills, phone bills are a major portion of our expenses.  I have done the research, and I seriously doubt that Skype ’s two cents per minute can be beat. That is twenty bucks for one thousand minutes (more than sixteen and a half hours). Far more than most of us use. That is the charge from your computer to a mobile or home phone. If you call someone else’s computer, anywhere in the world it is absolutely free.

I use it all the time for international calls. To Benin West Africa 24 cents per minutes…Sao Paulo less than 3 cents per minutes….all cell phones in the UK, Germany, France, Holland and most of the rest of Western Europe for just over 2 cents per minute.

If you are using it for business or just very talkative, you may save more money by subscribing for Unlimited calls to landlines with Skype to USA numbers for $5.95 per month, or get an Unlimited World calling subscription from Skype from $9.95/month.

You pay as you use it. There is no monthly bill nor any minutes that disappear or roll over. One less thing to concern you. Your balance is always visible in the upper right hand corner of the Skype interface.  Your initial deposit can be as little as $10.  We you do use it, you will be leaving money in the bank, I promise.

Besides the savings, there are some great extra features that you cannot get through your cell phone or landline phone. Skype’s conference application allows you to add many people a common discussion.  If everyone has a webcam you can see and hear each other, and since you are using the webcam over the Internet, your call is computer to computer and thus, all of that, ABSOLUTELY FREE.  Phone conferences are the cheapest on the market, because each conferencee pays his or her Skype fee.  But, remember you can – for free – arrange computer to computer conferences wit

How do you get it. Click here:
You will be led through the process. Basically, you fill out a form, download the software, pay a deposit if you wish, and begin using it.

If you want Skype to be your only phone, you can purchase a phone number for $60 per year, $5 per month. So, you can have your own phone number, accessible anywhere in the world and be able to make unlimited calls to landlines anywhere in the world for $17.95.

What more do you want.

Text messaging to your contacts anyone one your Skpe contact list is free and in real time.

Don’t want to use a headset?  You can buy a phone, or even equip your mobile to use all the features of Skype at the same rates.  We the cell phone option, in some cases, you might have to also pay the minutes on you cell plan.

Well, Skype is a great service and great value. Is Skpye a noun or a verb? It depends on how you use it, and I use it extensively. I works for me, so I see Skype as a verb. Without reservation, I recommend you download Skype .

Many of us have a business we run or work on out of our office at home, whether that be a full blown room complete with a desk, computer, printer (cum fax, copier, scanner), white boards, mic. and speakers, file cabinets, and even a globe, or just a laptop and a place to sit in the living-room.  Sometimes we need to meet with clients, co-workers, coaches, or consultants.  Do we set appointments to meet them at home?  Not if we heed the advice of Virtual-Professionals.com, “Should a potential client who is also self-employed and working from a home office wants to meet with you, I suggest that you mention meeting at a coffee shop, which is mutually convenient to both parties.”  Sounds like to me like they are saying, ‘Meet at Panera Bread.’

Seriously, (well I was serious) meeting in your home can be dangerous and less than professional.  Our homes are about the most private meeting places we could arrange.  Many would view an invitation of meeting us there as an invitation to something completely different.  If someone wants to do us harm or rob us, suggesting that we meet at our home office provides them the opportunity for all types of maliciousness.

Besides, we have the fine, comfortable, and quiet acceptable Panera Bread Restaurant available so we can talk and call up whatever we need to on the internet.

Happy, safe meetings with you clients.

Making Money from Cell Phone.  Yes, you read that right.  I just came across what could be the next big money making boom.  Billions of dollars have been made on the internet over the past decade.  There are still plenty of opportunities for we home business and Panera Bread Wifiers to make cash on the net, but the competition is stiff.  Not so with the cell phone platform.  There is one guy, Mack Michaels, who himself made hundreds of millions through the internet, who is training folks to cash in on the frontend of this wave.  Yes, this all sounds like hype, but I promise it is not.  Check it out Click Here!

Panera Bread Restaurants is reporting that same-store sales rose 2.8% in the first 27 days of the third quarter.  That is truly an anomaly in business, especially in the food services realm.  Some are saying that it has a lot to do with the growing number of work from home (work from anywhere but the office) folks, like us, who appreciate the free Wifi in the Panera Bread eateries.

In fact, Panera Bread Restaurants Wifi and comfortable surroundings is making it the place for more and more people to meet with clients and even have office meetings there.  Many bloggers, like Computer Daddy, are saying “Panera’s open Wi-Fi availability not only makes it my first choice for working coffee, lunch and dinner breaks while I am on the road, but it is also my first choice for off-site meetings with both vendors and staff.”

I found a very interesting discussion on Facebook entitled “Your Panera Wifi Experience.“   Most are very pleased.  As one says, “the only problem is there are not enough outlets.”  Check it out.

“Yep, it’s free. Just sit down, open up your laptop and you’re ready to go.”  So Panera Bread Restaurants promotes their new policy of open access.   To many of us that has been an invitation fo

r us, in these difficult economic times, to setup our ‘Away from Home’ office among the aromas of breads, pastries, and lattes.  A dream come true.