What’s a near mis and what responsibility does Panera have for watching tic tok?
So you’re saying that the product was dangerously defective and no signage would have helped. I strongly disagree with this. No other deaths, no other hospitalizations, no actual near misses. And again, no actual proof that the drink did her in. We have a few people on social media saying that it had more caffeine than they expected exaggerating the situation for clicks, none of whom had a medical condition where they needed to pay super close attention. There are probably similar vids of people saying the same thing about energy drinks which are also served cold, sugary and have the same amount of caffeine
It’s all well and good to have such clarity after the fact but it’s absolute bullshit, in my opinion, that they could have anticipated this.
The sign in the photo clearly states the total amount of caffeine in each drink size.
Anticipate what? That a woman would die? That’s true. The statistical relationship between all the variables is fuzzy and this could have been something that killed a person once every 50 days or once every 50 million years. But I can’t emphasize enough, the death is not the point, it’s about a culture and a mindset.
I think also where the disconnect comes is what you think my ask is. It’s not for the product to be pulled off the shelves, it’s not that Panera should be punished, it’s just that they should redesign the product. They put out a product, it had bad design, they should have noticed early, went back, kept the same goals but figured out a better design and fixed the mistake so we were never in a circumstance to wonder how bad the mistake was. This is not hard, it does not take a lot of resources, but it takes someone to notice and then convince a bunch of people to care.
You see this evidently in the safety culture of a lot of 3rd world manufacturing vs 1st world, there’s just a lot of obvious safety hazards strewn around and probably a large number of them individually are objectively not going to hurt anyone but all of them accumulated result in a statistical certainty band of injuries and deaths. It’s dumb that they don’t care, if they cared, all the metrics would improve. But also, while caring is not hard in a certain way, it’s also extremely hard in a certain other way that takes decades of diligent, slow building of a safety culture.
Again, I’m not blaming anyone! I just think it’s sad that this woman died in such a dumb way because a bunch of people were not trained to care.
I will refer you back to: Adding more signage to a bad design does not fix the problem .
I also want to thank @Shalmanese for great contributions to this thread, but …
As a former exec of a few different NYSE-traded companies, I can promise you that business decisions are made every single day, all across America, that put profit before people.
And there are cases in which, and a degree to which, we’d all likely understand that.
The leak coming from the roof is a questionable example, though, because the “charged lemonade leak” makes the company money. To a degree, even negative hype on social media makes the company money (because … dumb kids).
It becomes a crass business decision – whether this applies in Panera’s case or not – as to when the profit is no longer worth the cost, wherever that cost comes from.
Capitalism is like that old saying about the US, generally: they tend to do the right thing … after every other thing has failed 
But, as a general proposition? Quality should be designed in, not tested out. 100%
No, the reason this is dumb is because this was not a crass, cynical business move, they weren’t competent enough for that. This lost them money AND killed a person vs the thing they should have done which is just redesign the product when they noticed it was a bad design. The point of design thinking is to say, ok, we can eventually get to the problems where there are real hard tradeoffs but first, let’s just start with the obvious win-wins where you make more money AND your customers are happier with you. It doesn’t require a lot of work, but it does require a long term shift in mindset which is in and of itself a lot of work.
I was a manufacturing engineer for 30 years and I have spent over a year of my life in 3rd world manufacturing facilities. The ones directly controlled by my companies were pretty good honestly and used 1st world standards. I visited some supplier facilities and they definitely gave me pause and there’s no way I saw the worst cases.
I can tell you that in my experience we cared very much and spent a lot of time designing for safety and this was embedded in the culture. We definitely made some minor mistakes and we immediately worked to fix them. Modern manufacturing theory is all about that.
So we agree in general about the way things should be. I don’t know about your real life experience but in my thin slice of experience we’re pretty damn close to that ideal. I didn’t work in the food industry but I don’t believe that no one cared if only to avoid law suits. Speaking specifically about the subject of this thread, Panera, I don’t think they are legally liable here. I don’t think it’s a bad design.
I wonder how you feel so certain, in this case, of what went on behind the scenes – what was and was not discussed in advance, the financial history of the product, and the impact of this tragic event on the profitability of this product.
Despite my business background, I happily admit that I know exactly none of the above in this case.
Because the design mistakes were so dumb they had to have been done out of incompetence, not malice.
I strongly agree with this in the general case. This does not imply that no one cares.
Those really aren’t the only two choices, though.
There is also always the relatively callous indifference that lives within our version of Capitalism, and often causes harm.
This conversation is bound to get somewhat frustrating because if you don’t have a certain skill, all I can do is reason by analogy. If a bunch of people looked at a grocery store with a drip leaking from the ceiling and started wondering, wow, what was the great, secret, cynical business reason behind this grand drip, we would all know they were on another planet because we simply know from sheer obviousness that the drip is due to incompetence. It takes 5 minutes to fix the drip, there’s no downside, only upside, the reason they don’t do it is because nobody cared and the reason nobody cared is because the culture of the place is one of not caring.
You’re using the word “caring” in your sentence as an internal emotion. I’m sure there were people inside the Panera corporation that cared very deeply in your use of the word. I’m using the word in the design thinking way which is that they actually did the things needed to fix the problem.
I see what you mean now.
So back to the specific case, it hasn’t been proven to me that there was a problem with this product. In the general case and in my experience, safety is a huge part of the culture of product design. We take multiple training classes, it’s beaten into us as part of the jargon and it’s taken very seriously by management. I lived this for decades. I’m certainly cynical enough to acknowledge that a big component of this is law suit avoidance as well as altruism.
This is not a glaringly obvious leaking pipe or even a difficult to diagnose subtle intermittent leak.
The callous indifference is the incompetence. The reasons behind this are clear, they aren’t punished on the market and they need to just put up enough signage to avoid further liability. Note, the framing I’m using is not “Is this the best of all the options this team could have done”, that is the “blame” framework. The framing I’m actually posing is “Was a team that cares more about design as a cultural value than this one going to be able to create an outcome that is, in every category (profits, customer satisfaction, team satisfaction), better than this one?” and the answer is obviously yes and that’s a problem fixing framework.
The next problem is that those people are hard to find and the reason behind that is not that those people are rarer or more expensive or anything like that that actually introduces a tradeoff, the problem is there hasn’t been a sufficient design/safety culture inside the entire industry that these people could have been trained and that’s a problem that goes back decades and has deep structural roots.
The reason I’m posting so much in this thread is because I want to emphasize this is a mindset issue. Questions that seem like the only obvious question in one mindset are incoherent in another mindset. It reminds me of that Always Sunny scene where they keep on asking “Who is this versus”. Like, it’s funny because in one framing, the question is totally incoherent and then in another, it turns out to have been the important question. My feeling always in these types of conversations is just constantly getting “Who is this versus” questions and trying to explain not only can’t I answer the question, it’s not a question that is even coherent for me.
It’s not obvious to you because you’ve been trained on the specific relationship between certain physical elements and their impact on safety and you could probably point to things I couldn’t see and just go like, “here, this is obviously unsafe”.
If you have the requisite training in my field, you would be seeing the same thing. It’s violation of safety is as obvious to me as a leaky ceiling. I take one look at it and I’m like, man, someone’s going to get killed if they don’t fix that thing, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even in 50 million years, but the point is if I can see the problem and the problem is easy to fix, just fix the problem.
Is your fix that the charged lemonade not be sold at all?
No!
I can’t give you the actual answer because that would require actual design analysis and access to the team. I’m confident however that whatever goals Panera had in mind, there was a design that accomplishes all the goals better than this design. The charged lemonade not being sold violates one of Panera’s goals so that is off the table. All I can assert is that for sure, an actual answer exists.
And the reason I’m posting so much about this isn’t that I care about Panera, but using them as a case study for important movements in our life like “Vision Zero”.
You can start off Vision Zero by just attacking the “low hanging fruit”, that is, problems for which a design exists that is better in all goals than the existing design. You can do Vision Zero in a way where it doesn’t cost more, people are safer, cars drive faster, there’s less traffic, it’s a pure win-win-win-win.
Once you have exhausted the low hanging fruit, you move onto the ones where the tradeoffs are such that the cost-benefit analysis is obvious.
People then ask well, what about the cases where there are genuinely tricky tradeoffs to be made and the answer is those are so far into the future that they’re not even worth thinking about yet and also that we’re continually getting better at design the more we do Vision Zero so more and more stuff evolves into the “low hanging fruit” and “obvious CBA” buckets.
It’s dumb that we don’t do Vision Zero in the same way that it’s dumb this woman died. It requires us to simply shift our mindset and encourage the development of a safety/design culture. Other countries have done it and they look at the ones who haven’t like the 1st world manufacturers look at factories which don’t have a safety culture.
A company as large as Panera cares a great deal about its public image and absolutely ought to have people searching for references to it on tiktok, YouTube, Reddit, X, Facebook, and all the other major social media.