Sourdough speculation
Carb loading at Panera
Good morning, baguette brigade. This is your Stock Market Rundown for December 11th, 2023. Thank you for joining me for another week of finance follies. Let’s dig in:
TODAY’S TOP STORY: ADDING YEAST TO THE DOUGH
Who doesn’t love a sourdough bread bowl? Panera Bread, a chain of bakery-café fast-casual restaurants, is well-known for yummy, carb-dense meals like the Smoky Buffalo Chicken Melt and Bacon Turkey Bravo sandwich.
What’s not as well-known is that Panera was a public company for 26 years, and was the best-performing restaurant stock over that time period—its annualized returns even beat Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.
Panera left public markets when German-based private equity group JAB took it private in 2017. Now, the owners are working on an IPO, and just slashed corporate headcount to “streamline operations” in advance of relisting.
The private-equity owners have rolled up two other chains, Caribou Coffee and Einstein Bros Bagels, that will be part of the newly-public Panera. These brands dominate the “early daypart”—that’s the official name for breakfast hours in the fast-casual restaurant biz.
Panera’s public image had a recent setback with headlines about a deadly menu item: lemonade. Two different customers suffered cardiac arrest after drinking Charged Lemonade, a beverage with more caffeine than a Red Bull and a Monster Energy combined. Why not mix some cocaine in there too, just to round out the flavor?
Panera, for the record, expressed sympathy but said it “stands firmly by the safety of our products.” The negative headlines are unlikely to stop the IPO plans. After all, this is the business that figured out how to make Americans line up for salad: throw some BBQ chicken on it.
SO WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?
Skynet is not going to kill us all—not anytime soon, anyway. The president of Microsoft said there’s “absolutely no probability” that a super-intelligent AI could be created in the next 12 months. Hopefully soon there’ll be some consumer applications of artificial intelligence other than homework plagiarism and deepfake nudes.
You don’t have to be Patrick Bateman to enjoy an exfoliating gel scrub: Ulta Beauty raised annual sales forecasts on demand for luxury skincare and fragrances.
Spotify announced it’s cutting 1,500 employees, which the CEO said was an attempt to “rightsize our costs.” Guess that’s why Spotify Wrapped dropped early this year… so they could lay off that department before year-end.
Elon Musk has finally launched the Cybertruck, Tesla’s fully-electric entry into the pick-up truck market. Some fans are disappointed by the high cost and limited range, but the bulletproof stainless-steel body is pretty cool. If you get in a collision with a Camry while rolling in one of these beasts, you’ll probably just think you hit a squirrel.
That’s it for today, my friends; see you bright and early tomorrow morning. Yours in capitalism, The Axe
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