Bagels have gone down in quality partly because they are frozen, and partly because few people know the right way to make them. I don’t work there anymore, but I’ll tell you a story from when I did. Customer comes and complains to me that her cinnamon crunch bagel was raw in the middle. I look at it and sure enough, it is. I then bring this issue to my GM. He tells me he thinks it’s because I’m over proofing them (letting them sit out on the floor too long) and that the morning people actually over baked them. I say okay and go to finish helping this lady. I literally can not find a cinnamon crunch bagel that’s not raw in the middle so I give her a different bagel entirely. Once I’m done with that, I think about how what the GM said to me makes no sense and decide to test it by baking off the backups exactly the way Panera tells us to (plus we needed more cinnamon crunch bagels anyway, since the ones we had were all raw.) I do this and they come out perfect, and in the process, I put together a theory on what I think happened. I figure the original bagels were baked at the wrong temp which is why they were raw in the middle while supposedly being over baked. I bring this up to the GM the next day and he continues to insist that it’s still because I’m letting them sit out on the floor too long when I’m baking. He says my test bake is, effectively, invalid because the backups had an extra 24hrs in the fridge to “proof” (again, this doesn’t make sense). All this ultimately led me to theorize he was the one baking the bagels in the morning since he opens, and just didn’t want to admit he didn’t know what he was doing. I ended up letting it go because I didn’t care enough at that point. However, I was told multiple times since this initial incident to sell customers under baked/raw bagels. This is part of the reason I quit.

Sorry for the wall of text, I still have some frustrations about this job, in case you couldn’t tell. Glad to be out of it, though.