Specialty's Bakery folds

[Brian Lutz]

https://downtownbellevue.com/2020/05/17 ... nationwide

Specialty's Bakery becomes another victim of COVID-19, and all locations will be shutting down as of May 19th.. No big loss to be honest, they had some decent baked goods but beyond that the menu was basically a worse version of Panera Bread. It probably didn't help them any that (at least around here) almost all their locations were in places heavily dependent on office workers for most of their business.

[storewanderer]

I am not surprised about this. We are going to see a lot of chains like this end up folding.

These chains like Panera made a ton of money serving basically frozen or pre-made foods and selling them at extremely high prices, the types of prices you'd expect as if they were freshly made foods from scratch in the location.

With that said I am a little surprised they are closing ALL of their locations... they had online ordering, etc. and it seems like they were basically set up for a Contactless business. I guess without a captive audience (office workers) the product is so bland and marginal (so much like Panera) that nobody was seeking it out.

[Brian Lutz]

I'd take Panera Bread every single time over Specialty's though, I've just never been all that impressed with the Specialty's I've eaten at. The menus have been rather limited, execution is poor on a lot of occasions, and there's just little reason to eat there with any other reasonable alternatives available.