In 2010, Panera’s nonprofit arm launched a new experiment: It opened a cafe in St. Louis that looked exactly like the company’s other restaurants, but customers could pay what they wanted for the items on the menu, or not pay at all. Ron Shaich, Panera’s founder and CEO at the time, had volunteered at food banks and wanted to offer a better experience for people who were struggling to eat. The new nonprofit restaurant, called Panera Cares , was designed to sustain itself by nudging middle-class consumers to pay a little extra for their meals.

“In many ways, this whole experiment is ultimately a test of humanity,” Shaich said in a TEDx talk later that year. “Would people pay for it? Would people come in and value it?”

In January 2018, the St. Louis location closed. A location in Dearborn, Michigan, which also opened in 2010, closed in 2016. Locations in Portland, Oregon, and Chicago also failed. Only one cafe, in Boston, is left. Though the concept was designed to be self-sustaining, the restaurant operated at a loss.

A recent paper looks at why the cafes didn’t work. “Panera was a multimillion-dollar company and [Shaich had] owned Au Bon Pain before, but yet it was clear for us that he was so unaware of how consumers think and act and feel in the marketplace, in his marketplace in particular–that that’s why it missed the mark,” says Susan Dobscha, a marketing professor at Bentley University, who co-authored the paper with Giana Eckhardt, a marketing professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

In Yelp reviews of the cafes, the researchers saw that many consumers didn’t want to eat next to homeless people, and complained about the atmosphere. People who were food insecure also didn’t like it. Though the cafes were intended to provide dignity–people could pay as little as they could afford and weren’t supposed to be questioned about it or made to feel like lesser customers–it didn’t work that way in practice. The company asked customers to limit themselves to one discounted meal a week or to volunteer for an hour at the cafe to make up for a free meal. “We are not designed to be a permanent solution for those facing food insecurity,” the company wrote, but that could make things complicated for people who wanted to take advantage of the service.

One reviewer wrote:

I took my mother into Panera Cares today because she just moved to town and is on a very low fixed income. When the total suggested price was given my mother put the money she could afford into the box. The cashier watched her and said “we can do a discount once but if you come back this week you’ll have to pay full price. We only do a discount once a week here.” This was said with others behind us and very loudly. That is not posted anywhere in the store. My mother stood mortified and near tears as we walked away and waited.

Customers who were used to eating at other Panera restaurants were often confused when they entered; the nonprofit restaurants looked the same, apart from “Cares” in the logo. “Your customer is coming through the door with a set of expectations about what the service encounter is going to be like, and if those expectations are sort of thrown on their head the minute that you walk in, then it’s going to cause all this confusion and discomfort,” says Dobscha. “So that puts people in a less likely position to do good, which is what conscious capitalism assumes.”