Extremely Limited Reach

The world is full of franchises and most are in my personal opinion utter rubbish.  There is a few though that I find agreeable and one of these has been "Au Bon Pain" that really have some quite descent sandwiches and market themselves as a casual bakery:

Pay close attention to "no request beyond our reach" from their web site.

On Phuket however they don't quite grasp this concept.  Yesterday I went there to have one of their smoked salmon sandwiches and - they were out of bread.  I am not kidding - a bakery that didn't have any bread.  That's a bit like a MacDonald that is out of hamburgers - in other words completely pointless.  It was 8 pm at the Jung Ceylon shopping center on Patong Beach and every other place was crowded with people.  Au Bon Pain was quite empty.  I guess I wasn't the only one who discovered that they didn't really have anything to sell.