Kaylee Wells

Jomini says this trend won't hurt car dealers much, since they often provide incentives that clear the old car's balance so buyers can afford a new one.

I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace.

The estimates are that about 31,000 workers were involved with those strikes.

And so that does show up in the jobs report.

But all of that being said, health care jobs growth was still slow, even if you do account for those striking workers.

Meal deals make sense at a classic drive-thru because those customers are looking for cheap, fast food.

Rich Schenck, vice president of innovation at the food service industry analysis firm Technomic, says the fast casual restaurant traditionally didn't advertise cheap food.

It advertised food that was higher quality.

But then there was inflation and rising prices on groceries and utilities and housing taking bigger bites out of our wallets.

Now Panera might pull some customers from traditional drive-thrus, but their $10 value meal can't compete with the price of the $5 value meal at McDonald's.

But that's not the point.

Professor Alex Suskin teaches food and beverage management at Cornell University.

He says this is about helping customers who always came to Panera but are having a tougher time affording it now that paychecks are getting stretched by all the other rising prices.

In other words, off the $10 value meal and back into that $14 sweet spot.

But getting customers to walk back in the door is only half the battle.

Stephen Zagor, who teaches food entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School, says there are two more factors to Panera's success.

And two, the cheaper food only works if the food tastes good.

Zagor called this value pricing a war, which means Panera won't be the last to try it out.

He expects other fast casual restaurants, think Chipotle or Panda Express, to start doing the same thing.

I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace.