Years ago, I was assigned to clean up an office building that had recently been vacated by a government cybersecurity contractor. While throwing away all the trash that had been left behind I discovered a binder that had at least a hundred pages of print outs from mapquest with the location of the panera bread on each circled in pen.
Comments like this tend to weirdly circulate, I've noticed, with people forgetting that originally, it was completely anecdotal and unsourced.
Op I don't mean to disparage you, but this is the internet, and there just aren't enough grains of salt in the world to allow me to swallow a tale like that without speaking up.
At least around here, they were one of the only places to go with free public WiFi for a while. It could be something related to that, just a place to find open internet hotspots.