I once ate at a residence hall cafeteria where they had these fuckin bagel guillotines that you basically positiones your bagel in as if it was the head of a hapless French aristocrat and you could be all like vive le revolución and chop those fuckers. But they’d all seen so many bagels without sharpening that they required great strength to slice through a chewy bagel. In fact they probably slowed down the process.
The moral of the story is that bagels are hard to slice on a large scale.