You can’t argue taste, but it’s infinitely fun to discuss it.
Firehouse Subs are scattered around Ontario, but a quick look at their web site sites shiws they haven’t expand out to other provinces.
At my previous company, a common punishment for losing a bet was to eat a Subway seafood sandwich plain with extra seafood and heavy mayo.
Subway is my favorite con food. It’s reasonably healthy and not too expensive.
Waffle House is my second chance, it’s not healthy but at least it’s cheap and 24 hours all-day menu.
Before my good EVO run, that’s what I had in the morning- and got to meet a cute lesbian pro-level player right before who was nice to me, so a plus on top of that. She got me’tooed and deservedly so shortly after.
According to that map, there’s 17 subways within 5 miles…that’s a lot of subways.
And totally randomly, i had one today - tired of the same ole stuff we usually have, i decided to get a sub for my wife and I. It was $16 for a foot and a half and it wasn’t that good: the bread was particularly meh. Maybe i’ll go to a jersey mikes tomorrow…there’s apparently…two…within 5 miles.
I am completely failing to parse what this means.
I read it as she had a history of abusing/exploiting women and they eventually publicly called her out on it. So he no longer associates with her.
Waffle House is the melting pot that America likes to pretend it is. No matter how drunk (or otherwise fucked up) or poorly dressed you are, regardless of age, politics, ethnicity, religion, or sexuality and at any time day or night no matter the weather conditions or holiday, it will accept you. And if someone gets too obnoxious the grill cook absolutely can and will throw hands to save the experience for other diners.
There’s a magic to stumbling into a Waffle House off a redeye from some unfortunate part of the country not graced by its presence at 3:30 a.m. and eating an absurd amount of calories for $10 surrounded by long-haul truckers, old-men out night fishing, a strung out junkie twitching in off the street, and a couple of drunk/stoned college kids.
I also think the food there is legitimately about the best you can have at a chain restaurant, and you can watch them make it if that’s your thing. Although, yes, going there too much will absolutely kill you (and the food too!).
I hate Subway’s nasty, gooshy bread.
Jersey Mike’s is by far my favorite, but it pains me to drop $10 on a 6" sandwich.
Good sandwiches and props for having the hot sauce selection, they put me on a few that I wouldn’t have otherwise tried.
Not that I’ve been in the downtown skyways since last March, but there were quite a few there.
Lol maybe I just don’t see them. I worked in City Center for a while and all I saw was amazing tamales, sushi bowls, and the food truck parade.
Then again the internal Big Red cafeterias were pretty amazing and generally cheaper anyway.
She was outed as someone who assaulted other women. She fled to Japan afterwards.
Oh. Bummer.
This.
I was a “sandwich artist” in college in 1989/90. At that time, Subway was taking off because it offered something the big chains like McD’s, Burger King, Hardee’s, Wendy’s and Arby’s did not, big deli-style sandwiches on fresh-baked bread with customizable toppings that included a metric crapton of veggies if you wanted them. It was novel, even when measured against local deli places, and the franchisees were told to keep the atmosphere fun and friendly, while employees were trained to not just make sandwiches, but engage customers, make suggestions and remember regulars. It was also the first national chain to bring the process up front where the customer could see it. Those glass cases full of fresh ingredients, pristine cutting boards and racks of footlong bread loaves were all part of the sales pitch…you get to see us make the food right in front of you, so you know it is fresh, customized to your liking, and made by someone who cares (hence the customer engagement). It worked, probably way better than they ever anticipated.
As a college kid I already worked nights at a nightclub across from the campus, so I worked the Subway job during the lunch rush 3 or 4 days a week, 2-3 hours each shift, at a whopping $3.35 an hour. My weekly paycheck was like $21 after taxes most weeks, but it wasn’t the money I was there for, it was the food. Our franchise manager Brian would allow even the lowly lunch shift part-timers like me to grab a 6-inch, a soda and a bag of chips to eat in store before or after our shift, and then let us make another footlong to take home with us as well. As a starving college kid, there were weeks when half of my meals came from my part-time job at Subway. It also gave me a source of healthier food intake (I would load up a turkey sub or a seafood and crab with lettuce, tomatoes, black olives, peppers and banana peppers until they burst) than the endless stream of pizza and fast food I’d eat otherwise.
Our store was right across the street from campus, and there was no franchise actually on campus, so we had a steady stream of students, campus employees and emergency workers (both a hospital and a fire station were nearby) for lunch every day. Brian always had college rock playing on the store’s sound system, I actually got introduced to a few amazing bands from his mixes, and anyone that came in even semi-regularly was greeted like an old friend. The atmosphere in the store was always humming, it was just a cool, friendly and welcoming place to eat and work, and there was pretty much zero drama between employees. All of that was Brian’s influence, and I still remember him to this day, 30+ years later, because of how good a manager he was. When I left to start a “real” job in IT at a bank I was actually kind of sad to leave. I will never forget, months later, when my manager at the bank was giving me my first performance evaluation and said “When we called to check your references your old manager at Subway said he wished he’d had ten employees just like you, and now we know why.” I was nothing to that store, a kid that worked 9-10 hours a week and was totally replaceable, but he cared enough to make sure he talked me up to my next employer so I could move forward in life, and I will never forget that kindness. Wherever Brian is today, I hope he has led a happy and successful life and that karma has rewarded him 100x over for his kindness to his employees and his customers.
That was the Subway of the late '80’s and all through the 90’s. That was the Subway I stayed loyal to as a customer for two decades after working there. That is not the Subway of today though. Today’s Subway got complacent sometime in the early 2000’s and slowly let a host of competitors literally eat their lunch. So many other places now do Subway better than Subway, meanwhile Subway has gone the opposite direction, taking advantage of its franchisees, lowering the quality of its ingredients and the atmosphere of its stores, and generally becoming a shadow of its former self. Most Subway stores I walk into these days just make me sad.
Last time I ate at a subway must have been the 90s, and I remember it being depressing even then. Sandwich sucked too, but that may have been because I got too many toppings.
Great post. And very illustrative. They offered a differentiated choice that a lot of places – even in suburbs of metroplexes – didn’t really have, and most still don’t, namely deli-style sandwiches made to order. (And especially deli style sandwiches until 10pm or 11pm or even later.)
As a general rule: in the food/restaurant/quick serve/fast food biz, if you can figure out how to do the market leader’s core competency better than they do, and you can scale it, and you can do it for costs and customer prices in the same ballpark as the market leader…then you’ve got something.
Man that’s a totally different vibe than my Subway… 1995-1996. There was the manager who worked the day shifts, her name was Christine and she barely spoke a word to me when I’d show up after school to do the closing shifts. I’d basically work 2 or 3 weeknights and Saturday or Sunday all day. For $5.25/hr. There was another kid from a different town who worked there named Robbert. But the chick from Cumbies called him Bobbert. It was hilarious because we wound up doing drivers ed together, completely by accident. So I couldn’t escape that guy. He barely spoke, too.
The vegetables were fresh. They’d get delivered like every other day from local suppliers and they were in the fridge in the back of the Cumberland Farms with the milk and sodas and whatnot.
I kind of miss that place. It had a Clerks vibe. My friend did indeed work at a video store but it was across town, and not in the same little plaza. But I’d go hang out there with him and we’d watch movies and plan our D&D characters. The owner of that store got arrested for child porn and that was the end of that job for my buddy.
I laughed out loud when I read in the articles above that as part of the “Refresh” Subway is now thin slicing their deli meat. I can guaranty that not a single Subway customer ever asked for thin sliced deli meat, but instead this is just another cost cutting measure to get an extra few sandwiches out of every pound of meat that moves through Subway. If you used to get six pieces of regular cut turkey on a footlong sandwich, you’ll now get eight (or possibly even six still) pieces of thin-sliced, meaning less meat in every sandwich sold.
yup, that’s the truth alright. Yesterday, i actually noticed the deli-style slicing on the meat, and how little of it they put on. I figured it was because i ordered the ham/turkey (so i was getting a little less of both), but now in retrospect, i think it’s just how it is.