
Subway Got Too Big – Franchisees Paid a Price - sharkweek
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/business/subway-franchisees.html
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jessaustin
_Don Fertman, Subway’s chief development officer and a veteran of the company
for 38 years, said... that owning restaurants helps give development agents “a
better understanding of all aspects of owning a small business.” He said the
company reviews the agents’ work and expects them to uphold ethical standards,
dealing with violations “on a case-by-case basis.”

....

“Our business development agents are well-respected members of our business
community,” [Fertman] said. “And when we hear these allegations, I would say
that they are false.” He said he was not aware of any exceptions._

This is literally the same C-level clown claiming (a) that all violations are
investigated carefully and (b) that no violations exist. No ethical person
could have heard about this ridiculous "development agent" scheme and remained
silent about how obviously abusive it is, therefore no manager at Subway
corporate is an ethical person. I'm also pretty disappointed in USA courts:
did no judge ever look at these bankrupted immigrants and see someone
deserving of justice?

I haven't been in one of these dumps in at least a year, and after reading TFA
I don't plan to go back. I'm just glad it's privately held, so the upcoming
fire-sale to private equity will hurt the family and not honest investors. Not
as much as they've hurt the poor entrepreneurs who trusted them, but that
would be too much to expect in USA...

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roenxi
> did no judge ever look at these bankrupted immigrants and see someone
> deserving of justice?

Probably, but identifying the deserving is something we train judges not to
do. One of the great achievements of the law is the expectation that whether
someone is deserving or not they should be given the same justice as everyone
else.

If the courts are doing something you don't like, save your disappointment for
the lawmakers.

~~~
nihonde
The whole concept of equity at law is contrary to what you described. In legal
systems descended from English tradition, fairness trumps codified or common
law.

~~~
roenxi
Ok, sure - but I suspect fairness in that sense means 'make sure this person
isn't being treated (by the legal system) differently from someone else due to
a technicality'.

Based on the phrasing, I suspect jessaustin was taking more of a 'justice for
these bankrupt immigrants at the expense of Subway and their execs'. The judge
would have looked at the bankrupt immigrants, seen people who deserved
justice, then looked at Subway and its execs and seen another group of people
who deserve justice and then made a decision most consistent with how such
cases are handled.

Being deserving in the sense used in this thread _isn 't_ enough to overrule
the basic priority of same situation -> same outcome in common law. And that
is a principle that is worth defending, even in the passion of the moment when
it causes outcomes that are unsatisfying.

~~~
nihonde
It’s more along the lines of a discretionary override when strict application
of the law would offend the judge’s interpretation of fairness. It used to be
the King’s privilege, and later became a judicial power.

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alasdair_
"Subway, in an email, said that the franchisees who alleged misconduct were
“anomalies,” and that its surveys and “listening tours” found that 80 percent
of franchisees in the system want to keep working with the company."

This was used to indicate how happy franchisees are but, to me, indicates the
opposite. If one in five francisees don't want to work with Subway again,
that's a huge red flag.

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Topgamer7
I used to work at a consulting firm that had subway as a client. The Subway
ecosystem is very political. Part of the process that corporate Subway has to
deal with is IPC or Independent Purchasing Coop. They are a Coop that
represents franchisees to battle with Subway's corporate agenda. The problem
is that in order to have a larger say in the topics that IPC fights for, you
need to own more stores. Basically as a solo franchise you are at Subway's
will until buy enough stores to have clout. With the most powerful franchise
owner being the the guy who owns almost all the stores in California. A
difficulty with owning a new store is you have to get approved by the regional
DA. Who is typically an IPC member, and provides all new franchises to friends
and family. I'm fairly certain if you failed out of government politics, you
could take a shot in the Subway ecosystem. Regarding the politics at Subway,
corporate culture was cut throat. While I was there Fred was mostly hands off,
allowing execs to fight for projects and visibility. The executive turnover
was high. Probably because they were cut throat in their hiring negotiations.
It was common for people to cycle out in under 5 years.

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Hypx
Subway is just the lowest tier of sandwich shop I can think of lately. Could
easily see them going the way of Quiznos and forced to restructure at some
point in the future.

~~~
i_am_nomad
You’re right, of course; Subway tastes like resignation and apathy. But even
the most mundane things can surprise you every once in a while.

Years ago, I walked into a random Subway, somewhere, and ordered some random
sandwich. I asked for onions, olives, and yellow peppers on it. The energetic
“sandwich artist” (their term, not mine) shook his head.

“No, no,” he said, with a friendly sincerity, “that’s not a good combination
for this sandwich. You should go with olives, yes, but also the green peppers
and spinach, with the sweet onion sauce. Much more balanced that way.”

I let him make it his way. I couldn’t even object, because I was struck
speechless by this man, making probably minimum wage at the crappiest sandwich
chain in America, caring so deeply about his work and my lunch. This man and
his pride in his work, his determination to actually care, helped me see my
own work in a new light, and honestly helped me climb out of the burnout I’d
been suffering at the time.

Whatever you do, do it the best you can; thanks for the reminder, Subway dude.

~~~
Nasrudith
I think the resignation and apathy is just something that happens always with
chain restaurants and scale. At a certain point consistency becomes the big
priority and it becomes soulless as process dominates and it depressingly
seems to work.

~~~
newen
I think cost cutting becomes a bigger priority than expanding to new
franchises (I guess expanding becomes harder to achieve after a certain point
and cost cutting becomes a better way to improve financials). So they use
lower and lower quality ingredients. Burger King is a prime example of this.
Chick-fil-A is good counter example.

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Operyl
Side note:

I can’t get NYT to load anymore. It’s convinced I’m in “incognito” when I most
definitely am not. Same behavior in Chrome and Firefox. Has anybody else had
it break on them?

~~~
frutiger
Off-topic: would you pay for it?

~~~
badfrog
I'd gladly pay a monthly fee that gave me access to like the top 5 newspapers,
but I'm not interested in maintaining all the subscriptions separately.

~~~
mrsuprawsm
There is a service called "Blendle" that does something similar, but on a
model where you pay per article.

~~~
himlion
They recently stopped this pay per article model in favor of a subscription
model for unlimited access.

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dontbenebby
Long ago, I was a sandwich artist.

One of our popular breeds was "cheesy bread". It was made the same way as
italian herbs and cheese, minus the herbs.

(For context, all bread in Subway arrives frozen, is thawed, then cooked, with
any toppings applied before going into the oven)

Corporate decided it should no longer be offered. We had several regulars
upset, but couldn't serve it lest the corporate overlords revoke the franchise
agreement.

There were lots of little incidents like this where corporate would come in
with some bullshit rule or decision, we'd lose customers, then they'd
backpedal.

I never saw any health issues - my manager was strict about labeling things
with a date, and wrote people up if they didn't label since it forced him to
throw stuff out.

But it wouldn't surprise me if years and years of bullshit decisions nudge
owners to cut corners.

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_ah
On my college campus Subway was the only "outside" food option that used the
campus meal plan. All the rest was different storefronts for the same
undistinguished catering company. I ate a lot of Subway in those days.

~~~
shuckles
Same story at Stanford. There was an Ike’s but the catering cartel killed
them.

~~~
mrosett
That was sad.

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lanrh1836
I don’t think anything about Subway has changed in 20+ years. Everything,
including the distinct colors of every vegetable and shape of every meat, is
exactly how I remember when I was a little kid.

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riceboy1701e
Ever since the Jared scandal I absolutely refuse to step anywhere near, much
less into, a Subway. And much better sandwich shops around. Except for Jimmy
John's, whose owner wants to rid the globe of priceless animal treasures.

~~~
jessaustin
You have to admit, the priceless animals are delicious...

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Animats
Oh, the food vendor, not the transit system.

~~~
dwighttk
Would the trains be franchises? Or the stations?

~~~
Animats
The NYC subways originally were franchises. They were operated by two private
companies, Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) and Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit
(BMT) under franchises from the City of New York. The Independent Subway (IND)
was a city-owned operation from the beginning.

From the article title, I expected an article about early NYC subway history.

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sureaboutthis
First, I need to say I was a multi-unit Subway franchisee for 33 years until
late last year.

When Subway field agents inspected our stores, we would be marked up "out of
compliance" but that statement sounds more serious than it actually is. Yes,
you could technically lose your franchise for a handprint on the glass but,
unless it was a constant problem, agents would only point it out with a remark
on the form of "need to pay more attention to the glass".

I need to call out the article treating the slicing thickness of cucumbers
being a minor problem. It's not. It's sloppiness that should never happen but
yes it happens to the best of us.

We had a problem with one older store where some of the ceramic tile was
breaking and coming loose. It took a while to get to it--like months--because
we were shorthanded, extremely busy, and the tile was a type that was
difficult to find. While our field rep would constantly get on us about it,
because it was in the customer area, he was also understanding of our issues.

Something to point out. You needed to be written up on compliance issues three
times before you could get into trouble. We were inspected monthly so you had
three months to fix issues.

I never felt threatened about losing our franchise. I always felt respect from
our DA. Most of the groaning I would hear at meetings was more from newer
owners than "original owners" as we older franchisees sometimes called
ourselves.

Other groaning came from other areas not mentioned in the article. One was
about marketing that didn't work including pricing of advertised deals. The
other is the remodeling of older restaurants which would cost around the
$200,000 level. If you owned 10 restaurants, that's a $2 million investment
that someone of my age would never recover.

Fred DeLuca was stuck in his ways and wouldn't change with the times. His
sister, when she took over, was more amenable to change but didn't have the
respect from higher ups in the system. That she "retired" is not the right
word.

The problems for most of us was marketing not competing well with the new
competition causing sales to falter over the last several years. I sold out
for that reason and because I didn't want to spend the money on remodeling.

So the problems with this one development agent (DA) in California is
something I never heard of before so it really is an anomaly to me, at least.

~~~
pgrote
>First, I need to say I was a multi-unit Subway franchisee for 33 years until
late last year.

Thanks for for sharing your experience.

Why did you leave? What was the process for selling the stores? Did you sell
to someone new or someone already a Subway franchisee?

~~~
sureaboutthis
I already stated why I was leaving.

I sold to a fellow longtime franchisee.

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rudiv
As always, Gujjus are hardcore.

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geoffmunn
I had Subway for lunch for over a year until one day I thought a bit too much
about how the pork riblet sandwiches were extremely uniform in appearance, and
I didn't like the way it was obviously processed to death. Subway is ok, but
you can get much better, fresher options elsewhere.

~~~
lamby
> you can get much better, fresher options elsewhere

Of course and it's almost a cliché to say it for all chains :) What one needs
to keep in mind is that such places are actually selling _minimising regret_
and lack of cognitive overhead via consistency of output and menu options, not
maximising pleasure or variety.

