Subway Got Too Big – Franchisees Paid a Price
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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“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...
It’s entirely plausible that he acted ethically and legally at all times and the authors or sources were heavily biased towards a certain editorial conclusion.
Please apply some skepticism before reading one article and condemning people to jail.
1) One man's "hit man" is another's "demand for rigorous quality standards".
2) Through years (decades?) of ownership, Mr. Patel has developed a keen sense of what constitutes a high-quality operation and a shop that's cutting corners on quality. His comments were just "suggestions" and "gut feeling" based on his experience being an operator.
3) While he ended up acquiring some of the restaurants, he didn't acquire all of the restaurants closing under his watch. Through his tremendous experience (see above), supplier connections and economies of scale peculiar to a large franchisee, he saw a potential to "clean up the act" under new management and keep the jobs in the community (insert a tear jerker story of some employee extremely happy about such outcome).
What do you expect the judge to do? The contract has an arbitration agreement, and the FAA is quite restrictive on the basis that allow a judge to overrule such a decision. Blame your lawmakers.
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.
http://r139.publications.lawcom.govt.nz/Chapter+11+-+Sentenc...
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.
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.
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.
I once drove 15 miles to a place because FM radio would blare about how great is the sandwich. In the shop an overgrown bored teenager prepared an unbalanced and totally disgusting sandwich for me. Needless to say it was disappointing experience as I could have walked down a block to Potbelly and gotten much much better sandwich without filling a fucking form on what meats and condiments I want in the sandwich.
Repeatedly telling a customer 'no'? Telling them their choice is not good? Telling them what they 'should' do instead? It's not even a suggestion, it's a demand!
Smiling while dictating your opinions at the customer and telling them how wrong they are doesn't make it not rude.
Super rude, for anyone, let alone to a customer.
Moral of the story: When customers love your product, don’t change it or take it away.
Same here. I'm never going to come out of one thrilled, but they are consistently _fine_.
I think subway is a consistent experience, available nationwide and has a variety of raw vegetables not usually found in fast food.
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?
I pay for the Washington Post, but I still read it in private mode or without logging in at least. They don't need to know what I'm reading, though I'm happy to support them.
curl -O nyturl open local html
You don't know that
Et voilà, "incognito detection" is defeated (they are checking to see if localStorage is available or not). This will be enabled by default in future.
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.
From the article title, I expected an article about early NYC subway history.
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.
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?
I sold to a fellow longtime franchisee.
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.