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...
> I'm also pretty disappointed in USA courts: did no judge ever look at these bankrupted immigrants and see someone deserving of justice?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed, in NZ a judge will occasionally say "imposing the sentence required by law would be manifestly unjust" and the politicians get annoyed their new three strikes law isn't being used.
That's a cop-out. A great deal of horrible shit that happens in our courts is entirely the output of judges and lawyers. (For instance, the courts who support themselves by repeatedly sending poor folks to jail, charging them for their stay, and then sending them back when they can't pay.) Our courts should do the right thing if the law allows them. Instead they do the right thing if the law forces them to do, but only sometimes, if some hardass journalist writes enough articles about their evil deeds. If the victims of this scheme had been mostly WASPs born and raised locally, the courts would have found a reason to seek justice. Instead the victims spoke the wrong language, ate the wrong food, and had skin the wrong color. Sickening.
Yeah, same opinion. Shame they're shit, they were a consistently OK option for roadtrips that wouldn't upset stomachs, but this is pathetic. I guess I'm not surprised that no real consequences have come of it, but wow Subway should be dissolved. This is rot all the way through the organization.
Surely you understand the difference in burden of proof is different between a compelling news article and a court of law.
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.
He acquired restaurants personally of owners that were on his target list. This alone is a clear conflict of interest and if not legally, at least ethically very questionable. There is a source saying she was his "hit man". I'm sorry but this does not leave a lot of room for interpretation.
I, too, think there's a massive conflict in allowing the development agents and their inspectors to be simultaneously franchisees, but if this were to hit court, here's how his defense might play it out:
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).
"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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a beautiful story. It reminds me of the stories collected in "Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do" by Studs Terkel. The overall theme is how people find meaning in what they do and the nobility of the human spirit. Thank you for sharing it.
I worked at a Subway in high school, and the thing I liked most about that job is that there were two, at most three, people working, and if it wasn't standard 9-5 M-F hours, those people were all in high school. Being trusted not to completely screw up a business with no adult supervision was a very rewarding experience.
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.
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.
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.
I recommend you all check the book "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience". Probably mentioned already a ton of times before in HN, but it shows how to achieve the so called "Flow" state in any activity that you do, even in mundane jobs like a factory line guy working in quality assurance or something related (can't remember exactly), how he actually enjoyed that "crappy job" and how he excelled others in their same position.
> No, no, ... that’s not a good combination for this sandwich ... You should go with ...
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.
One of my favorite parts of traveling in Italy was that the waiters who weren’t at all shy about telling you not to order what you were asking for, and instead go with something they thought was better. And it was invariably excellent. It’s much easier for them to shrug and let you make bad choices, so I’m very grateful when someone does that for me.
This customer was so positively affected by this customer service that it had a lasting impact on their life and they are even telling the story years later.
What would be the point of reading into someone's quick retelling of an encounter on HN? You're acting like it's a transcript and lambasting a strawman.
Every time a waiter tells me I'm making a mistake ordering "rare", it is rude and it does annoy me. I don't let it show, because bodily fluids, but the tip definitely suffers. It's really amazing how many waiters can't imagine eating steak that tastes good...
I left an HN-type site a few years ago because it was filling up with this kind of negative, destructive, cynical, all's-fucked-so-don't-bother comment that ever presumes the worst in everything.
Either try to make the world a better place (it is possible, small things are not wasted) or be quiet and stop infecting the rest of us with your apathy.
Edit: I really must stop being an obnoxious arse. Let me try again, then. Comments like that are damaging and self-reinforcing because they demoralise. A lot of people care and are decent but will not try to remain that way if comments like this corrode them - why should they, if decency is met with nastiness? Why even try? So please don't do this.
The original comment had a kind of upward twist at the end, due to the cognitive dissonance introduced by the poster’s use of the colloquial phrase “Thanks for the ___, Subway guy”. What read as a mostly older, serious comment was upturned on its head at the end by the change in tone.
I think the OP here was responding to the change in tone which signaled that such dry wit of response was “allowed” on such a post.
Had OPs comment not ended with some sort of puzzling naive phrasing and twist at the end, I doubt he would have felt comfortable with his dry cynical joke.
In some sense, he’s trying to cancel out the overly positive naive tone introduced by OP at the very end.
Equanimity and balance is not so bad. OPs weird ending belied a sort of youthful immaturity which struck counter to the wisened, aged tone with which he had cumulatively relayed with his story thus far.
You sound like you're on the autistic spectrum, struggling to understand basic human social interactions like some kind of hyper analytical artificial intelligence. The server was being helpful, not bossy. That was a great example of customer service going beyond reasonable expectations.
The OP could have said "no thanks" and continued with his original order. Simple as that. It seems that your social cognitive circuitry is overloaded by someone acting like an actual person instead of a simple robot.
As much as people crap on Subway I don't think I've ever had a negative experience at one. I know they don't use fresh ingredients but I'm fine with that. They aren't that expensive and I enjoy the array of toppings they have, although I will always remain bitter that they took away that spicy pepper paste. If on any day I decide to go there, I'm not doing it to have a good time, I'm doing it get a quick bite to eat and fill up on. Although the fact that it's one of 2 close food places to me adds bias, I don't have to get on any main streets to access the plaza it's in.
Yep. It's one of the few sandwich places I can go to - locally or while traveling - and be pretty sure I can get spinach and other toppings I want. I can see what things look like, so if the tomatoes are ... meh... I can ask for different ones before the damage is done, etc.
In my experience they are super location dependent. Some of them are pretty good, but there's a few in the less nice areas around me that are consistently grungy interiors with ingredients that are always on the edge of expiration.
I see lot of subway bashing all around. At one point in my life, I ate subway sandwiches for dinner, daily, for more than an year (can't remember exactly how long). The serving folks memorized how I wanted it and basically just asked "which one" I wanted (felt like hash lookup with the "alias" being the key and my custom requirements being the "value"). Never had any upset stomach etc so no complaints.
I used to really love one particular Quiznos sub. It had this really great bbq sauce. I was happy to pay a premium for it. Then one day they changed the sauce. It was awful. I stopped going.
Moral of the story: When customers love your product, don’t change it or take it away.
They're alright for a quick salad if you have diet restrictions and you're busy. You can usually ask them to use spinach as the base instead of lettuce, which is much more nutritional.
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?
If I’m honest? Probably not. I made use of my free articles when that feature worked, and rarely hit the limit. I pay for 7 different subscriptions at other outlets that I read more often, such as The Guardian, a few more technical (like LWN), and local papers.
The problem is that if you log in, they're tracking what you read and presumably monetizing that.
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.
It’s happening to me on iOS as well, which I forgot to mention in my original comment. I do a lot of my reading of Hacker News on my device while traveling, etc
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While his tone is completely off (and the slavery comment off-topic), he's not wrong at all about being 'fraud friendly'. The USA is much more lenient towards fraud in a lot of areas, especially financial.
Working in this space I can tell you that US banks want as little friction as possible while onboarding, at a much greater risk of fraud. This is completely different from European banks.
Hell, the USA still signs for card payments and uses cheques in nearly all places! I haven't seen either of those in about 20 years.
US banks want as little friction as possible on boarding versus European banks. Why would this be? Why are US banks less concerned about fraud versus Europe? One possible explanation could be that fraud may be less prevalent in the US than in Europe.
Sure, that is indeed one explanation. However it would be an incorrect one by all accounts. The US just historically had a lot more smaller banks (more competition) and a lot less banking regulations than the EU. They don't have to look too hard at their customers, so they don't, and (I think, correctly) realize that they can simply write off the fraud with increased profits.
And the best bit is that when they make a mistake they can just say: "sorry, your 'identity' has been stolen! Now you have to deal with it :)" rather than admit they allowed someone with a wig and a fake mustache to take out a loan in your name based on a set of completely, and obviously, fraudulent documents.
At the consumer side, signing for a payment or using a cheque is completely ridiculous, and the USA is decades behind EMV rollout compared to the rest of the world (let alone contactless payments).
By a few metrics the USA has the 3rd highest rate of card fraud, behind Mexico and Brazil, and the USA accounts for nearly 40% of the $21 billion worldwide total of card fraud.
It's always amazing to me that it's MY fault when the bank gave all of my money to someone else. The reason the US has such bad fraud rates is that the banks have little accountability and therefore no incentive to actually get the fraud rates down
So the US fraud total is around $10 billion on purchases of how much? The latest number I could find was a projection for 2017 that said there's $3 trillion of credit card purchases. That works out to something like 0.3 percent which seems pretty low.
For reference, according to the last ECB report in the EU the total value of fraudulent transactions from cards issued by SEPA countries was 0.041% of the total value of transactions (€1.8 billion - That's over 5x less fraud). Only 19% of that was point of sale fraud.
The Fed publishes interesting breakdowns on US fraud types[1]. $3.6 billion card fraud in the US is point of sale - 10x more than the €342 million point of sale EU fraud.
Overall there is $2.62 billion of counterfeit card fraud, $3.46 billion of "Fraudulent use of account number" (whatever that is), $810 million "lost or stolen card" fraud (not an issue with chip and pin), and $360 million "fraudulent application" fraud.
That would probably mean having to get rid of things like tap-to-pay. IIRC, don't you have to enter a PIN in the EU? In the US I've never set the PIN on any of my cards and many places I don't even have to sign anymore.
Contactless payments are pretty universal, depending on the country. Any newer card machines support them so it's just a matter of how old the card machine in the business is.
I don't see why. The USA is one of the most corporate-friendly countries out there and is absolutely forgiving of large scale fraud in a way other countries aren't. This corporate friendly approach has also facilitated enormous success, of course.
As for the slavery thing, 1/3 is probably an exaggeration (I don't see how you could ever get data on it because people wouldn't be truthful) but it's also pretty indisputable that the US has a horrific history with regard to race, and that deep set racial problems persist today.
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.
> 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.
....
“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...