A Subway sandwich artist told Chet that the sandwich he’s been ordering for years is “illegitimate.”
Chet and his wife routinely split Subway footlongs. Chet is more partial to roast beef. His wife is more partial to turkey. So when they ordered a Subway Club recently, they asked for all the roast beef to be put on one side, turkey on the other, ham evenly distributed across, and it cut in half.
They were ordering the same amount of meat as a normal Subway Club, they only wanted it to be apportioned differently. Every other time they’ve asked Subway to do this, there’s been no problem, but this day was different.
The sandwich artist got huffy and told his wife that this was against policy. While begrudgingly constructing the sandwich to their specifications, he said that the sandwich was “cheating” and if his manager caught him, he would get “reamed out.”
Passing the sandwich to the clerk for tallying up the transaction, the artist made a point of noting that it was an “illegitimate” sandwich.
On Subway’s website it says:
Can I customize my sandwich?Yes! At SUBWAY®, every sandwich is fresh and made to order – just for you! In fact, there are over 2 million sandwich varieties available from our menu choices, so you can have your SUBWAY® sandwich with any combination of ingredients we offer.
Apparently rearranging the ingredients is the impossible 2 million and first sandwich variety and cannot be accommodated.
Chet and his wife thought the situation was very weird and kind of rude and sent comment to that effect in to Subway but have not heard back yet. In the future, they’ll avoid this particular franchise location.
Subscribe to Ben’s posts by RSS.
Follow Ben on Twitter.
Email ben at consumerist.com
More From Consumerist
-
Mother Probably Less Concerned With Size Of Subway Sandwich Than The Glass Shards In It
-
Give’em An Inch Or They’ll Take A Mile: Two Customers Suing Subway Over 11-Inch Footlongs
-
Ex-Subway Sandwich Artist On Short Footlongs: You Still Get The Same Amount Of Ingredients
-
What A Difference An Inch Makes: Report Says Some Subway Footlongs Are Only 11 Inches
-
Don’t Bother Subway’s Sandwich Artists Right Before Closing Or You’ll End Up With This Mess
Congratulations on your clever interpretation of the “rules” of sandwich making.
Here’s the one you forgot: If you win, it’s cheating. If I win, it’s not.
MY CHEESE STILL REMAINS NON-TESSELLATED!
Seriously Subway, spread the word about cheese tessellation already.
I’m not seeing tessellated cheese either. Very, very disappointing.
i actually get the chicken bacon ranch and tell them to add buffalo sauce to it at the end. If you get the buffalo chicken alone its like 2$ more total if you add bacon and its the exact same thing. Guess subway hasn’t caught on the that one.
There are several issues here. 1) Subway’s stated policy is to customize all of their sandwiches; 2) The customer was not asking for any substitutes or additional ingredients, only to have the meat arranged differently; 3) It should not be Subway’s concern how the sandwich is consumed, whether it’s by a single person, or by four; 4) If offering a $5 footlong is not profitable for Subway, they should not offer it in the first place; and 5) The customer was treaded rudely by the “sandwich artist”.
Subway owes these folks an apology, and the rude employee who openly called the sandwich “illegitimate” should be sacked. In a bad economy such as we have today, Subway should be instructing their people to do everything possible to keep customers happy. Certainly just about every fast food joint has a similar or better deal, so in the end, it’s customer service and quality that makes the difference.
I remember going to Subway with my ex. We’re both vegetarians, but we wanted a few different veggies and condiments. We’d always order our own 6 inch subs since we thought it was “cheating,” but the manager of the location we always frequented told us to just order a footlong and he could put whatever we wanted on either side.
I think we were cheating more than the OP. The OP was getting the standard stuff on the sub, just asking that it be placed differently. No biggie.
I had a regular customer back when I was a sandwich monkey that ordered similar to that – he’d always get a footlong club with all the meat on one side because he shared with his girlfriend, who wanted a veggie sub. Not a big deal. Same amount of meat, just proportioned differently on the bread.
Then again, we were pretty lax at my store. You want pepperoni on a ham sub? We’d ring up as a BMT instead of a ham + extra meat. Cheaper that way.
You rock.
Two words…Jersey Mike’s…splitting sandwiches (even wrapping them separately) is their pleasure…(and no, I don’t work there)
I was behind a couple in line at a Subway a few months ago and they ordered two different menu sandwich ingredients to be put on a single footlong, one on each side, so they could split it. I thought that was pushing it a bit, but the sandwich maker didn’t seem to care.
Funny, that. My wife and I went to a Subway and I asked for black olives on our sandwiches. The sandwich construction worker put exactly 4 slices on, counting them out as he did so. When I asked if they could put more olives on, he said that was “against policy”. We never returned to that location. At a Subway closer to my house they sprinkle them on liberally.
I love these on-the-spot made-up policies. Just means I won’t be going back, and I will tell this story of your moronic power trip to everyone I know.
Is this is a guest post written by an editor from the Onion? If so, you forgot to use their headline, “Area person gets less than perfect service at fast food restaurant”
Just make the fucking sandwich you pinhead!
I find it easy to avoid Subway altogether. The idea that I would want to customize my sandwich is absurd. Make the sandwich the right way, save me many minutes of waiting in line and making choices about every ingredient. Then I would be a happy customer. But Subway doesn’t work that way. So they don’t get my money.
My partner and I have experienced a similar situation, we also routinely split footlongs, the only difference between each half being that one of us is a vegetarian, so we have both halves of the meat put on one side.
Several times they’ve tried to charge us for either “extra” meat, or for 2 six inches. We give them one change to correct their error, if they don’t agree that we ordered a footlong, we leave and eat someplace else.
Some of you guys are missing the point.
The reason it’s cheating has to do with the dispersal of the meat, not the selected meat. Technically, they’re getting two 6 inch subs – which would be around $8. By ordering it as a 6 inch they’re cheating on the remaining $2 or whatever it is, because the footlong is cheaper than buying two 6 inch subs.
If they ordered one footlong of a particular variety with EVEN distribution of meats, it wouldn’t be a problem. But you can’t shift meat on either side to circumvent paying for two 6 inches. If she wants her sandwich her way, get her a 6 inch and pay the right price for each.
The “customize my sandwich” policy refers to, within a 6 inch OR a footlong, you can customize what is or is not there, not location within the sandwich to get around paying the right price.
Semantics? Maybe. But my point is that Subway is absolutely in the right here. Fortunately, there is an easy solution to the problem.
- Order the footlong Subway Club AS IS without asking them to customize the meats.
- Take it home, reorg the meat the way you want it.
Done. I fail to see what the problem is.
A Roast Beef footlong has 6 pieces of meat, a footlong turkey has 8 pieces of turkey, and a footlong ham has 8 pieces of ham. A footlong club has 4 turkey, 2 ham, and 4 roast beef, and a footlong turkey ham has 4 of each.