Subway Now Outnumbers 30 Of The 50 Largest Fast Food Chains… Combined

People joke about their being a Starbucks or McDonald’s on every corner in America — and in some parts of the country that seems true — but did you know there are more Subway restaurants in the U.S. than there are Starbucks and McDonald’s combined?

We were taking a look at the latest QSR 50 report from QSR Magazine, which ranks the nation’s largest fast food chains by everything from revenue to number of stores, and noticed that not only is Subway the chain with the most stores, it’s also the one that added the most from last year.

According to the chart, there were 25,549 Subways in the U.S. in 2012. To put that in perspective, that’s 1.8 times the number of McDonald’s and more than double the total number of Starbucks, the next two largest chains on the list. When you add McDonald’s and Starbucks’ numbers together, it only comes out to 25,285, short of the total for Subway.

Out of curiosity, we added up the store totals for restaurants 21-50 on the list and it only came to 23,929! That means that Subway is larger than Popeyes, Panera, Jimmy John’s, Panda Express, Chipotle, Papa Murphy’s, Church’s Chicken, Carl’s Jr., Five Guys, Long John Silver’s, Tim Hortons, Checkers/Rally’s, Jamba Juice, Whataburger, Qdoba, Zaxby’s, Del Taco, Cici’s, Bojangles, Wingstop, Captain D’s, Steak ‘n Shake, Moe’s, Culver’s, Boston Market, White Castle, El Pollo Loco, In-N-Out Burger, Jason’s Deli, and Krispy Kreme… combined.

And yet, in spite of that impressive number of stores, Subway only brought in around one-third of the sales revenue that McDonald’s earned in 2012, and only slightly more than Starbucks made with half the number of stores.

If anyone out there wants to make a Subway version of the McFarthest project and try to locate the spot in America that is the farthest away from the odd par-baked bread smell of a Subway, we’d think you were the coolest person on the planet.

Of course, since Subway added 956 new stores in 2012 (2.6 per day) — 615 more than the next chain on the list — such a map would probably be outdated before it was even published.

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