What You Don’t Know About Subway
By Tyler Anderson
There’s an unseen world at a place where many of us spend a lot of our time and money. Hopefully you realize that most things in life just don’t appear out of nowhere. Someone spent their time and energy creating the final products that the average American consumer will purchase. The unseen world I’m speaking of isn’t simply Target or Wal-Mart, where the employees will just get stuff from trucks and stock them on the shelves. I’m talking about the fast paced, almost hellish, fast food workplace. Or more specifically, Subway.
In December of 2007, I applied for a job at the new Target store that was opening up in Apple Valley. By February 2008, I was working 30 hours a week there. This was my first job so I didn’t know what to expect. I was expecting it to be really fast paced with managers that were constantly finding new and trivial ways to criticize me, but what I found however was quite different than the stereotypical retail environment. While I did have the managers who seemed to enjoy making others day miserable, Target was a surprisingly relaxed environment where it seemed like I was just getting paid to stock shelves and talk to other employees. While I was working at Target, I always questioned the old idea that everyone hates their job, because to be honest, Target was almost fun at times. Little did I know however that this attitude would set me up for a big surprise in the future. In late September I eventually left Target and decided to look for a new job.
I read the news so I knew that at the beginning of November the financial crisis was at its peak and people were getting laid off by the hundreds of thousands so it would be difficult to find a job. I did realize however that one industry that seemed almost unaffected by the crisis was the fast food industry so naturally that’s where I applied to. I had actually received two job offers, one from McDonalds and one from Subway. I figured that Subway would probably treat their employees much better than McDonalds would so I took the job at Subway. And then the reality of a real job hit me.
My first day of Subway was only about four hours but I didn’t make any sandwiches. Instead my manager told me about the behind the scenes stuff of Subway, or in other words, the stuff that the customers don’t see. I was actually kind of surprised at the amount of work that went on in the backroom of Subway. I mean when I had first gotten a job there, I thought it was just going to be making sandwiches and maybe baking some bread.
The very first thing I had to do was stock the chip rack, which is the rack that holds all of the chips. Easy enough. So the manager told me to take the chip rack back to the backroom where all of the boxes of chips were. Before I knew it I had finished stocking all of the chips. I told the manager I had completed this task and I was ready for the next thing. His response was, “You’re not finished. Actually you have to do it all over again.” Apparently I was supposed to pull the old chips forwards and then put the newer chips in back. Although I knew I wasn’t making a good first impression, the manager didn’t really tell me what to do, he just said, “Take the chips from the boxes and put them in the chip rack so that it looks full.” He never said anything about pulling the old chips forward. This lack of telling me how to do things is a similar theme throughout my training at Subway. I mean Subway isn’t really a difficult job when you know what to do but the thing is that I didn’t know what to do for the first two months that I worked there.
One thing that customers don’t know about Subway is that the training there is hardly up to standards compared to other places. Basically the ‘training’ there is being told what to do and not how to do it. This is especially true when it comes to the main part of Subway, the sandwich making. Cutting bread was surprisingly difficult for the first couple weeks. I remember when I was being trained how to cut the bread, the manager was standing there watching me like a hawk and expecting me to have known how to cut the bread. After ruining four foot longs of bread, he showed me how he cuts it, which was basically no help because I had been watching people cut bread for days. Also, no one told me what kind of meat or the quantity of the meats went on the certain sandwiches. Same thing with the vegetables. It’s actually pretty embarrassing for a Subway employee who just started and you don’t know what kind of meat goes on which sandwich.
When it comes to the behind the scenes stuff there’s actually quite a bit that goes on. Subway preps their own green peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes. All of the other vegetables come prepackaged. What this means is that the employees have to cut the green peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes and get them ready for the customers. All the meat is pre cut and ready to go except for the ‘chickens’. The ‘chickens’ are the teriyaki, buffalo, and regular shredded chicken. Getting these ready are a really tedious task that can take up to fifteen minutes if there are no customers. Usually we’re almost always busy so in reality, this can take up to over an hour to do.
Another thing that customers don’t know is that there is a limit as to how many vegetables we can give customers. People are always complaining about how Subway employees never give them enough black olives, green peppers, etc. This is because we’re only technically supposed to put six of every vegetable on a sandwich. This is reasonable for tomatoes or cucumbers, but for black olives almost every time you only put six on a sandwich you’ll hear one of the most often spoken words at Subway. “More.” It’s not the individual employees fault though. We’re yelled at if we don’t give only the minimum amount possible. Our official job title is ‘Subway sandwich artist’ but we like to joke that our really title should be “Subway sandwich assembly line worker’, because when you think about it, that’s basically what we are.
We’re also almost always understaffed as well. The managers and people above the managers think that two of three people can run the store at night. I mean during the day when they work, two or three people should be sufficient but at night when there is a lot more to do, we’re lucky if we even get to take a break for like five minutes.
Honestly, the list of what goes on at Subway could go on for quite a bit. The only thing that I can’t stress enough is that usually if a Subway employee does something that seems unreasonable, the only reason they’re doing it is because they’re told to do it. Hopefully if I ever become assistant manager of Subway, I’ll try to be as reasonable as possible to the employees that work with me. [1]
[1]
