Where There’s A Will, There’s A Subway

I found a fascinating article by Janet Adamy in today’s online version of the Wall Street Journal. What appears below are a few tidbits from that piece along with my take on what it all means for business owners.

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While most fast food chains are pulling back on their expansion plans, Subway is continuing to open restaurants at a rapid clip and in fact is now the largest such firm in the U.S. with over 20,000 locations. McDonald’s, for camparison, has approximately 13,700 stores.

One of the ways that Subway has succeeded where their competitors have faltered is in the area of “non-traditional” locations - defined by Subway as any place you wouldn’t normally find a restaurant.

Such as?

Such as inside a German car dealership, at 110 hospitals, in a Goodwill Industries store, a downtrodden church in upstate New York and The Jewish Community Center of Cleveland. At the JCC the menu was altered to provide only kosher fare and an Orthodox Jew is on hand at all times to oversee food preparation.

Sound crazy? That location is #5 in sales out of all Cleveland locations in spite of only being open half a day on Fridays and closed all day on Saturdays in observation of the sabbath. Cleveland’s top selling Subway is inside a hosptal.

I guess this is sort of a “think outside of the box” or “think outside of the bun” success story. Subway didn’t let the fact that they started out much smaller than McDonald’s or other burger chains limit their vision of what they could become. And their willingness to be flexible in altering the basic store layout to meet the needs of as many non-traditional locations as possible has paid off big time.

How big?

Right now 22% of their locations are non-traditional, up from 13% ten years ago.

Food for thought.