If I ever want a sub sandwich, there are way better options in town than Subway or Quizno’s. Subway is mediocre at best, while Quizno’s is mediocre and IMO overpriced. I never enjoy the sandwiches I get from them.
There’s also much better ways to control food than weighing each portion. Either preslice the meat like in Subway, have a standard slicer setting so you know exactly how heavy each slice is, like Port of Subs does here in Phoenix, or just…don’t do it in front of the customer. They don’t HAVE to witness every step of the sub construction.
Regarding the setting on the slicer. That actually won’t guarantee a uniform slice. When you first put the meat on the slicer it’ll slice thicker because of the weight of the meat compressing it against the table. The slices will gradually get thinner until you swing the end weight over the product at which point it will get thicker again and gradually thin out. To keep the slices uniform you have to keep an eye on it and adjust the knob as you go.
Also, our health inspector will verify the weight of our products from time to time. We either have to sell our sandwiches by weight or be able to guarantee a minimum weight. In order to keep the prices the same on each sandwich we weigh the individual components before they go on the sandwich so we can guarantee the minimum weight (but stay as close to it as possible so we can keep food cost in check). And even though it’s irrelevant, I’ll mention that he also checks to make sure the scales are calibrated and we give him $25 per scale per year for that.
ETA, I just re-read the last part of your post. So, ignore the health inspector thing since it doesn’t apply, but I’m leaving it in here anyways since I think it’s still good info to have.
I stopped going when they took out the pepper bar. I don’t know if they did this everywhere or just the one I went to, but that was honestly the big sell of Quizno’s to me.
Don’t forget that, as a chain, each store is individually owned. One going down doesn’t mean the chain itself is suffering that much, or chose to close it down. Whoever owned it might have just said ‘fark it’ and got out.
We had one out here in the sticks for about a year. I enjoyed it because our options are so limited and it was close to work. Eventually their staff just got so small and so clueless that it took forever to get your damn food. I’d order one of the sandwiches from the menu and they’d have to pull out the book to figure out how to make it and hunt all over for the ingredients, if I was lucky enough that they had them all. Everybody pretty much stopped going there.
I know the guys who owned it, and they had zero business running a restaurant, since I doubt they have a day of restaurant experience between them. So it could be that Quiznos was just overly lax about who they’d give a franchise to.
There’s three Quiznos in my 10-mile area, and they seem to be doing fine. I’ve bought a sammich from all three in the last year, and it was a good to really good meal each time. I hope my local shops stay open; I don’t crave Quiznos, but I probably buy a sammich there at least once a month.
With multiple locations disappearing in a concentrated area in the OP, I’d say you’re right on track. It sounds like a local franchisee going under, rather than the chain deliberately pulling out.
Quiznos and Blimpie both scaled back tremendously in Indianapolis, Schlotzky went away completely, while Subway has thrived and Penn Station has survived. Quiznos was okay but… building your entire chain around the novelty of toasting the customer’s sandwich? That’s it? Any store with an electrical outlet can do that (and we were doing it at Hardee’s in the late 1980s when we experimented with sub sandwiches); they had to know that the second the idea seemed successful that their competitors would jump on board.
Does anyone know what the selling angle was/is for Blimpie?
For a very short period, they had some promotional sandwich that was chipotle chicken something. It’s not anything on the menu now either. It was so wonderful.
Used to go to Quiznos before Subway starting toasting their subs. As soon as they did, I quit going. Quiznos subs seemed to have less toppings, and some of their promo sandwiches were ridiculous. There was one that was about 1.5 inches wide. I ordered one, saw what it was, and never went back.
Two closed down here. The only remaining one is near a courthouse, probably due to the lunch time rush.
I’ve only eaten at Quiznos when I have a coupon. I thought they’re sandwiches were too similar to Subway’s to justify the extra to “toast” them when I could do it at home.
Mine too. Over here on the west side of Cincinnati near where I work, there’s a Quizno’s franchise owned by a very nice Lebanese couple. I love going there.
And they don’t weigh their meat in front of the customers, either. They have everything pre-sliced and arranged in portions on wax paper like Subway does. I can’t get behind that complaint because I’ve never seen it.
The two Quiznos most convenient for me have closed this year. There are at least two more in the area, but they are not convenient for lunch hour at all. And since they dropped the meatball sub, that cut down by 50% the sandwiches I like from them.
Re: Schlotzky’s, I was passing through Joplin last weekend, and the sandwiches have definitely shrunk. After I scraped off most of the ridiculous amount of lettuce, there wasn’t what there used to be. Chips are still wonderful though; I bought half a dozen jalapeno to bring back with me.
Image. Other than at a meat counter, measuring the portion gives the impression that you’re unwilling to be generous.
A smart operation can keep control of the portions without taking out a scale. Subway, for instance, cuts its meat so that each slice is a certain weight. They you just tell your people “six slices per footlong” and you’re set. When you go to measure, the first impression customers will have is that you’ll take something off. Bad all around.
I only ate at a Quizno’s once. Their selection of sandwiches was uninteresting.
They’re my least-favorite sub chain. I used to eat there occasionally, but gave up on them.
One of the things I like about sub restaurants is that most of them are set up to let the customer choose the ingredients they want on their sandwich.
Quizno’s seems to be based on fast food models like McDonald’s: they work from a ‘standard’ set of toppings, and they invariably get the order wrong if you ask them to ‘hold’ ingredients (which is even more annoying when you consider how limited their set of ingredients is compared to Subway, Blimpie’s, etc).
Quizno’s prep areas reflect this ‘customer-doesn’t-need-to-know’ attitude: the opaque sneezguards act as visual obstructions that make it hard to see what they’re putting on the sub, until it comes out of the toaster. I would find myself bobbing and weaving like Jack Dempsey trying to see what they were doing. They got it wrong about one third of the time.
Most annoying of all, they sometimes tried to convince me to accept the results as is. * “I know you asked us to hold the cheese and mayo, but be a nice guy and pay for it anyway”.*
If Quizno’s is going under, they maybe should have considered these things more.
I worked at a Quizno’s franchise for about a year during 2005-2006, and I really miss another limited-time sub that had come out-- it was some sort of chicken milanese or something vaguely “Italian” to the name: sun-dried tomato pesto, chicken, provolone, and toppings. I can’t remember what was standard on it, as I always “doctored up” mine with all sorts of stuff. That said, the toppings choices were limited compared to other sub chains, but the bread and sauce varieties were fairly expanded at the one I worked. Working there with my coworkers who were all pretty good at producing food accurately and efficiently (we had to-- we were the #3 busiest location in the country at the time with a line out the door for most of our working hours) spoiled me to the point where I couldn’t really eat at another Quizno’s afterward. The workers were too slow, didn’t know their menu well enough, and often got stuff wrong that I was mentally walking through the steps before they figured out where the bread I requested would be located. Since it’s been about three or four years since I’ve been inside one, I can’t imagine I would see the same menu as when I was working in one-- the chain was really fond of introducing new stuff, eliminating menu favorites and doing “limited time only” sandwiches and soups. I’m really not terribly surprised that there are a lot of franchises closing down.
As for the measuring scale, having worked in one that was super busy, I can guarantee you that there was absolutely no time to do the amount of prep required to have everything pre-portioned-- we were lucky to have the Italian meats pre-prepped for long enough to last half the day, and often had to pull someone off the line to slice and make more halfway through the lunch rush. It didn’t matter how much prep we did-- we completely filled the coolers underneath the work bench with prepped containers every morning and still would run out of stuff because of the volume of customers that came in. For a branch with less foot traffic, I could see pre-measured amounts working as a solution for the “that’s so cheap” image of pre-measured foods.
Both Quiznos that closed near me still had ‘pepper bars’ (IIRC 3 types of peppers, and pickles) when I had last visited them earlier this year.
This never bothered me - they had been doing it for as long as I can remember and it just kind of showed they weren’t cheating with less than the minmum weight (although since you couldn’t see the scale read-out it proved nothing really). Subway goes for the slices per sandwich size deal, or the pre-weighed-in -a-cup method, which sucks as they premix onions into their chopped-up Cheesesteaks bits , and since the taste of onions is foul (but that’s a different topic, done in several other threads already).
That may have been either the ‘sammies’ or the ‘torpedoes’ - whatever it was, when I first came out I asked to see it, they showed me the size of the roll used, and I quickly took a pass on it. It just seemed silly and not a good value for the money.
Well, back in the day that was all we had on Long Island - Blimpies or iffy local delis that were hit or miss (usually miss). No Subways, and of course no Quiznos. Subways came around here big time, I guess in the late 1980s, and the smell of the bread baking was fantastic (OTOH the taste of the rolls was completely unimpressive - none of us could figure this out, maybe they had some sort of Fresh Baked Bread Air Freshener)? Blimpies is still around these parts, albiet in a reduced capacity - they use to have in the early '90s a chicken cutlet (well patty) w/ cheese menu item that was incredible good - then, last year after a decade or so (I’m not a dedicated customer, I guess), I tried their current chicken offerings, which was pretty bland.
I’ve gone to a few sub chains, and it’s damned annoying that they will all salt and pepper the subs unless you tell them at first not to do it, and then remind them that you didn’t want that stuff on the sandwich. Most of those meats have quite enough salt on them already, especially stuff like salami, and I can’t eat black pepper. I DO like Subway’s vinegar, but they always reach for the oil, despite me telling them I don’t want oil. I’ve only been to one Quizno’s location, and never saw them measure out the meat, but it’s hard to see what they’re doing.
And for crying out LOUD, people, American cheese doesn’t go with every sort of meat. Some meats need Cheddar, and some need provolone or mozzarella.
I didn’t mind the measuring, it was the change in the beef from slices to some kind of chunks. I used to get the Beefeater, then it was discontinued. Then I got something else and had them put mushrooms on it so it was like the Beefeater, and it was discontinued. Then I got the Steakhouse Beef Dip or something, and that was good when the beef was thinly sliced because it could be placed on the bread edge to edge. Then they went to something that looked like chunks of pot roast. It didn’t taste very good, and the chunks were heavy so although I got the same amount of meat, it took up a much smaller percentage of the bread which meant I had lots of bites that were bread but no meat. So I quit going.
I was a die-hard fan of their Prime Rib and Peppercorn sub for a number of years. It was a little pricey but well worth it. Then, around when, the economy started having trouble, they dropped the price significantly. For a good while, things were great, but then the quality dropped, as well. Finally, they dropped the sandwich (and the prime rib) from their menu altogether. They’ll still make it using whatever roast beef they’ve got now, but it’s not even close to being good.
So they went from being my absolute favorite major fast food chain to being not worth the trouble. Subway may be consistently average, but that puts them well ahead of where Quiznos seems to be. It’s possible that I could find something else worthwhile on the menu, but at this point, it doesn’t seem worth trying – especially since all the nearby Quiznos have shut down.
In short, my guess based on my (admittedly limited) observations would be a death spiral kicked off by the bad economy.
