Andre Morris

Link: http://www.subway.com

Working as a Subway sandwiches store manager for 4 years in my youth cemented in me a certain love for the delicious and nutritious subs on freshly baked bread. Subway has been my favorite 'fast food' place for the past fifteen years. When asked by anyone where I'd like to go for a quick bite, my first answer has always been "Subway." Once I got there, the sub I would order 3 out of 5 times was the Steak & Cheese on wheat. But times they are a changin'.

I'm very disappointed as they've changed my favorite sandwich, the Subway Steak & Cheese. They've done away with the sub formerly built using lean strips of tasty steak and have replaced it with large, fatty pieces of what appears to be roast beef. It doesn't look or taste like steak in any way! The Steak & Cheese was a good substitute for a Philly Cheese Steak in a pinch. Now the experience is more like eating leftover pot roast reheated on slices of Wonder bread. If I wanted pot roast, I'd order pot roast, not a steak & cheese sandwich!

For over 15 years Subway has provided the Steak & Cheese sandwich a certain way and it's a questionable business decision at best to change a core product in this way. The new sub is really like a whole new sandwich, it doesn't at all taste like the previous version. Why not provide a second product, called chunky steak, but leave the original intact for those of us who enjoy it? Especially a product that has such a large following. 15% of the sub orders that were placed while I worked at Subway were for steak & cheese subs. How many of these people will be turned off by these changes?

This should be an important reminder to any business: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Why risk losing existing customers by tinkering with an existing product when you could simply add a new product? I thought the goal of business was to keep existing customers while gaining new customers. The only saving grace for Subway with me is that the Steak & Cheese isn't the only sub of theirs that I like. Subway, do yourselves a favor, don't mess with the Club or the Meatball.