Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Subway - No way

I used to be a big Subway fan, to the extent that all my eat outs used to end up at Subway. My wife would object saying it was not hygienic to eat stuff which was cut and kept open. I used to give her a big lecture on Subway as an international brand which was very quality conscious and so on.

One day my wife got and opportunity to counter all my quality conscious Subway gyan. We walked into a Subway outlet in Gurgaon and I was getting ready to order, when my gaze moved to one of the containers on the counter which had a dead lizard in it. I was shocked and so was my daughter. I quickly clicked a snap of the thing and called out to the counter boy. The boy looked sheepishly at me, picked up the lizard and threw it in the dustbin and had the courage to ask me ' your order sir'.

I was amazed at the lack of quality consciousness of this chap, and that got me thinking about how shallow the claims of these so called big brands about quality consciousness is. I am sure this incident did not get escalated any further, nobody got to know at Subway of this fact and the next time around the same thing may happen and it will get brushed under the carpet just like this one incident.

You and I will probably assume that the brands do mean quality, but many incidents in the recent past have shown that the big international brands do not guarantee quality, be it worms in chocolates, pesticides in cola and so on.

For the time being, I have stopped eating Subway, not that it impacts their business, but just cannot come around to it. I wish my trust was not betrayed in such a manner, and more importantly I wish my wife did not get this opportunity to pull my leg every time we went out to eat.

3 comments:

Karthikkaraikudy said...

Catch 22 is it not. If you go for brand and see betrayal you feel bad. But you feel bad enough to go for the untested products with 0 Brand value.

The story of Subway, Coke, Pepsi, etc etc of famous brands letting down makes you feel it is better to be fooled by unknown /less famous brand then by this popular ones!!.

Karthik.
Bangalore.
http://www.karthikkaraikudy.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

Maybe you should have follwed up your good vigilante work by sending the photo to Subway HQ in the US and to some newspapers in India. Why did you leave it at that?

Anonymous said...

Well i guess its right what they say.. Wife always gets the last laugh !! My country manager is hooked on Subway, i should make him read this blog. !! cheerz!