PUBLIC LISTENING: SUBWAY
$5 BLOG POST
When I was in high school, I got fired from Subway for making the sandwiches too slow. I didn’t steal from the cash register. I didn’t smoke weed in the alley behind the store. I just made the sandwiches too slow, and not even on purpose, and that was enough for me to get canned by my manager, who monitored me from a CCTV feed in her office. Flashing forward, there were bleak periods in my 20s where I probably ate three or four $5 Footlongs a week. Periods when I slept on couches and in basements and subsisted primarily on touring money and modest publishing checks. If there has been one throughline in my life, it’s been the pleasant, chemical smell of Subway bread baking.
I hadn’t been to a Subway since before the pandemic. The last time I was in Milwaukee, my friend hooked me up with a Subway gift card containing an unknown amount of money, which, combined with a few other factors—the addition of a $5 footlong cookie to the menu and a new $7 meal deal—was my sign to enter back into the belly of the beast. I would like to say that my cognitive abilities have improved since the days when putting together a sandwich in a reasonable amount of time was a difficult task, but that would be a lie. Either way, I was going to eat that goddamn cookie, all of it.
11:46: Teddy Swims “Lose Control”
I don’t think it would be a shock for anyone to learn that, upon entering the Subway, I was the only customer in the building. The chain has been struggling over the past decade. Since 2016, Subway has lost a net of around 7,600 stores; around a year ago, the Connecticut-incepted restaurant was bought by the private equity firm Roark Capital for around 9.6 billion. I inquired about the $7 meal deal and my Sandwich Artist told me it wasn’t available at this particular location. I checked to see how much money was left on the gift card. $10. I wasn’t going to be getting a six-inch sub, chips, and a soda for seven bucks, but I was going to be eating good for cheap. Thank you, Cathy.
11:48: Isabel LaRosa “Hope It Hurts”
There were all sorts of new items on the menu. There were multiple subs made with hot honey, a condiment that I associate in some general way with Brooklyn foodie culture but has seemed to take America by storm over the past half-decade or so. I wasn’t interested in any of that; I wanted the proper, old-school Subway experience, the experience that, when I close my eyes, makes me imagine transit map wallpaper and a queasy shade of green. I ordered the Italian BMT. Isabel LaRosa is a singer who went viral on TikTok a few years ago but recently played at the Mercury Lounge in New York.
11:51: Lady Gaga “Vanish Into You”
Provolone cheese. Yellow peppers. Olives. A little bit of lettuce. Oil and vinegar. Salt and pepper and oregano. Yellow mustard. I got the six-inch because you already know I was going to get that dumbass cookie. I got a soda. After my gift card, the meal was only a little over five bucks. They even threw in a few extra cookies, very small cookies, cookies smaller than the normal cookies at Subway. Where did these cookies come from?
“PUSH 2 START” is a pleasant, poppy amapiano cut and maybe the best thing I heard that afternoon. It felt pretty good to be alone in a Subway. On the walls were a series of framed prints that centered small images of sandwich ingredients in front of monochromatic backdrops. They didn’t not look like contemporary art. In the back of the room was Subway’s new logo, large and backlit, which turns the two arrows that bracketed the brand’s old signage into a single S. To say that Subway has fallen victim to refinement culture would be giving its new store design too much credit.
For maximum Subway damage, I left my bread untoasted. The Italian Herb and Cheese was squishy. I was eating my sub slowly, biding my time for the main event: the cookie. “Ordinary” came out in February, making it a fairly current tune by fast food music playlist standards. It sounds like an even more Christian version of an Imagine Dragons song. At some point, Subway franchisees had the option to tap into something called Subway Radio, which provides, I guess, a few channels of music via satellite, though I’m not sure if it still exists. I do know that, in 2021, the fictional British pirate radio station Kurupt FM took over the “airwaves” at over 2,000 Subway restaurants around the British Isles. Listening to grime music while eating a footlong sub sounds incredible, even if the people playing the music are a bunch of actors famous for a television show about private radio.
12:00: Justin Bieber (Feat. Quavo) “Intentions”
The footlong cookie is part of the larger “Subway Sidekicks” line of innovative snacking hardware. Also included in this suite is a footlong churro made in collaboration with Cinnabon—they call it “bakery inspired”—and a footlong pretzel made with “a twist of Auntie Anne’s.” The cookie is long and slim and housed in a cardboard pan that has some depth to it. "Bringing together two of Subway's most iconic menu items—footlong subs and Subway cookies—was the only way we could top our celebration of National Cookie Day last year when we opened the first Cookieway," said Paul Fabre, senior vice president, Culinary and Innovation at Subway in a statement a few years ago. Like I said, I was alone.
The addictive thing about Subway’s cookies is that they are soft to the point of being undercooked, a quality that one might call “oddly satisfying.” The footlong cookie was missing this specific textual component. Truth be told, it was more like a brownie. For some reason, Lorde mentions the Brooklyn club Baby’s All Right by name in this song; a few days ago, Baby’s All Right owner Billy Jones passed away. To any readers who were friends with the man, and I wouldn’t doubt that there are at least few of you, my thoughts go out.
12:07: Benson Boone “Beautiful Things”
The only other person in the Subway was a delivery driver, presumably picking up the meatball sub that I saw being made ahead of me. Nobody eats inside restaurants anymore. Was I going to finish the whole cookie? Is this what my life has devolved into? Doing competitive eating challenges in empty fast food restaurants while Benson Boone plays quietly in the background?
12:10: OneRepublic "Invincible (from Kaiju No. 8)"
I was more than two-thirds of the way into finishing my cookie, but this song was not helping me push to the finish line. Ryan Tedder from OneRepublic was a judge on a short-lived NBC reality show called Songland, which I can only describe as Shark Tank for the Los Angeles pop songwriting world. Whether intentionally or not, the show reveals some shit.
I could see the sole Sandwich Artist glancing over at me. I felt some sort of obligation to finish my cookie for them. The voices of my competitive eating heroes—Kobayashi; Chestnut—were knocking around in my domepiece. Post Malone was playing softly, encouraging in its own way. It just dawned on me that I was blogging about Subway on my Substack. The punishment and pain will never cease.
Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars “Die With a Smile”
It was the second Lady Gaga song in less than an hour and I was only a few bites away from finishing my cookie. Still, it wasn’t looking good. My real mistake was having the arrogance to think that I could eat a six-inch sub and a footlong cookie in one sitting. I was feeling nauseous. I was fading fast. Once again, Subway had gotten the best of me.
Have you gone to firehouse subs? You should go there
Were these songs playing on the Subway PA, for all to hear?