An open letter to the geniuses at Subway Restaurants:
Sometimes I wonder if competitors plant lawyers and marketing idiots in the employment of their competition. For example, whatever idiot decided it was in McDonald's best interest to sue a pair of British protesters, Helen Steel and David Morris, for libel in 1989 almost had to be working for Burger King. After seeing a documentary made about that legal action, McLibel, I took my already skimpy fast food business to anyone but McDonald's ever since. In the long run, McDonald's didn't win any money from the suit, engendered a shit-load of bad will from anyone interested in corporate fairness, safe and healthy food, or good government. The idiot judge who settled the case in McDonald's favor ended up costing the British government a load of money ( £57,000) in the European Court of Human Rights where the case was overturned and England found itself owing that court money for violating Article 6 (right to a fair trial).
In all, the moron who advised McDonald's to sue these people produced a lot of customers for everybody but McDonald's. I'm not kidding. I haven't eaten a crumb produced by that miserable company since sometime in 1990 and I never will. In my opinion, the best thing that could happen to McDonald's is bankruptcy. I do my best to direct people to McLibel and every bad word I can think of to say about McDonald's gets said as often as possible.
One of the companies that benefited from my deflected business was Subway. That all ended in late May, 2010. Subway sent a letter to Coney Island Drive Inn stating, ""You must immediately remove all references to FOOTLONG (tm) in association with sandwiches."In the crazy mind of Subway's doofus legal and marketing departments, they imagine they invented the word "footlong" in regards to sandwiches. Good for them. Going crazy is a symptom of getting too big for yourself and this is obviously nuts. I would imagine that many businesses, like Coney Island Drive Inn have been making sandwiches called "footlongs" for longer than the morons at Subway have been alive.
So, this is my notice that I'm done with Subway; one of my wife's favorite food franchises. We're done. No matter how hungry we get, how poor the rest of the choices might be, we don't do business with corporate bullies. So, fuck you McDonald's and Subway. We're gone.
