Hungry New Yorkers are up in arms after the
New York Post exposed the actual size of Subway's "Footlong" subs as an inch shorter than the famous sandwiches are advertised.
The controversy began when an Australian man recently posted a photo on the chain's Facebook wall of himself measuring the Subway sandwich with a tape measure, establishing that the hero is 11 inches long rather than a foot.
The image soon went viral, gaining more than 118,000 "Likes" in just 24 hours.
To determine whether the apparent size disparity in for "Five-dollar Footlongs" was an isolated incident, a reporter from The Post purchased seven of the subs from different locations in New York City's Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens boroughs.
The result was that four of the seven sandwiches were between 11 and 11.5 inches.
Responding to the Facebook post, Subway Spokesperson Les Winogad told The Post that the photo "doesn’t meet our standards" and that Subway "always strives for our customers to have the most positive experience possible."
The length of the sandwich isn't the only way customers reportedly have been shorted in the past year by the sandwich franchise. The amount of meat some stores are using has also decreased. At least one Manhattan Subway franchise owner admitted that he was cutting back on the quantity of cold cuts he included in sandwiches.
"The distributor has increased the food cost on individual owners by 4 to 5 percent every year and provided the owners with less food," the owner said.
Reactions to the questioned advertising were mixed.
Juan Rivera, a 32-year-old Brooklyn hardware store owner, a frequent Subway customer, expressed his outrage.
"They’re cheating us! That’s foul and misleading. They state it’s a foot long, so it should be a foot long!" he told The Post.
Others, however, were not bothered it.
"It’s probably good that it’s not a whole foot long — I don’t think anybody needs a full foot-long sandwich," said fellow Brooklynite Margaret Zakhary, 30.
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