The Fast Food Chain Everyone Should Avoid, According To Reddit

We understand that this might be a novel insight for some people, but we think that fast food should be both tasty and cheap. We can forgive something that's just okay if it's cheap enough, and we can sometimes stretch our wallets for a burger if it just slaps that hard. (Looking at you, Five Guys.) But we absolutely cannot tolerate something that tastes like it should cost $2.50 when it actually costs five times that much. That's why we concur with Reddit when, upon being asked which fast food chain they never want to eat at again, so many people answered with that struggling sandwich behemoth, Subway.

"It's expensive as hell now, and the sandwiches are basically trash," one user opined. "I see a lot of Subway hate, and I'd like to make one thing clear," another Redditor said. "It's completely justified." Plenty of people took issue with their sandwiches' level of moisture, which went well beyond what's normal. "I paid almost 15 [dollars] for a sandwich that was bland and...wet. Just so, so wet," one person lamented. Another said, more succinctly, "Subway: Home of the Sweaty Meats." There were a few other chains mentioned in the discussion thread, including Panera (which may or may not be fast food at all), Sonic, and Long John Silver's, but Subway received the most notices by far.

One of the funniest scenes in any movie this year came from "Friendship," wherein a character sets out on what's supposed to be a life-changing hallucinatory odyssey ... only for his subconscious to conjure up a vision of him going to a Subway and ordering a Black Forest ham sandwich. It's the kind of joke that wouldn't have worked with a KFC or a Taco Bell, but in recent years, Subway has become associated with a certain clammy suburban shabbiness, ideally suited for the queasy A24 comedy.

It wasn't always this way. Once upon a time, Subway was embraced as a tasty, healthy-ish fast food option, serving sandwiches made from fresh ingredients right in front of you. They found a young man from Indiana named Jared Fogle, who supposedly lost 245 pounds through exercising and eating Subway sandwiches, and made him their spokesperson. They even offered a footlong sandwich for $5 — a truly ridiculous bargain with a catchy jingle.

Eventually, though, the bloom came off the rose. The once-vaunted fresh ingredients were found not to be so fresh after all. The $5 footlong deal ended, which didn't endear the chain to its customer base. The hyper-aggressive business model resulted in oversaturation and overworked franchisees. And Fogle, essentially Subway's mascot, was arrested for some of the worst crimes imaginable. It was a perfect storm of bad publicity, and although there are still plenty of Subways out there, their image has yet to fully recover.