Back in the early days of international, everybody wanted to customize the menu for every place.
For a franchise system to work well, you really need people with an entrepreneurial mind-set because, while you have a large, overarching system that everybody has to work with, a lot of local issues have to be handled.
I guess that's one of the benefits of being sick. Your wife lets you have a big-screen TV in the living room.
There's huge access to information. If you need to learn something, you can go on the Internet and learn very quickly. You can reach across miles and miles to find companies that can assist you.
In a typical situation, it's going to take pretty close to a year to get your location in, get your permits, and then get open.
There are so many ingredients that are approved for use. You can't be an expert on all of them.
When I started in the business, the minimum wage was $1.25. I've seen an enormous number of wage increases. Basically, it applies evenly to everyone in the business.
The people who come to work deserve to be paid properly, and there's no excuse. I could understand someone making a small error, but sometimes people make systematic errors, and that's not right.
The payroll tax is affecting sales. It's causing sales declines.
If I were in charge of the government, I would index the minimum wage to inflation, so that way, everybody knows what they can count on.
Everybody who goes through the business will make mistakes. The big question is how big will the mistakes be? How fast will they learn from the mistakes, and how quickly will they get the business in the correct direction?
Six months after we started, in 1964, there was a day when we sold only seven sandwiches. If we'd taken all the money from the register, we couldn't have paid an employee, much less the food or the rent or all that. It could have been a turning point. We could have given up.
Subway is a real point of pride. We have influenced the way people eat.
Higher unemployment generally bodes well for franchising. People are looking for a new opportunity, and people who have jobs are a little less confident they'll always have a job.
In some markets, we don't have a lot of room to expand. We've done studies of store density and essentially found our more dense markets have more than one store per 15,000 people.
The United States is a huge market, and once you get rolling, you can replicate that model over and over pretty easily. Your supply lines are taken care of. You don't have technicians to deal with. You've got your customer base.
When we first started the company, I didn't have any thoughts of franchising. We just had company-owned stores.
When you're invested in your own business, you're going to run it better. When people are financially responsible for whether their store succeeds, they're going to have that kind of entrepreneurial spirit that's harder to get if headquarters is running things.
If you have company-owned stores, you make 100 percent of the profit from each one, but you have less entrepreneurial spirit.
There may be a perception that, with franchises, they're all the same, so that limits the ability to experiment. But that's not true. We've always kept two slots open on the menu of each Subway franchise - slots that franchisees can use to come up with their own sandwich ideas.
