Subway -- Jared is right. Subway's a healthy alternative to the wax paper wrapped heart attacks at other restaurants. I enjoy their sandwiches quite a bit, even if they have less meat on them than Kate Moss on a hunger strike. Having visited 178 Subways in my lifetime (all within a mile radius of my house), I've noticed that almost all of them have the following in common:

1) Awful bathrooms. I think one of them near me was used to film Trainspotting.
2) Sub Nazi owners. My local one has a husband and wife (I assume) who act like you're trying to rip them off when you ask for an extra napkin.
3) The Subway half measure and/or Elastic Veggies. The half measure is when your "sub artist" takes a large handful of vegetables and taunts your sandwich with them, holding them over, as though blessing your sandwich with them, but then only puts half of them on your sandwich. The rest go back in the bins. Elastic Veggies is when the worker grabs a tiny amount of vegetables and pulls them apart with both hands as though willing them to fill the entire length of your sandwich.
4) The one sub, one napkin rule. This rule seems universal. While most fast food places will allow you to pull a ream of napkins out if you want, Subway keeps them under lock and key and has its workers parcel them out like they're giving out gold bullion. I wonder if Jared has to ask for more than one
5) The gloves. I have never figured this one out. They're doing sandwiches, not surgery. For all I know, the guy just swabbed the toilets with his elbows just prior to slipping on the gloves. A thin layer of plastic (which that person grabbed all up and down while slipping on his fingers) isn't going to protect me from Mad Sub Disease or any other sub bourne illness.

I can only figure that Subway is 1) run by the biggest tightwad franchisees in the business or 2) charges so much for its supplies that its owners have to pinch every last penny or go under. All of the above are minor annoyances, but I'd love to once have a sub where I didn't have to ask them to put more vegetables on.

When Black Friday comes.....

Black Friday. I had never heard this term for the day after Thanksgiving until last year. Now there are whole websites devoted to talking about the sales (and leaking sale prices) on that day.

Now I can't say I've ventured out to REALLY shop on this day recently, especially not at 6 AM.

Which leads me to this thought....

Why in the world do all of these companies start their sales at 6 AM? I understand the thinking that you want to catch people before everyone else does, and that if they happen to come late, maybe you snag them for the stuff that isn't ridiculously low. But......

Why not promote opening your stores at noon? If you're a big enough store (like Target), the promise of a crazy sale later in the day will have people holding money back for you, and probably snag more people who find the idea of getting up at 6 on the day after Turkey Day insanity.

Or maybe not.

As a decade long Diet Coke drinker, I've occasionally only had the regular kind available to me. Whenever I drink it, I think, "This was the stuff I loved as a kid?" Never was quite sure why it didn't taste as good. The story below might answer my question. It also makes me wonder why Coca Cola doesn't seize on this opportunity to make the true Coca Cola Classic (made with sugar) available to all of us. They could put it out in smaller bottles or charge a premium price and I'm sure they'd make enough to pay for it.

<<Mexican Coca-Cola taking root in U.S.

The Associated Press

LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. - Deep in the heart of Coca-Cola country, there's at least one place where the iconic caramel-colored fizz doesn't reign supreme - or at least the version most Americans know.
At Las Tarascas Latino Supermarket, 30 miles from the soft drink giant's world headquarters, store manager Eric Carvallo adjusts prized bottles of Mexican Coke displayed prominently at the front of the store.

He then briefly points over his shoulder to a noticeably smaller display of American Cokes tucked in the corner.

Carvallo notes that his store goes through 10 to 15 cases of Mexican Coke each week - his entire stock - while he's barely able to push the five cases of the domestic version he orders.

"Sometimes I have it left over. Sometimes a case, case and a half. So it's a lot of difference," he said.

Taste is the main reason why his discriminating shoppers buy Mexican Coke - they say the cane sugar sweetener used in Mexican Coke has a sweeter, cleaner flavor than the high-fructose corn syrup in the American version. Many are willing to pay $1.10 per 12-ounce bottle for the imports, even with cans of American Coke sitting nearby for 49 cents each.

"You drink it and taste it - it's something you tasted all your life," said Carvallo, referring to the many immigrants who prefer Mexican Coke over its American counterpart.

While the flavor of Mexican Coke provides a taste of nostalgia for immigrants hundreds of miles from home, its retro green-tinted contour glass bottles have also caught on among some baby boomers, who can recall a time when their cola was made with sugar - before rising costs drove U.S. bottlers to switch to corn syrup in the 1980s.

With a niche market for Mexican Coke taking root in the United States, The Coca-Cola Co. and its bottlers are quietly looking to block its passage across the border.

One reason the Atlanta-based company wants the drink to have a low profile in the United States is that bottlers here don't profit from sales of the import, which are produced by independent Mexican bottlers. Mexican Coke, brought in by third-party distributors and retailers, infringes on franchise territory rights of the U.S. plants.

John Craven, editor of BevNet.com, an online beverage industry newsletter based in Cambridge, Mass., suggested Coke also might want to quell any potential demand for a formula that would cost more to produce.

Martin declined to specify what action the company has taken to curb the gray market trade of Mexican Coke, saying only that "our bottlers discourage that practice."

Discouraging the imports may be all they can do, since Mexican bottlers legally produce the drink and third-party distributors and retailers aren't bound by contracts between Coke and its U.S. bottlers.

"It's very tricky for them to enforce," Craven said. "It's not a product that they can get Customs to stop at the border since it's not a counterfeit."

Coca-Cola said it has been unable to track exactly how much Mexican Coke is sold in the United States, although some industry observers say the company's concerns are unwarranted since sales likely pale in comparison to its American counterpart.

"If there's a tiny amount of Coke from Mexico sold in the U.S., it's a pin drop compared to the ocean of American Coke sold by the U.S. bottlers," said John Sicher, editor of the New York-based industry publication Beverage Digest.

Craven agreed, but noted the company's resistance to this budding niche market. "Consumers are starting to wise up to a lot of these smaller brands that are out there, these regionally premium sodas," he said.>>

Last night PBS presented an excellent show about Wal-Mart, details of which can be found here. The show addressed my concern about how Wal-Mart shifted from "Buy American" to selling stuff produced mostly overseas, stating that the change came when Wal-Mart started to see its stock price drop and wanted to increase profits. They flooded their stores with hundreds of cheap imported items with high profit margins. The strategy worked, and continues to this day.

What the show also made clear is that Wal-Mart now ropes its suppliers into a deal with the devil that can hurt ill prepared companies who cede too much up front. Former Rubbermaid executives discussed how that company originally enjoyed a great relationship with Wal-Mart, one in which their sales skyrocketed. When Rubbermaid's costs skyrocketed due to the cost of raw materials going up, they tried to pass this on to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart advised Rubbermaid that they would either have to eat the costs or see their shelf space dwindle. When Rubbermaid refused to lower the prices Wal-Mart went elsewhere to get similar products and cut its shelf space devoted to Rubbermaid way down.

As a result, Rubbermaid lost lots of money, and eventually was taken over by Newell. THe town of Wooster, known as the home of Rubbermaid, lost its plant, which was sold in pieces, with much going to overseas producers.

Of course, you can argue this was Rubbermaid's fault. After all, someone was able to step in and do what Rubbermaid did cheaper and better. And you wouldn't necessarily be wrong. But, as this story and one about Vlasic on Fast Company (here) demonstrate, Wal-Mart forces the hand of companies both big and small to play ball or suffer. Wal Mart believes that prices should go down, not up, and believes its suppliers should help its "rollback" policy by lowering or keeping their prices the same year in and year out. They even go as far as to suggest that they move their production overseas to keep the costs low.

The end result of this is anyone's guess. You have to think that low prices aren't necessarily good if more and more of the country has less disposible income, especially in the small towns that Wal-Mart made its bones in.

Blue Light Special In Craftsman Tools

When I heard the news today that K-Mart was buying Sears, I thought, WHAT? That's kind of like MC Hammer buying Donald Trump, isn't it? To see two formerly huge names in retail get together in an attempt to survive/compete with other, more successful retailers was somewhat alarming.

The "synergies", to use a buzzword, don't seem to be there, other than both are retailers. K-mart was, of course, the Wal-Mart of its day, where you went for cheap day to day purchases and Sears was where you went to buy well made inexpensive clothes and long lasting big ticket items. Crossbranding would seem to create serious issues for the most valuable parts of the Sears brand, Kenmore Appliances and Craftsman tools, both of which are associated with high quality. Assuming that K-Mart slaps either name on cheap garbage, the value of these names will diminish greatly.

Additionally, I can't imagine K-mart having much to add to the Sears line, except maybe Martha Stewart's name (which they already had in paint), assuming that name still has value. With Sears trying to pick up its image in recent years, adding a retailer whose name is synonymous with both bankruptcy and "blue light" specials won't suddenly bring shoppers through the doors.

Of course, I hope I'm wrong. As a kid who loved the Sears catalog and has fond memories of trips to both stores in my childhood, I want to see both succeed. Maybe combining forces will give both a needed shot in the arm.

I'm one of those lucky people to have been blessed with a Wal-Mart in my neighborhood for going on 3 decades. Wal Mart opened its first store in the Louisville, KY area 20+ years ago in Crestwood. The store, which would probably fit nicely into the clothing section of the SuperCenters built today was a wonderful place to shop. Open from 10 to 9, the store was a perfect discount store for a small town, with good prices and friendly people.

I thought of this today as I grabbed a pack of cups out of my cabinet to get some water. They were the Wal-Mart brand, which I bought because it was cheap. I looked at the back and saw they were "Made In Mexico".

Nothing new, of course. Cups, toothpaste, housewares, clothes, and other items have been increasingly coming from across our borders for the past several years.

However, this put the spotlight on something that Wal-Mart used to carry in its back pocket as a great reason to shop there. It was saving American jobs. The Wal-Mart of my youth played up this fact in posters displayed throughout the store. Wal-Mart prided itself on giving contracts to television makers, bicycle makers, and garment manufacturers and rescuing the jobs there. I remember the signs counted the jobs that were saved.

The irony, of course, is that as Wal-Mart killed K-Mart and became the discounter in this country, the aggresive business tactics it championed eventually ensured that the jobs it saved would go elsewhere. Conspicuously absent from Wal-Mart these days about buying American. Save for the occasional note on the Sam's Choice products, the only American jobs that Wal-Mart is willing to hold onto seem to be the ones in its stores.

What also seems to be lost, at least in my experience, is the idea of the "hometown" Wal-Mart that is such an important part of their ads. As Wal-Mart has grown, it has gone from a nice place to shop to a place you go because you have to. My local Wal-Mart where I live now was built small and expanded, and still seems too small. The people that work there are less than friendly, the store is filthy (as are many in the Louisville area), the shelves are a mess, and the checkout lines are almost always backed up.

It's no wonder that Target has come on strong. Cheap chick has become the alternative of choice to those of us fed up with Wal-Mart. Target's clean, brightly lit stores, while not always as cheap as Wal-Mart, are places where the budget conscious among us can go and shop and enjoy ourselves.

Granted, Wal-Mart will not suffer financially anytime in the near future, and I'm probably in the minority of people who really have begun to hate shopping there. But I think that its general shift away from the things that once made it a pleasurable place to shop.


So what can Wal-Mart do to improve?

1) Clean up its stores. I've been to Wal-Marts that are nice and clean in other states, but most of them seem to be in smaller areas where the competition for labor isn't as great. In areas such as Louisville, where low paying jobs are a dime a dozen, Wal-Mart seems to get by with skeleton crews. Because the stores are open 24 hours and remain relatively busy that entire time, the stores have to be stocked, cleaned, and reconfigured on the fly. While it may not be feasible to shut down overnight, even a simple closure for a few hours once a week would work wonders to make the stores more pleasant to shop in.

2) New uniforms. Okay, this may sound dumb, but Wal-Mart's uniforms are absolutely horrible. They are 300% polyester and seem in danger of turning their wearers into human torches if they get to close to a heat source (like a warm blanket). Gas station attendents are better dressed.

3) Stock the crap you know people buy. I drink a LOT of soda. Because of this, I buy lots of cheap Sam's Choice Soda. Apparently lots and lots of people do the same, because they are ALWAYS out. Now Wal-Mart got where it was by tight inventory management. But I have to think that having enough Dr. Thunder on keep the shelves stocked throughout the course of the week isn't going to throw Wal-Mart on the downgraded stock list anytime soon.

4) Build more grocery only stores. We just recently got a new Wal-Mart neighborhood grocery, and I like it. The shelves are usually nicely stocked, the prices are great, and the store is much more pleasurable to shop in than the Super Duper Centers that combine groceries, housewares, gas stations, mortgage companies, paintball arenas, and OB/GYN services under one roof.

5) Get off your moral soapbox. On a recent trip to Wal-Mart, I found I could buy Grand Theft Auto (a violent, profane, sexist videogame full of sex, violence, and profanity), Body Double (a movie full of much of the same), and a number of Stephen King novels (chuck full of the same as well). For some reason, if you decide to sing about any of these same themes, Wal-Mart doesn't want you. WHile I appreciate Wal-Mart wanting to look out for children, I think I'd rather have my child have access to Eminem's latest than a movie where people are killed by a power drill or a game the main theme is how many crimes you can commit. Yeah, this probably won't save or make Wal-Mart much money, but it certainly does annoy me.