Dan Mooney

I’m currently boycotting a very famous sandwich chain, because I can’t handle (not to say, “fed up with”, which would be okay) the fact that their sandwiches, even their larges, have a hilariously small amount of meat on them – six slices, tops. And while six sounds like an average sized number, know that these slices are almost translucent; you’d have to fold them over twice to create any resistance in a given bite. What it comes down to in this place, happens to be what it comes down in fast food restaurants, really: they give you more of the cheap stuff that’s not the centerpiece of your meal — the french fries, the lettuce, the onions. Roy Rogers gives this stuff away. The meat’s the important part. And, if I were to become a vegetarian, I wouldn’t want it to be pathetically by default, by eating these tasteless, meatless, overpriced “healthy” sandwiches. There’s no fat in them because there’s no meat in them. Period.

My roommate doesn’t join me in my boycott – these sandwiches are, around where he goes to grad school in Midtown, reasonably priced. (Plus, he may indeed believe in boycotting for more widespread, important, humane causes, sweatshop labor, etc. Not me. I attack mountains and molehills alike.) But my roommate did tell me a fantastic tidbit about this chain:

He got a large sandwich, chips and a drink, which is a combination deal. In the East Village, these cost around $6, and a little more than $5 with the student discount of 10%. In Midtown, the deal’s a little more, of course, around $7.50. He went up to pay for his meal, expecting the final price to be about 10% less than $7.50. It would surely be less than $7, even assuming generous math. But the final cost was around $7.15; 35 cents just didn’t seem enough of a discount, and rightly so. That’s about 5%.

What happened?

Well, when my roommate went up to pay, he had seen the price on the board and noticed that he was being charged the full cost; the cashier hadn’t given him the student discount. So, the cashier rung up the items again, in a curious way: the sandwich, alone; the chips, alone; the drink, alone. The cashier didn’t give him the discount the first time through, and on the second, he charged the items separately (a la carte), when they cost more, instead of as a complete package, when each would cost slightly less. Technically, the combination itself was already a discount. It seems students are only allowed one discount per meal. Or, they’re entitled to getting screwed once per visit.

Make that twice: they still have to eat the sandwiches.

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