Subway has long provided diners a fresh alternative to the usual deep-fried menu items of McDonalds, Wendy’s, or KFC.
Placing a greater emphasis on traditional sandwiches in lieu of fried chicken, hearty burgers, or crispy fries, the international fast food chain quickly became one of the most popular restaurants across the globe by the mid 2010s, its locations cropping up in airports, train stations, even larger retail stores like Walmart and Target.
Unfortunately, Subway’s popularity has been on a downward slope in recent years, with the company recently closing over 600 locations in 2024 alone, as reported in Restaurant Business Magazine.
With these closures coming at an alarming rate, Subway now has the lowest number of domestic restaurants than it’s had since the early 2000s.
Over the past 20 years, the Miami-based sandwich purveyor has dramatically fluctuated in popularity. Per Restaurant Business Magazine, Subway’s most successful year in terms of operating locations came in 2015, when the company had 27,100 restaurant bearing the trademark green, yellow and white banner head.
In the decade since, Subway has shuttered 7,600 of those locations, or 28% of its restaurants from 2015.
The foremost reason accounting for Subway’s recent slump involves middling sales at its restaurant locations. While Subway reported respectable average-unit sales in 2024, that number failed to reflect serious growth from 2023, with the average Subway location losing customers as menu prices steadily rose.
Even with these recent closures, however, Subway remains far and away the largest U.S. restaurant chain, surpassing the second largest company (Starbucks) by over 2,600 locations.
However, knowledgable finance experts claim that, at this rate, Starbucks could soon surpass Subway as the biggest restaurant chain the world over in the next two to three years. This is especially true if Starbucks continues to add approximately 600 new locations to its caffeinated empire with each passing year.
