It’s not $5, but Subway is reintroducing affordable footlongs and entering the fast restaurant value menu war.

Beginning August 26, Subway will sell any footlong sandwich for $6.99, a significant savings given that certain footlongs may cost up to $14 in some cities. It’s the privately held chain’s latest attempt to entice back customers who are avoiding rising fast food pricing and spending less when they do go out.

The offer has a catch: it is only available through the app or website with the code “699FL” and expires on September 8.

Subway Announces A New Price For Footlongs As It Enters The Value Menu Wars

A private equity firm controls subway, and unlike its publicly traded competitors, it rarely discloses sales figures. However, according to trade publication Restaurant Business, its sales and traffic challenges this year are similar to those of McDonald’s, Burger King, and Starbucks.

“Today’s diner is more stretched than ever, and too often that means sacrificing quality, variety, or flavour to find an affordable meal,” said Doug Fry, president of Subway North America, in a press statement. “Our menu is full of footlongs for every budget, and this new deal means our guests can get the sandwiches they crave at a great value.”

Subway has also been diversifying its menu as sandwich prices have risen. The business recently began selling $3 Dippers other Sidekick snacks priced between $2 and $5 to attract cash-conscious customers who may be turned off by the higher prices of its other items.

The inclusion of Sidekicks and Dippers “makes sense,” according to David Henkes, senior principal at Technomic, who told CNN that Subway needed to generate income someplace as fast food customers began to push back on price increases due to inflation.

“They’ve underperformed in the sandwich segment, so they need to shake things up a little bit and drive some incremental traffic,” Henkes told investors. According to technological data, Subway falls behind competitors in terms of side and snack sales.

Subway Announces A New Price For Footlongs As It Enters The Value Menu Wars

Subway has recently added customisation to its menu, doubled down on driving orders to its app, expanded its worldwide footprint, and introduced freshly sliced meats, a significant departure from the company’s traditional approach of delivering cold cuts pre-sliced.

Another important challenge for Subway is its declining shop count: the firm closed more than 400 stores in the United States in 2023, the fewest since 2005 (20,133).

SOURCE | CNN

Americans are paying more for oysters happy hours.

According to experts, the buck-an-oyster offer is all but dead, with some eateries raising costs as high as $2.50 per oyster.

Oyster happy hours are just one of the many aspects of American life that have become more expensive as prices have risen in recent years. While the US Federal Reserve has made progress in slowing the rate of price rises, inflation has remained persistently over the target, and Americans have been paying more for everything from groceries to rent to, yes, going to their neighborhood bar for an oyster deal with friends.

Inflation Comes For Your Oysters

Wholesale oyster prices skyrocketed to triple-digit highs in 2022 and only started falling late last year. However, according to the most recent Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute analysis, general inflation pushed retailers to hike store pricing to prevent losing money on surplus oyster stock, even as sales and wholesale expenses fell.

Oysters used to be plentiful and (relatively) inexpensive, which made them ideal for pub fare.

“Historically, Americans would consume a lot of wild oysters, and because they were so abundant, they were at such a low price,” said Julie Qiu, co-founder of the Oyster Master Guild, a New York City-based oyster teaching organization. “People kind of anchored their perception of oysters being a cheap food until all the wild oysters pretty much went away.”

While Wells Fargo reports that wholesale oyster prices have dropped from the previous year’s high of $117 per gallon to $88, long-standing supply concerns compounded by climate change may imply that the prices shown on oyster bar menus will not fall anytime soon.

The largest supply issue driving market changes is a scarcity of wild-caught oysters, which industry experts say has been a concern for over a decade.

“We’ve had a number of both man-made and natural events that have caused problems with oysters,” said David Branch, sector manager at the Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute. He cited the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and a series of storms in Louisiana as high-profile disasters that destroyed oyster beds and drove the business to transition from wild-caught to farm-raised oysters.

Branch believes farms now provide up to 60% of the current oyster supply, an almost complete shift from 20 years ago when 70% of oysters were wild-caught.

Qiu echoed Branch’s conclusion, noting that the remaining wild oyster reefs are a mere fraction of their historical numbers.

“We are really relying on intensively farmed oysters, which means that they require a tonne of labour and personalised handling from people and sophisticated machinery,” she told me. “That is beginning to trickle down the supply chain. It comes into a restaurant, and the business has mark it up by a specific percentage to pay labour costs.”

While efforts to rehabilitate wild oyster reefs are underway, climate change complicates matters.

In addition to rising temperatures, extreme flooding and rain may alter ocean salinity, introduce new predators, or allow new diseases to thrive.

“Climate change hinders consistent growth… “There are just so many things that can go wrong when farming oysters,” Qiu added.

Despite the problems in the oyster market, demand has not slowed. According to Branch, interest in shellfish is increasing, fuelled by Gen Z and millennials eager to expand their culinary horizons. However, he claims that increased demand, along with dwindling supply, is driving prices even higher.

Inflation Comes For Your Oysters

“The industry has been trying to catch up and replace the loss of what we had with our wild-caught (supply),” he told me. “It’s still expanding, but it just hasn’t been as quick to fill the gap with what we had.”

Qiu is aware of the increasing interest in oysters as a luxury appetiser. She remains optimistic, however, that restoration efforts and sustainable farming will allow the sector to increase supply and stabilise pricing in the long run.

“We hope that one day we will get back to that space where you can have oysters as an affordable, healthy protein,” she told me.

SOURCE | CNN

In 1997, “David,” a worker on a banana plantation, was brutally and quickly executed by right-wing Colombian paramilitary groups.

He was taken off, beaten to death in front of his fellow passengers, and thrown on the side of the road, where his attackers covered his corpse with a banana plant, just minutes after his bus was halted at a checkpoint in the coastal district of Urabá. Court records stated that cows would later eat his corpse.

The violence persisted after that. A few weeks later, his sister-in-law and daughter vanished, never to be seen again. Another family member received death threats.

The family that remained quickly departed Urabá permanently.

The Bloody History Behind The $38 Million Chiquita Verdict

He was only one of thousands of victims targeted by the notorious right-wing terrorist organization known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, which was able to muster tens of thousands of fighters during the height of Colombia’s civil conflict at the beginning of the new century.

“For the past 17 years, it has been an honor to represent these victims.” Simons stated during a press conference in Washington on Tuesday, “It’s not over yet, but this is a significant step forward, and we hope that this will pave the way for compensation for all the victims.”

Although Simons believes it is doubtful that any of the victims would get compensation anytime soon as a result of Chiquita’s appeal, he believes the case has sent a clear message to businesses about the need of upholding human rights.

In the end, the money won’t be able to make up for the loss. Even though we’re still discussing the horrifying mistreatment these families have endured, money matters because, regrettably, it’s the language that companies speak the best. According to Simons, sometimes a sizable financial fine is necessary to influence business conduct.

“Tragic in so many ways”
Chiquita has argued in its defense that it was a victim of its own actions because it was compelled to pay the AUC protection money, both in the current case and in earlier legal proceedings.

Even while the jury was not persuaded by that argument that it had behaved “as a reasonable businessperson would have acted under the circumstances,” the corporation told CNN that it was still “confident that our legal position will ultimately prevail” in the wake of the most recent verdict.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of those who were directly impacted by the violence in Colombia, as well as the many others who found themselves in a tragic situation.” That does not, however, alter our conviction that these assertions lack a legitimate foundation,” the statement said.

The business acknowledged that it had made more than “100 payments to the AUC totaling over $1.7 million” in its 2007 lawsuit against the US Justice Department. According to a US Justice Department press release from the time, Chiquita documented the AUC payments as “security services,” despite the fact that the business never got any real services from these payments.

Before becoming US Attorney General under President Barack Obama, Eric Holder represented Chiquita in the 2007 trial. At the time, he informed the court that the company had to pay various terrorist organizations for more than 15 years because those organizations controlled the areas where the company operated. Not the government of Colombia.

However, in that trial, the company ultimately entered into a plea agreement acknowledging that, because of the protection money issue, it had voluntarily continued to pay the AUC even after the group was designated as a terrorist organization by the US government in 2001 and even after a senior director objected to Chiquita’s board reiterating “his strong opinion to sell our operations in Colombia.”

The Bloody History Behind The $38 Million Chiquita Verdict

Chiquita’s operations in Colombia yielded profits of $49.4 million between 1997 and 2004, according to the findings of federal attorneys.

A period of “true terror.”
The AUC was established in 1997, in the midst of one of the deadliest periods of the civil war in Colombia, when the government was fighting right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing guerrillas, and criminal groups for supremacy.

At that time, the civilian population was being terrorized by left-wing guerrillas from the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who were fighting the government. Prior to turning to the AUC in 1997, Chiquita claimed in the 2007 case that it had paid ransoms to the ELN and the FARC.

Due to the threat of an armed communist revolution, right-wing supporters and landowners in Colombia organized vigilante organizations to match the guerrillas blow for blow. Until their ultimate demobilization in 2006, the AUC was one such group that terrorized the people of northern Colombia in an effort to put an end to the uprising.

When the AUC was at its strongest, it could muster tens of thousands of fighters and was mostly funded by drug trafficking; after demobilization, over a dozen AUC officials were deported to the US on drug-related charges.

“I recall that time; it was truly terrifying,” a plaintiff who received compensation on Monday told CNN. “You had victims all around town; not only was my husband killed, but my daughter was also raped.”

Another piece of evidence presented to the jurors in the most recent instance included a young girl who had been made to see her mother and stepfather being executed on the side of the road from a cab. She was then given the equivalent of less than one dollar so that she could go back home and live as an orphan.

Colombia, as of right now
The Colombia of today is very different from the Colombia of the AUC’s founding.

The 52-year struggle between the government and the FARC was resolved by a peace agreement in 2016, a few years after the AUC’s demobilization; however, some dissidents are still fighting.

The Bloody History Behind The $38 Million Chiquita Verdict

In an effort to put an end to some of the bloodiest chapters of the conflict, transitional justice procedures have since included both left- and right-wing guerrillas and paramilitaries.

Still, there is terror in Urabá.

A few ex-members of the AUC are still on the loose, having joined the Gulf Clan, a new organized crime gang that opposes government authority in northwest Colombia.

Rights organizations claim that strong corporate interests are still working with local governments and criminal organizations to suppress activism, especially when it comes to environmental protection, which can be a risky endeavor in South America.

Nevertheless, the court decision this week offers hope for at least some of the numerous AUC victims. In a show of defiance, one of the litigants who spoke with CNN sought to have her message shared.

“Mom don’t talk, mom don’t pick up the phone,” is what my son and daughter all say. However, fear is only permanent until a person chooses to express it,” she remarked.

SOURCE – CNN