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Subway wants your breakfast business

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Filed under: Food

In our homeland of the obese, the lunch and dinner business is saturated, so fast food retailers are looking to the breakfast market to make better use of their retail locations.

I wonder, however, about the prospects of Subway as it attempts to grow its share of that market. Where are the ads, I wonder, for $5 foot-long omelets?

Breakfast is a fickle market. Wendy's, the third largest burger chain in the country, recently crapped out in its second foray into this market.

Subway, according to Advertising Age, is jousting with already established breakfast retailers such as McDonald's, and others attempting to redefine themselves with wider a.m. menu selections (Dunkin' Donuts.)

Subway's limited breakfast offerings include a breakfast sandwich with various meat, cheese and egg combinations, as well as cinnamon rolls, juice and coffee. The chain recently announced the switch to brand-name coffee, Seattle's Best, in 9,000 locations to beef up its breakfast trade.

From my perspective, Subway has several major hurdles that will be hard to overcome. First, they don't typically have drive-through service, which is so popular during breakfast hours. (Who gets up early enough to go inside for a leisurely breakfast? I suspect most Egg McMuffins are consumed on the freeway during the drive to work, in between checking e-mail and applying makeup.)

Many Subway locations are in strip malls in which few if any other stores are open, and therefore easily overlooked by sleepy drivers. Lastly, as McDonald's and others are busily rolling out dollar-menu items, Subway's typical price point, at the high end of the fast food spectrum, seems pricey by comparison.

Have you tried a Subway breakfast? What was your impression; does it compare favorably to the competition?
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