Actually, Subway's Gift of 'Free Sandwiches for Life' Is Some B.S.
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Restaurant chain Subway has offered to give free sandwiches "for life" to one person willing to legally change their name to "Subway."
The winner will actually receive $50,000 in gift cards to purchase their "lifetime" of sandwiches.
However, at a sandwich a day, that amount could be spent entirely in roughly 11 years.
In David Foster Wallace's landmark 1997 encyclopedic novel Infinite Jest, he conceives of a future (roughly estimated to be around the early 2010s) where economic desperation has grown so grave that the United States (as part of the future Organization of North American Nations) agree to implement "subsidized time." In "subsidized time," numerical years are replaced with your ears bearing the name of a corporate sponsor, like the "Year of the Whopper" or the "Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar."
The good news is we haven't quite reached that level of dystopia yet (yay!). But we are closer than we'd probably like to think (boo!).
Take, for example, the promotion Subway announced last month: the sandwich chain announced that they would give "free sandwiches for life" to someone willing to legally change their name to "Subway."
The fact that such promotion exists at all says something about the way we live now. But the fact that reportedly 10,000 people threw their hat in the ring to make the name change in exchange for a lifetime of sandwiches doesn't just say something about the way we live now—it hires a skywriter to fill the sky with an indictment of our modern times while dropping pamphlets from the sky reading, "How did we get here?"
According to Business Insider, "Between August 1 and 4, close to 10,000 people signed up for the sandwich chain's Name Change Challenge." But before any of these hopefuls start telling their loved ones to swap out the old name from their contacts, they may want to look at the very next sentence in this Business Insider piece:
"The free sandwiches for life, as promised by Subway, come in the form of $50,000 in gift cards."
That's right. Not only will only one person be selected as the "lucky" winner, they will have just four months to legally change their name, and they won't even be getting an actual lifetime of sandwiches—they'll be getting $50,000 in Subway gift cards.
"Prices vary greatly between stores as they're set by individual franchisees, so the amount of sandwiches you can actually get depends on where you live," Business Insider notes. And they do the math to figure out just how short the "lifetime" of this future Subway Smith will apparently be:
"If a classic grilled-chicken footlong is your go-to order, you could, for example, use your gift cards to buy 5,600 of the sandwiches plus several cookies from the store in a BP gas station at 7030 Highway 27, Frostproof, Florida at current prices, or just 3,849 for $12.99 at the store at 1 Exchange Place, Jersey City, New Jersey."
"If you plan to eat a grilled-chicken footlong a day, the gift cards wouldn't even last you for 11 years at the Jersey City store," Business Insider's story muses—which either means Subway didn't do the correct math here or Subway knows something about its future winner that's deeply ominous.
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