Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Subway for illiterates

This story has been going around the blogs a bit in the last day or so, so I thought I might mention it here:

The Subway sandwich chain is running a writing contest for kids from which homeschooled kids are specifically excluded. Excluding a potential one million customers seems pretty dumb to start with but the stupidity does not end there. In their promo they write (down the very bottom) of the "Untied" States and homeschoolers are described as "home schools". Note that there was another misspelling too: "bastket".

And to top it off it is pre-schoolers that they are asking to compose sentences. A bit ambitious! See here and here for more.

So why did they do it? I think Bob McCarty has the best explanation.

Update:

As I had had a small eye operation only a few hours before I wrote the above, I could not see very well and missed a couple of things (funnily enough). Now corrected.

Jerry Lerman has grabbed a copy of the original promo in case they wake up long enough to correct the original. See here. You may have to use the resize gadget to enlarge the pic. Jerry has highlighted the bloopers in red.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

One of the prizes is a "Scholastic Gift BASTKET for [your] home".

Got to hire one of those home-schooled kids to proof the site.

Anonymous said...

Whatever happened to governesses?

Anonymous said...

The reason behind the "home school" exception is that Subway doesn't want to be paying $5,000 for some kids personal backyard playground.

Unfortunately, the general exclusion from the contest of home-schooled children is going to be a PR nightmare.

Anonymous said...

I believe that Subway did this in order to keep the writing simple and easy to understand. After all why would they want to confuse their judges with complicated words of multiple syllables? And Homeschoolers might even include Historical references that would leave the judges totally baffled, since they were education in public school.

As for the prize, if a homeschooler won it, then the playground equipment would go to whatever organization that the kid wanted it to go to, be it a city park, or a county park or even the local Church’s Sunday School area.

Mobius

Anonymous said...

Hello Good Gentles All!

Here is my email to Subway:

Dear Sirs,

I had a classical education. The ineluctable result of which is, I can spell correctly (did you even proofread your contest materials before releasing them?) and I am a highly productive and well compensated citizen of the United States notwithstanding however ‘Untied’ you might think they are. (The spelling checker does not substitute for a functioning brain. Perhaps you should hire some home schooled children to correct your all too obvious errors of spelling and grammar.)

I sincerely hope Jarred Fogle is able to eat two sandwiches from now on as I will eat not another sandwich, or indeed anything, from any of your establishments. Frankly, hunger would be more desirable than to patronize an organization that has such a callous disregard for its patrons and such untrammeled contempt for an entire cohort of children who are quite demonstrably the most comprehensively educated group of children in the United States.

You may consider me yet one more educated person no longer eating at Subway.

With twice as much disdain for you as you clearly have for me,

I am the legacy of,

Thomas Paine

P.S. I apologize for the use of so many polysyllabic terms. If you are still unable to comprehend the meaning of my correspondence then just ask any home schooled child to explain it to you, assuming there are any remaining who will still speak to you.