The sandwich chain Subway shuttered 631 locations last year, leaving it at less than 20,000 restaurants for the first time in two decades.
Subway, which is the biggest restaurant chain in the US, ended 2024 with 19,502 locations, franchise disclosure documents showed.
It is the eighth straight year that the company has closed locations in America.
At its peak in 2015, Subway boasted around 27,000 restaurants.
A Subway spokesperson told CNN that it is ‘opening new restaurants as well as relocating or closing locations as needed, to ensure a consistent, high-quality and convenient guest experience’.
The company added that it ‘achieved global net restaurant growth’ for the second consecutive year and now has almost 37,000 stores.
Within the US, it is ‘using a strategic, data-driven approach to ensure restaurants are in the right location, image and format and operated by the right franchisees’.
Subway’s footprint began declining in the US in 2016. It lost 443 locations in 2023, 571 in 2022, 1,043 in 2021, 1,601 in 2020, 996 in 2019, 1,108 in 2018, 866 in 2017, and 357 in 2016. That totals around 7,600 locations that have closed doors.
Despite the losses, Subway at the end of last year still had more locations that Starbucks, which was second in the US with 16,935 shops and McDonald’s at third with 13,559 restaurants.
But in the international front, Subway is the third-largest restaurant chain, after McDonald’s and Starbucks.
Subway was founded in 1965 by Dr Peter Buck and Fred DeLuca and remained family owned for decades. The Private equity firm Roark Capital purchased the chain for a reported $9.6billion last year.
It is one of numerous American chains downsizing in the struggle to survive.
A month ago, the iconic casual dining chain Hooters filed for bankruptcy and has begun selling all of its locations to a franchise group.
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