Why Subway is better and more Longtail than the rest
Traditional sandwich shops and supermarkets buy the most popular sandwiches from suppliers. These come packed in plastic boxed and labelled this adds greatly to the products cost. They meet the demands of only the average customers, shown on the graph as the area shaded in red.
Subway allows the customer to choose their filling from a wide variety at the point of purchase. By doing this their combinations of sandwiches are much more varied catering to a much larger body of customers.
Subway reduces the overheads of the store by not making sandwiches which they do not sell. Traditional sellers either have to store unsold units (reducing their quality) or trashing them (complete loss of capital).
Subway reduces storage and distribution costs by baking its bread on site, by doing this they can react faster to market demands. High cost ingredients such as meats are packed in single unit forms, this gives a consistent product as well reducing lose of money due to waste.
9 Comments:
Might want to reconsider what the author of the Long Tail has to say about this....
By Kevin Conroy, at 11:42 AM
idiot
By paul, at 4:15 PM
I don't even understand what you're talking about or what it has to do with the Long Tail.
By anonymous, at 7:38 PM
It was not meant to be taken seriously, it was a joke between friends.
By mark sailes, at 8:04 PM
This post has been removed by the author.
By Kirk, at 9:01 PM
If that really is a joke (and based on your Legacy Animals post it probably is) then Anderson is simply unable to filter the noise from the longtail of humor.
Be not afraid of the angry, self conscious, quazi-intellectual fanboys of the Longtail that lack a sense of humor. (I like the Longtail idea but even good ideas have stupid followers.)
By Kirk, at 9:06 PM
Why don't you obsessives calm down ffs! It's not that far off the track that you lot make out.
When you look at what the number of products they 'ship' or orders they satisfy is, it is the possible combinations of all sandwich fillings they stock, this is large for a relatively small number of fillings and generally larger than the number of types of sandwiches a shop will stock. So it could be argued that there are a large number of products in the long tail that are shipped infrequently but still stocked. I guess the question is whether people are attracted to Subway because of the number of types of sandwich available like people are attracted to Amazon for the number of books etc.
So is he really that far wrong? And there's no need to be rude about it!
By jonny boy, at 12:50 AM
Just realised I'm going to get flamed for my last post big time (assuming you bother to read it). I didn't read Chris Anderson's post specifically talking about this article. So I can't really argue that Mark's point follows Chris's rigid defintion when the Master of the Long Tail has spoken out.
But Mark has a point and I know what he means and if it doesn't fit with Chris's long tail defintion then so what. Must we take Chris's defintion as the common law? And where have you people come from, are you Defenders of the True Long Tail (TM) or something, flaming people's blogs to evangelise the One True Meaning of the Long Tail?!
Calm down people, chill out listen to your podcasts and have a good long tug on your long (or is yours short?) tail...
By jonny boy, at 11:22 AM
Actually, I can't see anything wrong with that graphic - it's got a quantitative X-axis, which is more than most representations of the 'long tail' do. Speaking as someone who works with stats, the now-canonical image of the LT bugs me - surely you should have high values out on the right, rather than high-numbered rankings (derived from the values on the Y axis). More on this here.
By Phil, at 11:54 AM
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