Subway Around the World

So I've done this now for both McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Despite the obvious difficulties involved in getting Google's search engine to understand the word 'Subway', I wanted to try with the submarine chain, because they claim it's surpassed the Golden Arches as the fast-food chain with the most branches.

I was sceptical. But looking at Subway's own webpage comes up some remarkable stats: Subway truly is an empire. There are Subways in countries you've never even heard of. From our perspective, that doesn't mean that much, since we're still limited to countries that Google Maps Street View is active in. So it's the same mix of Western Europe, North America, Brazil, South Africa and a few eastern Pacific countries. I tried at least to choose a few out-of-the-way cities. What else can I do? Anyway, Subway is everywhere...

Click on any of these pretty thumbnails for a full-screen picture
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Auckland	Belo Horizonte	Cardiff
Coventry	Dallas	Fukuoka
Helsinki	Honolulu	Kaohsiung
Los Cristianos	Lyon	Malmö
Mexico City	Mobile	Montréal
New York City	Paris	Perth
San Francisco	Sao Paulo	Stockholm
Sydney	Wassenaar	Whitehorse
	Winnipeg

Auckland is in New Zealand, Belo Horizonte 'represents' Brazil alongside Sao Paulo, and Cardiff is in Wales. Coventry is a small English city, Dallas is in Texas and Fukuoka is in Japan. Obviously, Helsinki is in Finland and Honolulu is in Hawaii. Kaohsiung is an impossible-to-spell city in Taiwan (I got bored of Taipei), and Los Cristianos is in the Canary Islands - the most exotic place Google Maps Street View can currently be found. Lyon is in France and Malmö is in Sweden - as is Stockholm. No points for knowing where Mexico City is, Mobile is in Alabama and Montréal in Québec. New York City is in Guatemala, Paris is in Bhutan, Perth is in Australia rather far from Sydney, and only one of those three sentences is correct. San Francisco is in California. Wassenaar is a suburb of The Hague in the Netherlands, and while Winnipeg is in Manitoba, Whitehorse is in the Yukon.

Subway is in every square inch of this planet. It may even be in the room with you right now as you read this... Look at the full list here and be very, very afraid...

Related articles

• The Evolution of Fast Food Logos (neatorama.com)
• Food Is Fashionable: The Subway Fashion Show (thegloss.com)
• Zagat Reports Results of Fast Food Survey (shoppingblog.com)
• Is having a Subway a constitutional right? (timesunion.com)
• SUBWAY Shows Off Outfits Made From Restaurant Chain's Recycled Packaging (prnewswire.com)
• View the HTML Source of subway.com; it's a marvel of modern browser technology. (subway.com)