The Quiet War for Second Place in Subs (and the Ghost of Blimpie)
The interstate sub standings have an untouchable champion: Subway, at 6,286 exits, more than the next five chains combined, twice over. The interesting race is the one for second, because it's genuinely close and the two contenders are running completely different maps.
A 89-exit national lead, and somehow the challenger holds more states. Two empires, two strategies.
Two maps, two theories of America
Jimmy John's is a Midwest density play: Illinois is its capital with 100 exits, then Texas (90), Michigan (76), Minnesota (72). Jersey Mike's is a coastal siege: California leads with 99, then North Carolina (77), Texas (56), Virginia (53). Jimmy John's stacks exits deep in fewer states; Jersey Mike's plants flags everywhere, which is how it leads more states while trailing the national count. If current growth patterns hold, the second-place trophy changes hands somewhere on I-35 or I-40 in the next couple of years.
Behind them: Firehouse Subs at 412 exits, Potbelly at 165, and Penn Station East Coast Subs at 127 (a fifth of them within a tank of Cincinnati, where it was born).
The ghost of Blimpie
And then there is Blimpie. In the 1990s it was the country's number-two sub chain with roughly 2,000 locations and ambitions of catching Subway. Today it appears at 45 interstate exits in America. Its last stronghold is Georgia with 10; its birth state of New Jersey, where the first Blimpie opened in Hoboken in 1964, holds just 6. The interstate is where chains grow, and it's also where you can watch one quietly fade, exit by exit.
Every sub chain in this story lives in the shadow of the champion anyway: 52% of even Subway's exits are shared with a McDonald's. The full shadow accounting is in Everyone Lives in McDonald's Shadow.
