That’s really the only appropriate response to the existence of a Subway sandwich shop.
Via WaPo’s Perry Stein, there’s a Subway coming to Washington DC’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood, and this isn’t sitting well with many of the residents, as Mount Pleasant is largely a neighborhood of small, locally-owned places. But one resident, artist Robin Bell, has come up with the funniest possible form of protest: he’s been quietly projecting images of poop emojis (and the hashtag #JaredLies) onto the Subway storefront at night from a building across the street. Please do yourself a favor and click that link, there are pictures.
If this were simply to protest the fact that Subway sucks, it would be right, fair, and just, because Subway is terrible and the world would be an immeasurably better place if every Subway sandwich shop spontaneously vanished from existence. But Bell also wants to protest Subway’s food sourcing and wage practices. DC’s minimum wage is set to jump to $10.50/hour on July 1, and the owner of the incoming Subway franchise, Obey Hoque, makes it clear that’s what his starting employees will be making.
For those who want to make some dumb point about the area needing low-cost options and Bell is just complaining about not seeing some upscale place, it’s worth noting that there’s a Subway less than five minutes’ walk from the new planned location, just over the border into Columbia Heights. I mean, of course there is, Subways are fucking everywhere and there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about it.
Also, while this paragraph is largely apropos of nothing, I would be remiss not to relay it:
Bell said he’s not vandalizing property and doesn’t plan to stop his light messages on the building, which only appear after dark, after Subway opens for business in a few weeks. He said he doesn’t bombard the neighborhood with his anti-Subway messages, intermittently posting them in between other art projections. On Monday night, he projected an animated cat. On New Year’s Eve, he projected an enlarged version of his Boston Terrier dressed in a Liberace robe counting down to the new year.
Full disclosure: this story takes place within two blocks of where I grew up, which could go a long way towards explaining why it makes me so unreasonably happy.
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