Analysing Profitability of Opening a Subway Sandwiches Franchise in

Stockbridge:

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Analysing Profitability of Opening a Subway Sandwiches Franchise in Stockbridge 

1.1 Introduction 

Where is a suitable restaurant that serves fast food and has healthy 
options in Stockbridge? Currently, there is none of this kind of 
dining experience. Due to the increase in percentage of people 
nationwide that are trying to eat a healthier diet and run healthier 
lifestyle, it seems as though there is a slight niche in the market 
here. 

When this niche is contemplated, one restaurant brand immediately 

springs to mind that would probably best satisfy customers in the area 
whilst retaining a fair sum of profit is the brand named Subway's 
Sandwiches. They offer made to order healthy sandwiches with fast 
service and high quality. This brand is very well known in the United 
States and is becoming increasingly popular in the United Kingdom. 

There are many fatty fast food restaurants in the area, such as 
Franco's and Pizza Hut but no healthy food can be bought in these two 
places. Subway is a sandwich making restaurant which the sandwiches 
are highly customizable so is made exactly to the customer's desires. 

After some browsing the Subway website[†], I found that it was a 

franchise which has many advantages and some disadvantages as well 
which will be looked at throughout this feasibility study. 

Stockbridge is a small area with one main street which mainly consists 
of tertiary sector small retail stores and many housing area around 
this central street. The retail stores bring consumers into the area 
with cash to buy goods with and some of this money will be spent on 
meals while the consumer is out of their home. 

The surrounding area is largely residential so those residents may 

become regular customers and visit often due to the ease of getting to 
the restaurant from their homes. 

The age distribution is looked at in the graph shown in the Appendix 

of age of people in Edinburgh against the percentage of population. 
The graph is unimodal and shows that the greatest population lies 
between the 25 to 34 year old category. This graph is analysed more 
when looking at the consumers. 

The success of the project can be measured by profitability of the 

branch in the first year of the opening. This time scale is adequate 
because it will allow for time for customers to become regulars and 
for the brand awareness to spread. A whole year is needed to measure 
the success of the store because as the seasons chance, so do people's 
habits so there will be fluctuations in consumer spending patterns, 
for example right before Christmas when lots of people will go out to 
buy presents they may also buy a sandwich while they are in the area 
so sales may increase. 

1.2 Objectives: 

Without objectives any firm will fail. Objectives are usually the 
firm's targets but they are written out in such a way so that they are 
SMART (specific, measurable, agreed, realistic, time measured). The 
main objective is to create a feasibility study into the profitability 
of setting up a branch of the Subway franchise in Stockbridge. 

My secondary objectives contain the following parameters: 

* Competitors 

Competitors must be considered when creating a feasibility study. They 

must be analysed to see if they will be a threat to the firm or if 
they will provide slight competition. Competition can also be good for 
a firm as it helps the firm become more productive and efficient as 
each business wants to do better than the others so works harder at 
doing so. 

* Suppliers 

Where will a business get its stock from? Will the food still be fresh 
after a long journey from the suppliers? The location of suppliers is 
just as important to the cost of stock, especially in the food 
business where freshness is the key to quality and quality is the main 
way the business uses to attract customers. 

* Customers 

Customers form the basis of any business. Without them, the business 
would not be able to create any revenue and would therefore fail. 

* Brand Image 

The brand image is how customers will distinguish your product from 
the others in the same market. If customers think higher of one 
product over another then they are far more likely to buy the product 
which they prefer unless the value they place on it is less than the 
price. Having a large brand image will help get customers to be loyal 
to a business or product and not go to competition instead. 

* Finances 

Cash is the gears behind a business that make it work. The cash is 
used in every transaction a firm does with anyone else and is used by 
businesses to help in growth. Money is needed to start and maintain a 
business so is fairly important and should be considered in much 
detail. 

These secondary objectives will then help me in making my conclusions 

which support my primary objective which was to analyse the 
profitability of opening s Subway Sandwiches restaurant in 
Stockbridge. 

1.3 Research: 
Research is the method used to collect information that can later on 
be used to create plans for the future, for example for creating 
objectives, aims or targets. This information is data collected 
directly from the source as raw data. This data must then be sorted 
and reorganised until it can become useful. Secondary information is 
data that has already been collected and sorted and can usually be 
found on hard-copy or by asking experts in the field that is being 
researched. 

This study will mainly consist of secondary research for finding facts 
and figures about the area of Stockbridge such as the number of 
residents in the area itself. I will then know my potential market. 
This information is better than primary information because it is 
usually done on a very large scale to get the most accurate results 
possible for the people who use it whereas the results may be very 
wrong in a small survey done over 15 people. If there are a decent 
number of residents in the area then I can assume that a fair amount 
of those people will at some stage visit the subway branch and may 
become regular customers due to the ease of getting from their homes 
to the store. Repeat customers have been known to make up the vast 
majority of the customer base as opposed to one time only customers 
for most businesses in the restaurant market. Repeat customers are 
also a good sign of customer satisfaction because if a customer was 
not satisfied with the service on offer then they would not have come 
back for a second or more time. 

My primary research will be a questionnaire done on the main street in 

Stockbridge and I will make some notes on dining habits in 
Stockbridge, such as where I see most people going to eat at the lunch 
hour of the day. This will give a larger insight into the way 
consumers think and their behaviours. This questionnaire would be 
conducted at the middle of the main street on the pavement. This 
questionnaire will be essential into giving me an insight to how 
customers think and how they view the franchise I am investigating and 
it will give me a good viewpoint into the percentage of people who 
would become customers at the store. 

I will use systematic sampling to randomly choose the people that will 
be surveyed in my questionnaire. This will mean I will have to ask 
every 10th person who walks by during the time specified if they would 
be interested in participating in a survey about opening a Subway 
branch of the restaurant on that street, This should give a fairly 
random sample of people asked as it is out of my control who the 10th 
person to walk past will be. This should give me a large amount of 
results as a copious amount of people walk past the area in which I am 
going to be at so the results should give a fairly good view on the 
general opinion of people of the area. The survey will be carried out 
at the lunch time because the sandwiches made at the Subway franchise 
are more of a lunch meal as opposed to a dinner or breakfast mean 
although it does stay open from lunch through till dinner in case 
anyone wants a sandwich as an afternoon snack. 

2.0 Secondary Objectives: 

2.1 Objective 1: Competitors 

I hope to find that competition in the area for the specific market 
the franchise tailors to will be fairly low or easy to overcome. As in 
all areas, there will always be a few restaurants so it would be 
unlikely for there to be no competition in Stockbridge. Problems may 
arise if there is already a supply of the same goods and services that 
I want to supply to the consumers in the area. 

To investigate into the competition in the area, I performed some 

primary research in Stockbridge and visited all of the potential 
competition. The possible competitors include: Pizza Hut, Franco's, 
Pizza Express, and two local pubs. At a glance, it can be seen that 
these restaurants do not specialize in healthy food and restaurants 
such as Franco's and Pizza Hut do not any proper healthy food. Pizza 
Express and the local pubs provide some healthy food, but at these 
restaurants the customer usually pays mostly for the service provided 
in serving their meal in a relaxing environment so they do not provide 
it as a fast service. This is a promising aspect so far because all of 
the potential competitors are not directly linked in the same market. 
The main competition will be from Franco's and Pizza Hut due to Pizza 
Hut's large scale brand awareness and both restaurants provide good 
quality fast food at an affordable price. The kinds of people who go 
to these two places to eat may not care much for their diet and it may 
be tough trying to get customers to change to a healthier option of 
fast food. 
To establish the reasoning why consumers went to Pizza Hut and 
Franco's, I stood at their doors for 30 minutes each around lunch time 
on a working day and asked each person who entered what their reason 
for wanting to eat at those particular restaurants was and most people 
responded with something along the lines of that they wanted some food 
that they could get quickly that was near to where they worked. This 
is promising for my feasibility study because the restaurant I am 
conducting a feasibility study into is a fast food restaurant with a 
healthy theme to it. The consumers now need to be analysed to give 
further help into my feasibility study into setting up a Subway 
Sandwiches franchise in Stockbridge. 

Using the above reasoning, I have found that there is some competition 
in the food market which may be hard to compete against as they may 
have brand loyalty but most of the customers will be from a more 
specific niche market, the market of young professionals. This will be 
analysed more closely when researching the secondary objectives for 
the customers. 

2.2 Secondary Objective 2 - Suppliers 

Suppliers are one of the main factors in a businesses running, If the 

suppliers are charging too much for goods then the firms costs will 
rise which could cause problems from the firm. One advantage from 
starting another branch of a franchise is that all of the supplies are 
dealt with by the administration of the franchise. This means that no 
time will be wasted in looking for good suppliers. 

A fee needs to be paid each month to the administration of the 

franchise in return for supplies. Supplies may include products to be 
sold in the tertiary sector, trained staff and machinery. 

The Subway franchise buys in extreme quantities of bulk buying, so the 

cost per unit would be significantly reduced then if each unit were 
bought separately. This means that Subway's costs will be relatively 
low so each branch will not have to pay as much for the products to 
sell onto the consumers. The main things to look for in a good 
supplier are that they must be reliable, supply on time and should be 
cheaper than other suppliers. 
Because there are other Subway sandwich branches in Edinburgh, it 
should not require much more effort for Subway to deliver extra 
supplies to the area. This should be good because the quality 
standards Subway sets are high so the food should stay fresh until 
after it is sold on to the customers. 

2.3 Secondary Objective 3 - Customers 

Without customers, any business will fail so before setting up any 

firm we must be sure that there is sufficient demand on the market to 
keep the firm running. 

There are many ways of finding out about potential customers. One of 
these is to look at how many people there are living in the area of 
Stockbridge. This is useful because it would be convenient for the 
residents of that area to often have a quick snack or meal from a fast 
food restaurant. By using the Census Report of 2003, I have found that 
approximately 6,954 people live in the area with the postcode 
beginning with EH4, which is the Stockbridge area. This number of 
residents gives a promising outlook on the number of local potential 
customers. 

Stockbridge is an area near to the main part of Edinburgh so many 

businessmen will work in the local area so would visit Stockbridge at 
lunch for a quick meal. I feel those people would be the main type of 
consumer which the product is aimed at. This is because many of those 
young professionals want a fast lunch so that they can get back to 
their busy work and they also will want something healthy because 
young professionals are known to eat and exercise well to keep in 
shape. One lunchtime on a working day, I went out to Stockbridge and 
inspected the number of young people wearing a suit. The results were 
as expected as a lot of the people I saw were dressed in this way so 
we can assume they are young professionals. The main target market 
will, therefore, be young professionals. 

The ACORN (A Classification Of Residential Neighbourhoods) group 

performs vast amounts of research into different aspects of area, some 
of these include attitudes, housing, socio-economic profiles and media 
aspects. One of the pieces of data stated that the number of microwave 
purchases was low, this could mean either two things: people eat out 
often or people do not use the microwave to prepare meals. It also 
states that eating out is extremely popular in Stockbridge, 
particularly in the evenings, and all cuisines are popular except 
English. These two pieces of data are very useful because they show 
that many people do not eat at home but go out to restaurants. A 
Subway branch has potential to be one of these restaurants that people 
go out to eat at. 

The number of households in the area with two or more cars is rated 
high by the ACORN profile. This could mean that incomes may be fairly 
high and couples live together. If there are two cars then each one 
will probably be for each person in the couple, so at least one person 
in the relationship will work because they need two cars because they 
will be doing two different things at the same time. This will mean 
that there is at least one professional in each household and they 
will most likely be a young professional because 47.6% of people in 
Stockbridge are 20-49 years of age. The socio-economic profile for the 
area is the population is well educated and there are nearly three 
times the amounts of professionals in Stockbridge than the national 
average. Young professionals are the target market for the Subway 
restaurant so this information is very promising in constructing a 
customer base. 

Attitudes are very important in every day life. They can determine 
what we buy, where we go and what we do. ACORN tells that there is a 
60% greater chance of someone being a vegetarian in Stockbridge than 
the national average. This may be the cause for the low meat 
consumption in the area. The most popular grocery products are ground 
coffee, dog food, mineral water, fresh fish and fresh fruit. Subway 
provides its customers with a range of fresh products and almost all 
sandwiches bought have salad and other vegetables in them. It seems 
that people in Stockbridge enjoy fresh foods and do not eat much meat. 
Because of the customisability of the sandwiches, the customers can 
choose what they would like on their sandwich so if they do not want 
meat, it will not be added to their sandwich. 

Unfortunately, winter holidays are 73% more popular and long holidays 
are 2.7 times more popular than the national average so sales may be 
expected to decrease in the winter and on holiday occasions. Many of 
the young professionals will not travel though because they will be 
hard working and want to spend lots of time on their job so may not 
want to travel far away, such as abroad. 

Stockbridge is a very affluent area with 3.5 times more people earning 
£40,000 per annum than the national average. This will mean there is 
more professionals in the area than in other places. Professionals 
take their jobs very seriously and do not have long lunch breaks so 
fast service is very important along with the healthy lifestyle the 
majority of people now lead. 

Leisure activities are very popular in the area as people are very 
active. According to ACORN, they do lots of sports so probably live by 
the attitude of a healthy body is a healthy mind. One part of having a 
healthy body is the food they eat, eating at Franco's (an unhealthy 
restaurant in Stockbridge) would not be a common option for healthy 
eaters, instead they would probably prefer a healthy sandwich. 

The results of my survey indicated that most people questioned in my 

random sample were between the ages of 20 to 39 as shown in the below 
distribution graph. These ages are also the type of age which most 
commonly care about their general health, so it is very promising when 
these are the sorts of people the target market for the sandwich 
restaurant would be. 

[IMAGE] 

Most of the people in the survey turned out to live in the area. Each 
person who answered that they would visit the restaurant if one were 
to open in Stockbridge and also said they lived in the area may become 
regular customers due to the ease of being able to reach the 
restaurant and they also expressed an interest in visiting the store. 
Repeat customers are vital to the success of a business and make up 
most of the total number of sales a business will receive. 

This market seems to have vast amounts of young professionals in it 

which are the main target market. The healthy choice Subway provides 
would well suit the healthy attitude that most of the people of 
Stockbridge seem to live on so therefore there is a fairly high demand 
for healthy fast-food but there is no supply. A niche has been found 
in the market. 

2.4 Secondary Objective 4 - Brand Image 

Brand names are very important in modern society and may be the 
determining factor which will help a consumer decide between two 
similar brands. I wanted to find out whether Subway's brand name was 
as well known in Scotland as it was in the United States of America. 

On the side of the cups Subway sells for its drinks, it states, 
"Subway, the leading franchise in the world." After some background 
research I found this to be true as Entrepreneur Magazine[‡] rates 
Subway as the number one franchise opportunity each year for the past 
11 years. This shows that it is not just an advertising method. This 
is one of the methods Subway uses to increase their brand awareness 
and to help to increase their brand loyalty. Brand loyalty is very 
important to Subway so they try to make it so that the customers do 
not forget which store they are in. They do this by putting their logo 
on most things on the store, for example on the walls of the store and 
on the wrappers of the sandwiches. I asked other people around school 
if they had heard of Subway and 19 out of 20 people said they had been 
to a branch and everyone had heard of the brand. There is not another 
Subway franchise in Edinburgh but still everyone has heard of it or 
has been to one. 

Over the past 38 years, Subway have been slowly promoting their brand 
and building up a strong brand image and lots of brand loyalty. If one 
were to look on the back of the number 54 NASCAR Winston Cup Car 
driven by Todd Bodine at Watkins Glen, they would see the Subways logo 
over the back of the car. This is a way Subway promotes their brand 
into different markets. This is advertising in the market for young 
people who enjoy watching cars race. 

In my survey, I asked people if they had heard of Subway and out of 
the 50 people asked, only 1 did not know, therefore it is safe to 
assume that approximately 98% of people in the area know of the 
restaurant. This is due to the promotions and advertising done by the 
franchise to increase their brand awareness throughout the United 
Kingdom. Out of the sample, 54% had purchased something from the 
restaurant which shows us that about this percentage of the people may 
be regular customers or have experienced the restaurant. Combined with 
my question about how customers would rate the restaurant, this shows 
that Subway is fairly popular with the public in the Stockbridge area 
so I can say that there is definitely some forecasted demand for the 
sandwiches sold in the restaurant. 

Due to the many methods Subway uses to advertise, they have created a 
very strong brand image and are very well known. This is very useful 
for franchisees because their store will be well known and will be 
easier to attract potential customers. This is good for my primary 
objective. 

2.5 Secondary Objective 5 - Finances 

A feasibility study must also cover financial aspects because without 

money, a firm cannot operate. There are four areas of finance which 
apply, these are: start-up costs, sales revenue, direct costs and 
indirect overheads. 

Because the firm is a franchise, fees have to be paid to the 

administration of the firm. This fee is £12,500. There are three 
different types of store that the franchisee are allowed to open, a 
lower cost store, a moderate cost store and a higher cost store. The 
initial start up costs and running costs for the first three months 
for each is as follows: 

Lower Cost Store (£) 

Moderate Cost Store (£) 

Higher Cost Store (£) 

Initial Fee 

12500 

12500 

12500 
Real Property (2 months rent) 

2000 

5000 

12000 

Leasehold Improvements 

40000 

75000 

100000 

Equipment Lease Security Deposit 

2500 

2500 

6000 

Security System 

1000 

2500 

5000 

Freight Charges 

2000 

3000 

4000 
Outside Signs 

2000 

4000 

8000 

Opening Inventory 

2500 

4000 

5000 

Insurance 

800 

1500 

2500 

Supplies 

500 

750 

1000 

Training Expenses 

1500 

2000 

3000 
Legal And Accounting 

1000 

2500 

4500 

Opening Advertising 

2000 

2300 

2500 

Miscellaneous Expenses 

4000 

6000 

8000 

Additional Funds (3 months) 

12000 

26000 

41000 

Total Investment 

86300 

149550 

213500 
With sales revenue, many things must be considered; these include a 
sales volume forecast and the effect of seasons. The forecast for the 
volume of sales must be looked at in three timeframes, long medium and 
short term. In the short term, it seems that many people in the area 
will visit the restaurant to try it to see if it meets their standards 
and their tastes in food. This should mean a relatively high volume of 
sales in the short term but the medium and long term sales will come 
from repeat customers. Repeat customers form the main consumer base of 
the majority of markets so they keep the demand high. The sales are 
not likely to be affected by seasonal changes unless there is a 
psychological connection with the weather and peoples' eating habits 
which is yet to be proven. The price set for the product being sold to 
the customers is set by the administration of the Subway franchise so 
the franchisee does not need to research into pricing tactics such as 
price discrimination or selective discounting. 

Direct cost may include materials, stock bought and labour. As shown 
in the above table, the stock each three months will cost from £500 to 
£1000 but a freight charge will also have to be paid to get the stock 
into the store. There would also need to be somewhere to store the 
stock which must also be paid for. This could be avoided by using a 
just in time basis or by having frequent, small deliveries of stock. 
Due to the nature of the business, having small and frequent 
deliveries would be the best option because the food must be fresh 
when sold to the customer, ensuring high quality goods and service. 

Indirect costs would be the rent, salaries/wages, bills, insurance, 

interest on loans and depreciation. The rent has been found to be from 
£2000 to £12000 for two months depending on the type of store bought 
and the location, the insurance costs from £800 to £2500 each three 
months and there are many loan schemes that the Subway franchise have 
to offer if not all expenses can be paid by the franchisee. 

There are many different start-up plans Subway has to offer so even if 
the franchisee does not have enough money to pay the costs, they can 
get help from Subway in raising the finances. This is very useful 
because it allows more franchisees to be able to afford to start up 
the higher cost stores which in turn are of better quality than the 
lower cost store. The total start-up investment needed to be a 
franchisee ranges from £86,300 to £213,500. If the franchisee feels 
they can make this money back through sales then this option seems 
financially feasible. 

Deciding which type of store should be set up is another major 

consideration. The store will be located in a prime area and so will 
attract a fair amount of customers so it may not be a good idea to go 
for the low-cost store as it will be smaller and less attractive so 
may not attract as many customers. The higher the cost of the store, 
the more risk there is involved. We would like to have as little risk 
as possible whilst still being a quality shop so it may not be very 
practical to go for the high-cost store. This leaves one viable option 
left, the medium-cost store. 

If the franchisee does not want to use one of Subway's borrowing 

schemes for some reason such as they may know of a better and cheaper 
way to raise the finances then they must look for another form of 
money to pay for the original start-up costs. There are several 
different ways of obtaining this money. Some of these include bank 
loans, personal money owned and shareholders. Having shareholders in 
this particular case is not an option as franchisees cannot have 
shareholders due to the nature of the business. This leaves two other 
main options, personal finance and a bank loan. The total £149550 will 
not all be able to come from the personal money of the franchisee in 
this case but they could borrow money from friends and family. 
Borrowing within friends and family causes many social problems, such 
as family disputes over the firm. Many people will not want to help in 
the business venture as of the extremely high risks involved in 
starting up a business. This is why a bank loan would be the opportune 
way to collect funds to start up the firm. The only disadvantage in 
applying for a bank loan is that a feasibility study must be done and 
shown to the bank and the franchisee must be able to prove to the bank 
that the bank will get its money back with interest in a specified 
time. This feasibility study would be very useful in showing to a bank 
manager to help them make a decision on whether they think the risk 
outweighs the potential profits or not. 

By 5 years into the business venture, I hope that at least the initial 
start-up costs will be paid off and the branch is making a continuous 
profit. I would like to compare the opportunity cost of investing the 
£149550 in a building society with extremely low risk instead of 
investing in the business proposition with very high risk over a 5 
year period. 

Profit (£) 

Year 

Business Venture 

Building Society 

0 

(149 550) 

149 550 

1 

(50 550) 

154 784.30 

2 

39 450 

160 201.70 

3 

129 450 

165 808.80 

4 

219 450 

171 612.10 
5 

309 450 

177 618.50 

For this table, I assume the branch will make a revenue of £90 000 per 
year. I also assume that there is a fixed interest rate of 3.5% on my 
building society investment. 

The above table shows that if the base rate remains the same then the 
interest rate will also be the same and after 5 years, £177 618 would 
be the amount of money the business would have by the end of the five 
years that could come from investing this money into a building 
society in a building society called Nationwide Building Society. If 
the business venture was taken up, £309450 would be the money made 
after paying back the loan. 

This means that if the money were to be put into a business society 
then the opportunity cost of this would be that (409 450 - 177 618.50) 
£231 831.5 was missed out on. 

There are many problems with this method to calculate payback, the 
main one being that costs are not taken into consideration. The costs 
for the business venture will be fairly high so the figures calculated 
are not an accurate representation of the future, it is only a model. 
The cost of investing in the building society is also not considered 
because of depreciation in the economy for currency. 

The second problem with this method is that it does not take into 
account risk. The risk in the business venture is extremely high and 
if there are problems then the franchisee will be completely liable 
whereas the investing in a building society has little and almost no 
risk attached to it. Risk is one of the main factors in making 
important decisions about whether or not to become a franchisee. My 
calculations seem to show that it would be a very profitable to take 
up the business venture but it has also made me consider the factor of 
risk in more detail which has led me to the conclusion that it may not 
be such a good idea to take up the business venture after all. 
3.1 Conclusion 

After much deliberation, I feel that it is probably not the best of 
ideas to start up a Subway restaurant in Stockbridge. My main 
reasoning behind this is because there is so much risk involved. The 
amount of risk outweighs all of the other factors and the potential 
franchisee must be 100% sure that the business will succeed. 

My feasibility study however is not enough to completely eliminate any 

doubt of the business failing. Many other factors must also be 
considered, not just the five main ones I have chosen as I feel they 
are the main ones. 

If I were to go ahead with the proposition, then there would be one 

major problem. The problem being the lack of room for growth and 
expansion. This is a very large problem because the business would not 
get better as the rest of the surrounding business grew. The growth of 
the branch would be limited but the franchise would continue to grow 
and new sandwiches would be brought onto the menu so there would be 
some change, but I feel that the changes would be so slow that 
customers would get bored of the same place and the same food every 
time they came and would move to our competitors as the competitors 
such as Franco's might bring out a new menu or change its 
surroundings. 

The figures I calculated and used were very unreliable as I cannot 

accurately predict how many customers I will have per day and how much 
they will spend in the shop therefore I cannot work out the total 
revenue per year which I managed to do using very inaccurate and maybe 
unrealistic figures in my Payback analysis in my Finances section 
(2.5). 

The start-up costs are very high and a large loan would have to be 
taken out to reach this value of money. With interest being paid over 
a period of time on a large amount borrowed, the total amount of money 
that would have to be paid because of interest is very high. 

On the whole, I am disappointed that I could not start the business 

venture but in the end, it is much better to have not started it when 
there is a large risk of failure. Even with all of the positive 
information I gathered, this was still not enough to overthrow the 
inevitable weighting of risk. 

If a more in depth feasibility study was carried out and more than 
just the main 5 factors were considered, there may have been a 
different outcome. With more time and chances, I would have looked at 
as many aspects and then rated them in list of priority which could 
then be used to find out whether it would be feasible or not. 

3.2 Appendix 

Questionnaire: 

Have you heard of Subway Sandwiches? 

â–¡ Yes â–¡ No 

Have you ever purchased anything from Subway? 

â–¡ Yes â–¡ No 

How often would you visit a Subway branch per month if one were to 
open in Stockbridge? 

â–¡ 0 â–¡ 1-5 â–¡ 6-10 

â–¡ 11-15 â–¡ 16-20 â–¡ Too often 

Would area do you currently live in / closest to? 

â–¡ Stockbridge â–¡ Pilton â–¡ Granton 

â–¡ Inverleith â–¡ Blackhall â–¡ City Centre 

â–¡ Other 

How would you rate the service and environment inside Subway branches? 

â–¡ 1 (best) â–¡ 2 â–¡ 3 â–¡ 4 â–¡ 5 (worst) 

What is your gender? 

â–¡ Male â–¡ Female 

What is your age? 

â–¡ 5-9 â–¡ 10-14 â–¡ 15-19 

â–¡ 20-29 â–¡ 30-39 â–¡ 40+ 

Questionnaire Results: 

Sample size: 50 people 

Have you heard of Subway Sandwiches? 

No: 2% (1) 

Yes: 98% (49) 

Have you ever purchased anything from Subway? 

Yes: 54% (27) 

No: 46% (23) 

If you answered NO to the last question, if one branch were to open in 
Stockbridge would you ever visit it? 

Yes: 17% (4) 

No: 83% (19) 

How often would you visit a Subway branch per month if one were to 
open in Stockbridge? 

Would area do you currently live in / closest to? 

Stockbridge: 23 
Pilton: 3 

Granton: 1 

Inverleith: 11 

Blackhall: 0 

City Centre: 11 

Other: 1 

If you have visited a Subway restaurant, how would you rate the 
service and environment inside Subway branches? 

[IMAGE] 

What is your gender? 

Male: 58% (29) 

Female: 42% (21) 

What is your age? 

[IMAGE] 

5-9: 0 

10-14: 1 

15-19: 7 

20-29: 14 

30-39: 20 

40+: 9 
[IMAGE] 

Other information collected: 

Property Prices: 

Stockbridge Average- £154,052 

Scotland Average- £82,319 

Information from http://www.ros.gov.uk/ 

ACORN profile: 

Microwave purchases- Low 

2+ Car ownership- High 

Socio-economic profile- Educated population, nearly 3 times the 

national level of professionals 

Attitudes- 60% more likely to be a vegetarian 

Financial- affluent areas - 3.5 times more people earning £40,000 per 
annum than national average 

Leisure- Winter holidays are 73% more popular and long holidays are 
2.7 times more popular than national average. Eating out is extremely 
popular here, particularly in the evenings. All types of cuisine are 
popular (excluding English). Very active people- do lots of sports and 
activities. 

Food and Drink- consumption of meat products is well below national 

average. Most popular grocery products are ground coffee, dog food, 
mineral water, fresh fish and fresh fruit. 

People- 448,624 people in Edinburgh. 47.6% of people are 20-49 years 

old. 6,954 young pros in Stockbridge.