Appeals court rejects Subway foot-long settlement

[question everything]

A U.S. appeals court threw out a settlement between Subway and its customers Friday, agreeing with a class action reform advocacy group that the problems cited in the original lawsuit had no merit.

The parties have to either negotiate a new settlement or dismiss the case.

“A class action that ‘seeks only worthless benefits for the class’ and ‘yields [only] fees for class counsel’ is ‘no better than a racket’ and ‘should be dismissed out of hand,” read the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, released on Friday. “That is an apt description of this case.”

Subway came under criticism in 2013 when an Australian teenager measured a Subway footlong sandwich, found it to be only 11 inches long, and then posted it onto social media.

The post went viral and generated media attention. Attorneys began investigating and filing lawsuits. The two sides mediated and plaintiffs in the case began focusing mostly on ensuring Subway worked to make sure its sandwiches were the proper length.

The two sides settled last year, with Subway agreeing to pay attorneys for the plaintiffs $525,000 in legal costs, and $500 apiece to each of the 10 people who led the class action lawsuit.

(snip)

But Ted Frank, the director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Class Action Fairness — who joined the lawsuit as a member of the class — appealed the settlement, arguing that the case had no merit and that the case “enriched only the lawyers and provided no meaningful benefits” to the customers who were part of the lawsuit.

Subway’s unbaked bread rolls are uniform, with the same ingredients and weight. The variations in length were due to the “natural variability in the baking process and cannot be prevented,” the decision states.

More..

http://www.nrn.com/operations/appeals-court-rejects-subway-foot-long-settlement

[dsc]

1. the last paragraph you excerpted is wrong as a matter of math

Yes you can prevent the problem or at least make it so rare as to be prevented. Surely there is a mean and standard deviation to the distribution of the lengths of the loafs of bread. A simple normal curve chart can take it from there. I have baked enough bread to know there is some variation but not so much that a difference of an inch in length can't be dealt with by making the loaves average 12.25 or so inches instead of 12.

[defacto7]

3. Agreed... but

Yeasts, flours, ovens, kneeding proceedure, altitudes all make variations in baking let alone the human factor that can be different when you have hundreds or thousands of locations.

I think an inch is too small to bring a suit over. 12.25" before baking could have a lot of different outcomes.

[question everything]

4. I have never baked bread, but I suspect that variations can come from the diameter

I suspect that some loaves would be rounder and thus shorter, if the same amount of dough is used.

[defacto7]

2. Bravo on putting the breaks on frivolous lawsuits.

Good lawers should make a fair buck but when it's a thousand times the plaintiff's recovery it's suspicious to me. The bread baking issues should never have gone to court anyway. The difference in 11" and 12" is just normal variance. If the difference was 12" versus 8" it might be worth an argument.