It's really the little things that bring people regularly back to restaurants. In Arby's case, I quit going to the local shops years ago when they stopped offering brown mustard and instead only offered some God-awful (and, I suspect, much cheaper) barbecue sauce or horseradish sauce to go with the roast beef sandwiches. On top of that, try and get a roast beef sandwich without the cut-rate cheese sauce. Yuck!

Arby's is an illustration of the axiom that if something is offered cheaply enough, Second Rate becomes acceptable (maybe). If you value bulk over flavor and quality of food, Arby's is the place to go. In the right hands, I believe Arby's could become a significant player in the fast-food industry, but the way things are now, forget it.

Way back when, we all ate bologna and salami from the deli. Today, we buy high quality turkey and roast beef and eat sandwiches from Subway. Standards have changed. Arby's hasn't.

Today, you can get high quality roast beef at the deli at Walmart for $6.00 per pound. One regular roast beef sandwich at Arby's is more than $3 and the quality of the meat is terrible...