Shuttering: Subway is planning to close 500 U.S. restaurants to focus on expanding overseas, Bloomberg reports. The sandwich shop is struggling to boost US sales and fend off competition from a resurging McDonald’s Corp. whose domestic sales rose 3.4% last year, according to Technomic. The struggling Subway saw its sales fall 4.4%. CEO Suzanne Greco says in the past the chain focused on store count but is now redirecting its efforts to focus on market share. It’s also banking on a new loyalty program to boost in-store traffic. Subway has more than 44,000 locations globally. It’s unclear which locations will close. Read more.
Doubling up: U.S. crude exports soared to a record high this week, doubling from a year ago, FuelFix.com reports. The Energy Department says exports rose to 2.3 million barrels day, up 1.2 million barrels a day from last year. Analysts attributed the surge to lower prices of U.S. crude compared to Brent crude produced in the North Sea. The price gap between Brent and the U.S. benchmark, West Texas Intermediate, has widened from $3 a barrel in early March to about $6 a barrel this week, according to S&P Global Platts, a commodities research and analytics firm. Brent crude settled at $74 Wednesday while West Texas Intermediate settled at $68.05.
Unbothered: Facebook’s public trust crisis isn’t hurting the company’s bottom line, with The Washington Post reporting the social media giant’s first-quarter revenue skyrocketed 49% to $12 billion and net profit jumped 65% to $4.9 billion from the same period a year earlier. Despite many users saying they deleted Facebook as the result of a privacy scandal that erupted in mid-March, 3.4% more people logged on each day in March than in the previous quarter. Read more.
