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By Aleks Phillips
U.S. News Reporter
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A Subway store in Rincon, Georgia, has removed a sign that made light of the recent implosion of the Titan submersible after facing a backlash over the "distasteful" joke online, the company has confirmed.
Images of the sign posted by social media users show that it previously read "our subs don't implode"—playing on the shortened versions of words "submersible" and "subway sandwich."
Appearing early in July, it comes just weeks after the remains of the Titan submersible were found by a search and rescue operation near the wreckage of the Titanic.
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The five people who were on board when the vessel lost communication with its surface ship while descending to view the famed wreck on the morning of June 18 are now presumed dead. A debris field was found by deep-sea robots on June 22, and parts of the imploded sub have been dredged up and brought to Newfoundland for investigation.
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On Wednesday, the U.S. Coast Guard, which is part of a multinational investigation into the incident, said human remains had likely been recovered from the Titan's wreck.
Those onboard were CEO of Titan owner OceanGate Stockton Rush, billionaire Hamish Harding, former French Navy diver Paul Henry Nargeolet, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman.
"Not only is it distasteful, it's just sad," Amanda Butler wrote of the Subway sign on Twitter. "Do better."
"This is what we are doing now?" Donovan Bentley tweeted. "Making fun of people who lost their lives."
Meanwhile, another user said that the sign was in "horrible taste for a chain that is trying to reinvent themselves." In 2015, the sandwich chain was forced to fire its national spokesperson after he was found to be in possession of child pornography, and it has recently faced criticism for not scaling back its operations in Russia over the war in Ukraine, as other brands have done.
After one of the images of the sign was posted to Reddit, some users said it was "too soon," while others made jokes of a similar nature at Subway's expense.
On Monday, a store manager told local news channel WTOC that the sign had been removed and that they would not be commenting further.
A Subway spokesperson told Newsweek: "We have been in contact with the franchise about this matter and made it clear that this kind of comment has no place in our business."
Timothy Mauck, who originally provided an image of the sign to WTOC, wrote on Reddit: "It was wrong of them to think this would slide and nobody would care."
Since the Titan's disappearance, historic concerns about the safety and construction of the submersible have reemerged, including a warning from the Marine Technology Society about OceanGate not allowing independent testing of the craft. Experts have also questioned the novel design of the vessel.
OceanGate said in 2019 that bringing in an outside entity was "anathema to rapid innovation." Its website states that the Titan was designed for depths of more than 13,000 feet and had a real-time hull health monitoring system that provided "unparalleled safety."
On Sunday, the U.S. Coast Guard announced that it had convened a Marine Board of Investigation (MBI) to probe the implosion, including what caused the five deaths and whether "an act of misconduct, incompetence, negligence, unskillfulness, or willful violation of law" contributed to it.
OceanGate and the U.S. Coast Guard have said they will not be commenting publicly on the investigation while it is ongoing.
Update 07/04/23, 13:35 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include comment from a Subway spokesperson.
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