It was 1975, and Peter Cancro was 17 and in love. The object of his affection was a small mom-and-pop deli in the beach town of Point Pleasant, New Jersey, called Mike’s Subs.
Peter had worked there since he was 14—at first wrapping subs, then waiting for the day he’d earn the right to slice meats. “Only certain people would slice,” he recalls, “because that was, like, where you had to really nail it.” Alongside his colleague buddies, he was always talking to the tourists who flocked to the ocean. There’s no way to know for sure, but Cancro thinks the deli had to be the highest-volume sub shop in the country, even back then. On an average summer day it went through “850 giant loaves a day,” Cancro says, “or $130,000 in sales a week, in today’s dollars.” He was always serving people, always memorizing their orders. Always tracking the details.
Then one night, Cancro heard from his mother that the shop’s owners were planning to sell. What happened next is a story Cancro has long relished telling. His mother asked him, “Why don’t you buy it?” With that question in his head, he started heading upstairs to bed. By the time he got to the top of the stairs, he thought, Why not me?
Cancro was still in high school (and planning to attend The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with notions of becoming a lawyer), but he skipped classes to research the financials and look for backers. Desperate, one Sunday after 9 p.m., he knocked on the door of his former
