Here’s how location-based marketing really works: I walked past a store and saw a sign advertising a sandwich that sounded yummy.  I went in, bought it, photographed it, and ate it.

But wait, there is more.  While waiting for the sandwich to be made, I checked in on Foursquare and discovered a $1 coupon.  A serendipitous win, but I’m not sure how I might have known in advance that this special was on offer, so I’m not sure how it could have changed my behavior.  The signboard out front was a shot in the dark but it went straight to my heart.

Speaking of heart, you may have noticed that I’ve been eating a lot of cheesy sandwiches.  That’s not the best thing for one’s heart, so I’ve been trying some possibly less bad for me sandwiches.  The sandwich in question for this elliptical post is Au Bon Pain’s Egg Whites and Cheddar breakfast sandwich, described as “Three Egg Whites and Cheddar served on a wheat skinny bagel.”  ABP also offers avocado for $1 extra, so I greened my sandwich courtesy of Foursquare’s buck.

That’s a generous amount of avocado for a dollar, I’ll give it that. Three eggs’ worth of whites is also generous, perhaps to make up for the stingy cheese allotment and the skinniness of the bagel, but those are the tradeoffs in a “healthy” sandwich. It’s listed at 310 calories on the signboard and 230 calories on the website, sans avocado, or  310 with avocado and lemon aioli, the latter of which I did not have.  I’m hoping that the megadose of cholesterol listed (40 mg) is largely from the aioli, or at least the good kind from the avocado.  The base sandwich has 25 mg.  At least there’s 3 additional grams of fiber from the avocado.

The avocado itself was maybe not yet fully ripe so a little less creamy that I’d like, and its position below the egg white made it prone to squeezing out of the sandwich when bitten.  I would have put it adjacent to the cheese layer or at least squished it a bit with a fork.  The “skinny bagel” (feh) might have been a somewhat flaccid bagel with the middle 1/3 carefully excised, but it was more likely a specially created chimera or maybe two slices of wheat bread trimmed to a torus. However they did it, they did it pretty well.  It’s reasonably priced even without the dollar off.  I approve this sandwich.