Image via doobybrain via Dunkin Donuts' corporate archive.
Dunkin' Donuts has turned 60. Sort of how I get a weird charge from seeing someone enjoying a cigarette (I mean really enjoying it, not posing) -seeing the brand loyalty to Dunks here in New England is an anthropological marvel. I've been approached in random airports, magnet like, with where is Dunkins??, for carrying a half finshed coffee off a flight (pre-liquid ban). Fantastic, long, older article about the history of Dunkin' Donuts from the Boston Phoenix; Choosing Your Religion (2007).
One early Dunkin’ store sat across the street from a Ford assembly plant in Somerville, Slate’s Bryan Curtis writes, “guaranteeing [Rosenberg] hundreds of loyal rivet-heads.” And when Rosenberg started granting franchise licenses, “He hewed to the blue-collar wards of New England and the mid-Atlantic, which had built-in constituencies.” But for all his working-class bona fides, Rosenberg was a businessman. His coffee, even in the 1950s, was overpriced: 10-cents a cup was twice the going rate.Here is that article from Slate about the slight changes to market and image of Dunkin Donuts in the new millenium.
Dunkin' Donuts still boasts some gruesome pleasures: "The Great One," a 24-ounce coffee chalice, and the Double Chocolate Cake Donut, which carries 310 calories and has the texture and density of igneous rock. But over the past five years the chain has sought to burnish its pastries with a glaze of class: Dunkin' Donuts is reinventing itself as an upstairs-downstairs coffee house.Never saw this recent ad... reminds me of buddies on the South Shore, heading out to fish at the canals etc.
One thing I never understood though, since DnD sponsor the Red Sox so much, how come you can't get coffee at Fenway... on those cold nights I've wanted one a bunch of times... Litigation worries? Spilling hot coffee?? Old news but remember those 2008 Red Sox prints Somervillen Chris Speakman did as a promo set for DnD; still a bunch on ebay.
