Another Super Bowl has passed, and once again we were subject to a slew of bad commercials. I have immediately forgotten all of them, but as always, the one for Dunkin' weights heavy on my heart. Not only because it is bad, it takes away the traditional "good" Super Bowl commercial of setup-punchline-tagline-additional joke and instead goes the more modern route of lazy writing followed by unending reference humor pumped in like one might pump in tons of saccharine syrup to hide the taste of a low grade coffee roast. Both in terms of the magnitude of the commercials and the care for the quality of product, we are far away from "Time To Make The Donuts." But the part that really offends me is the continued insistence that anyone who lives in Boston must salute, let alone like, this garbage, and how many people actually believe this propaganda.
Imagine you met someone who liked Arby's. I mean really really liked Arby's. Like it was part of their personality how much they liked Arby's. They are showing up to work five minutes late proudly displaying their Arby's bag as if you to say "you know me." They bought limited edition Arby's merchandise. They considered it a matter of regional pride to be from the general area in which Arby's had originated. It would be outright insulting to them for you to suggest that the meats they are slugging down are, at best, replacement level. To suggest that this enthusiasm is misplaced and possibly at the expense of enjoying any number of better roast beef sandwich purveyors is tantamount to telling them that their own mother ought to be jailed for mail fraud.
Seems like an odd person right? Probably going to avoid them at a party. You're not going to trust them to watch your kids or even recommend you a movie. It'd be the kind of thing where you consider that presumably this person has life responsibilites and is licensed to drive a motor vehicle, and then you can't really focus on that too longer or else you become afraid to rely on other people.
This is what it's like when Boston people rep for Dunkin'.
You might think I chose the Arby's example because it is funny, at it is. But it is also the most true to form, because Dunkin' and Arby's are literally the same company. They are an investment of Roarke Capital, both part of a portfolio called "Inspire Brands" that also includes companies like Baskin Robbins, Sonic, and Jimmy John's. These are brands of varying esteem but unquestionably they do not Inspire. Much like with our hypothetical Arby's stan, the mind boggles to imagine the type of person who writes the name "Inspire Brands" on a whiteboard and believes they written a combination of words that means something. Perhaps it is the same person who comes up with a name like Roarke Capital, which is a reference to The Fountainhead, a favorite of insufferable morons. You might deduce that these are likely the same dullards who would rename Dunkin' Donuts to "Dunkin" on the assumption that people are not smart enough to see a place with "Donuts" in the name possibly infer whether or not they have coffee. Technically you are wrong, that decision was made by their prior ownership group. But in the spiritual sense, you are correct in that all of private equity is built around crushing the misshaped human aspects of living into commerce cubes that are simpler to stack, and then making a quick buck shuffling those cubes around until the hinges break off.
When I first moved to Boston, I found the Dunkin' obsession to be rather peculiar. I grew up five hours away in New Jersey and we had Dunkin' there. There was one by the library that we went to after school. We didn't deride it nor did we love it. It was just there. And by "there" I mean pretty much everywhere. Why did they matter so much more in Boston? I learned later that they originated in Quincy and much in the same way one might one might fear a chicken like it was a dinosaur, they revered Dunkin' like it was still a local institution. And to be fair the original location in Quincy was a nice little donut shop. You can't see any of it in the other 10,000 Dunkin' locations, but you can look at it and see why maybe it launched a good deal of locations. And sure I didn't think it was good, but it was at least cheap. For a while, I could stomach this local pride, no matter how misplaced I felt it was.
But now look at yourselves. While 20 years ago there was at least a limited geography of Dunkin', it is now unquestionably nationwide. And a large coffee costs 3-4 bucks, which is just a regular coffee price. Maybe Starbucks costs more but Starbucks sucks too, and if I ever meet a Seattle resident who is proud of Starbucks I will rightly clown on them. My point is that it is time to give this up.
And it would be so easy if I thought this was a simple conconction by the doofuses who want us all to be too illiterate to recognize anything that isn't a branding symbol or responsive to anything but the saddest pandering. I think Dunkin' is simply coopting something that naturally exists. This is why I need to particularly be mean to this type of person, because if we can cut off the Dunkin' enthusiasm pipeline we make few error codes appear in the money printing devices they own. These assholes bragged about preventing Joe Biden from passing a $15 minimum wage. The least we can do is make sure nobody is doing free advertisement for them.
There's one last vested interest that we need to address: Ben Affleck. His oafish paparazzi pictures holding multiple Dunkin' cups might fit into free advertisement that they rely on from Boston-type people. Maybe it was genuine or maybe curating a persona or maybe it was just viral marketing for the inevitable run of Super Bowl commercials he would star in. But now he pops up every year and in his unelected role of Mr. Boston endorses Dunkin' as the official drink of the Hub. This year he even went as far as to "parody" Good Will Hunting (as a premise, the parody fell apart about 9 seconds in when they realized that would be hard to do and just kept pushing the "celebrtity cameo" button.)
He'd like you to think you're going to associate him with Good Will Hunting. Not a chance. He's good in that, but he is not Will Hunting. That's not his Boston Movie. His Boston Movie is The Town. Remember The Town? He wrote, directed and starred in it. And guess what? It sucks! Not only does it suck, but it sucks in ways that are extremely similar to why the hamfisted Boston-Dunkin' synergy sucks. This is a movie that attempts to be a "You Know You're From Boston" cinematic listicle and insults the viewer in every attempt. The second heist of the movie includes a car chase through The North End. There is likely no neighborhood in the US less conducive a car chase. You would be apprehended before you could even leave your parking spot. Do these people even know Boston? Well of course they do, as they prove in the final heist, where Affleck and Jeremy Renner rob FENWAY PARK. Does it make logistical sense to eschew banks and rob Fenway Park? Would any real Bostonian be willing to absorb the bad juju of robbing such a beloved institution and ruining the Red Sox' chances? (though they've recently handled their payroll as if they had been robbed.) The film is not interested in those questions. It is interested in letting you know that it is aware of some surface level Boston institutions. It's fraudulent. Mr. Affleck, you are not Mr. Boston. You're not even the "Time To Make The Donuts" guy.
And this is the sort of larger, self serving point that I want to make: I am a better Bostonian than Ben Affleck. Not only Ben Affleck, but anyone who has strong feelings about Dunkin'. Sure, I was not born here. But I have lived here for nearly 18 years. And more importantly I have dignity. You're pathetic. You have found meaning in being a consumer of garbage. What have you done for your fellow Bostonian? Do you even know how to get to Nubian Square from Brighton Center? You have an EPCOT idea of Boston. I bet you've never even been to Wally's. I bet if I asked you to pick up some Boston beer you'd get Sam Adams instead of Harpoon. I bet you even like Faneuil Hall. Or maybe you hate Faneuil Hall. But you definitely don't hold a nuanced understanding of Faneuil Hall as a place without much real culture but serving as an important gravity for teens and tourists. Go drink your Dunkin' or your Dunks or your Dunkies. Put some seasonal flavor in it too. Be proud of that trash. Maybe just make a trough for watery coffee and stale donuts and the limpest breakfast sandwich with sciency eggs and just stick your head in. See how much Dunkin' related denigration you can subject yourself to and still wave that flag proud. For what? Dunkin' will never be your ally. The capitalist dogs have convinced you that their profits are a win for your culture. None of that will return to you. They will ransack anything you hold true and valuable to put in another Dunkin'. Another outlet for them to give you an inferior version of a utility drug. They work you to the bone and then sell you the efficiency juice as if it is a defect in you and not in their mode of production. And that's before we even talk about the conditions for those in the global south who are exploited for their coffee resources. America Runs On Dunkin? America runs on the blood of the global working class.
Cumberland Farms though, that's some good shitty coffee. That's a local institution I would wear a t shirt from. Take a picture of me holding a big ol' dollar twenty-nine iced coffee I'll look so cool. I fuckin love Cumbies.