A Very Serious and Consequential Topic: Boycott Dunkin Donuts!

It was two years ago this past April that I made the arduous trek cross-country from Boston to the sunny climes of Los Angeles. It has taken a while but I have finally grown accustomed to the miserable traffic, the apathetic sports culture, and the formidable number of vacuous poseurs. Life is less stressful here, the weather’s always delightful, and people are generally nicer. There’s a lot to like. But there’s one thing that I was not expecting, one thing that has dogged and abraded me for every day that I have lived in L.A.: There are no Dunkin’ Donuts in California! 

“So what? Who cares? Go to Starbucks,” you say. Well, I’ve acquiesced to drinking the bitter swill at Starbucks, but for anyone who has spent 45 minutes of their lives waiting at one of the new Starbucks drive-thrus while some douchebag orders a triple decaf macchiato, there is truly no suitable replacement for the ease and alacrity of the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru or the sweet, smooth taste of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.

Perhaps some context is in order to fully understand how debilitating this is to me. In my view, Dunkin’ Donuts is not just some meaningless, faceless chain of coffee purveyors. I grew up in Massachusetts where Dunkin’ Donuts opened its first store in 1950 in Quincy, Massachusetts. It’s more than just coffee, it’s part of our identity. There are four defining characteristics of a true Massachusetts resident (no, one of them isn’t that “you have to be an asshole” — I know what you’re thinking). To be a righteous Massachusettsian, you have to love/appreciate/prefer these four things:

1. The Red Sox

2. Candlepin Bowling

3. Gambling/Lottery

4. Dunkin’ Donuts

So you see, not having Dunkin’ Donuts in L.A. is more than a mere inconvenience, it’s an affront to my self-identity. While Dunkin’ Donuts brand coffee is now available at Target, there’s truly no substitute for a store-brewed cup of regular Dunkin’ Donuts coffee (that’s 3 creams and 3 sugars for the uninitiated).

But lest you think that my sole desire for this post is to solipsistically rant about how I am forced to drink Starbucks, I assure you that I have a much grander purpose in mind. What I’d like to discuss is the disturbing trend that I have noticed at Dunkin’ Donuts during recent trips back to the East Coast. Since moving to Los Angeles in March of 2006, I have paid a number of visits to Dunkin’ Donuts stores in various states, drinking approximately 15 cups of coffee from 7 or 8 different franchises — a fairly substantial and diverse sample size.

My first trip back to Boston occurred in June, 2006, when I returned for a weekend to attend a good friend’s wedding. I eagerly raced to the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts location only to receive a bitter cup of coffee more consistent with black tar than the saccharine ambrosia of my fondest recollections. Another coffee from another store produced similar results, but I blindly dismissed my experiences as aberrations. Looking back I should have considered that in the previous 2,000 odd cups of Dunkin’ Donuts I had quaffed in my lifetime, I had absolutely no memory of ever having an imperfect cup. But at the time, I saw no pattern.

The exact dates and times of my subsequent Dunkin’ Donuts visits elude me, but I can attest that I drank cups from locations in Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. And what was similar was that in every instance the coffee was harsh and acrid, nothing like it used to be. A pattern had fully and undeniably emerged.

My most recent cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, which I had just two weeks ago, was so hot in temperature that even after I poured half of it out and replaced it with half & half, I still couldn’t drink it ten minutes later. Now anyone who is a regular coffee drinker knows that particular restaurants will try to cover-up the low quality of their coffee by brewing it extra hot.

You may remember the infamous 1994 McDonald’s coffee case, Liebeck vs. McDonalds Restaurant, where an elderly woman sued McDonalds after she suffered third degree burns when she spilled McDonalds coffee onto her lap. ABC News called the lawsuit “the posterchild of excessive lawsuits.” Now I shouldn’t have to tell you that anytime the mainstream press informs you of something with absolute certainly, it’s best to reconsider independently; and in this case it’s no different. Because anyone who had the displeasure of imbibing the scalding hot, liquified ground rubber that McDonald’s passed off as coffee would know that McDonald’s was not some poor, little multi-billion dollar conglomerate being conned by a duplicitous 81 year old, former department store clerk. During the case, the woman’s attornies discovered that McDonald’s required its franchises to serve their coffee at between 180 and 190 degrees fahrenheit, whereas most establishments serve their coffee at approximately 140 degrees fahrenheit. At McDonald’s temperature, the coffee would cause a third-degree burn in two to seven seconds. Liebeck was awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages but eventually settled for closer to $600,000. [Note: McDonalds has since replaced their coffee with Green Mountain coffee beans].

So you might be wondering what could possibly have occurred in the past two years that would effect the quality of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee so drastically? Well, as it turns out, in December, 2005, three private-equity firms, Bain Capital Partners, the Carlyle Group and Thomas H. Lee Partners acquired Dunkin’ Donuts from Pernod Ricard, the French wine and spirits company. The deal was finalized in March, 2006, the very month I moved to California!

If Bain Capital rings a bell it’s likely because you may have recently heard that it was co-founded by that phony corporate stooge, Mitt Romney. And if the Carlyle Group sounds familar, chances are that you saw the scathing Michael Moore documentary, Fahrenheit 911, that delves into the shady history of the global private equity firm that employed George H.W. Bush as a senior advisor and listed as one of its investors the Bin Laden family. After 9/11, the Bin Laden family’s investments became embarassing to the Carlyle Group so the Bin Ladens were forced to liquidate their assets. Here’s a refresher courtesy of Michael Moore.

Finally the picture is crystal clear as to what happened to Dunkin’ Donuts: those evil rat bastards at the Carlyle Group and Bain Capital are skimping on the quality of the coffee beans in order to save a lousy buck! It gets worse, according to the New York Daily News, since 2006 Dunkin’ Donuts has been suing existing single-unit franchisees in order to replace them with multi-unit franchisees. The article, written by a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise owner, details the betrayal:

Dunkin’ Donuts has sued other franchise owners 154 times since 2006.

Over the same stretch of time, McDonalds was involved in five lawsuits. And Subway, a company that has four times the number of locations as Dunkin’ Donuts, sued its franchises 12 times.

After talking to dozens of franchise owners just like us, we learned that this was more than an unusual litigation binge. This was a corporate strategy.

In order to compete with Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts has announced a plan to open 15,000 stores by 2016. There’s only one problem with that plan. Because Dunkin’ Donuts is made up entirely of franchisee-owned stores, it relies on franchisees to open new stores.

Only large, multiunit owners who already own dozens of stores have the means to expand quickly.

Dunkin’s answer to this conundrum is to systematically replace single-store owners with multistore owners. And because they can’t just force these mom-and-pop shops to sell, they strong-arm them with threats of lawsuits over minor “contract infractions.”

The consequences of this are real, personal and painful. The owners of these stores – who overwhelmingly tend to be immigrants – lose their entire life’s work.

Maybe America runs on Dunkin’, but Dunkin’ itself is a corporate giant that runs on the sweat of franchisees large and small.

We small franchisees have just about been sweated out. And with us, perhaps the last vestiges of what mom-and-pop New York used to be.

Dunkin Donuts was like a kindly grandmother that plied you with tasty treats; now they’re like an alcoholic, pederast uncle that scars you for life. These corrupt, soulless bastards make me sick. And they’re un-American to boot! So this is where I draw the line; this is where I fight. To borrow a line from The Dude: “This will not stand, ya know. This aggression will not stand, man!”

You might imagine that the intended locus of my anger would be those brobdingnagian corporate entities that have hijacked my beloved Dunkin’ Donuts. Oh, but you would be mistaken. No, I prefer to put a face on my mortal enemies, so I choose to hold the George Bushes and Osama Bin Laden most responsible for this outrage even if they are no longer associated with the Carlyle Group. After all, if you’re going to misplace some anger, you can find worse targets than the Bin Laden and Bush families, right?

I feel like forming a Political Action Committee devoted to seeing George W. Bush impeached or maybe buying a rifle, flying to Pakistan, parachuting into the mountainous tribal region, living off the land for months by eating moss and tree bark, befriending the local tribesman in order to persuade them to identify Osama Bin Laden’s hidden lair, and then finally smoking his cowarldy ass. Screw due process and the rule of law, it’s time for some Edmund Dantes, Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, old-fashioned, eye-for-an-eye style vengeance!

Corporate America, in its all-encompassing pursuit to milk every last cent out of a credulous public, has finally crossed the line.  Join me, friends, our time has come to poke these avaricious mongrels where it hurts most: in the wallet! I advise an immediate boycott of the Bush family, the Bin Laden family, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, the Carlyle Group, Bain Capital Partners, and Thomas H. Lee Partners. Divest your money! Save your souls!

Until those un-American corporate fiends have withdrawn their rapacious claws from my beloved company and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee is fully restored to its resplendent glory, we shall not rest! Our fortitude will not flag! Our anger will not abate! Anarchy will reign! Justice will prevail!

[I'm not playing around here, I'd dead serious. And as it turns out, you won't have to worry about hurting a small business owner with your boycott since it appears that they'll all soon be replaced by "multi-unit" owners anyway.]