Because "Regular" Means Cream and Sugar

How do you write a treatise on Dunkin' Donuts? With five dollar words like "inculcated" and "extant." Mike Miliard writes such a tome for the Phoenix titled "Choosing our Religion" about the rise and embrace of Boston's beloved coffee and donut shop. It's not clear if people outside New England identify our chain the same way we see Starbucks as something coming from Seattle, but it really doesn’t matter – we drink it, and love it. The chain often measures new market success by how many opening day donuts (not doughnuts) are sold but we know the real secret is in the coffee.

From the iced coffee downed year round to the hot coffee brewed fresh and consumed whenever a Styrofoam cup with purple and orange adorned logo is available Dunkin' Donuts has positioned itself as a brand inseparable from Boston and our culture.

Baked goods are only part of the story, however. Increased efficiency and expansion turned the brand into a local fixture, but the sales that supported that growth were fueled by one thing: coffee. Coffee, coffee, coffee, and then maybe a top off. The black stuff now accounts for 63 percent of Dunkin’ Donuts sales: 2.8 million cups a day, 16 percent of all coffee sold by the cup in the US. There have even some rumblings of dropping the “Donuts” from the chain’s name. “When they realized the strength of their coffee product,” Dettore says, “is when they started advertising more.”

That's right, the rumblings are that the "Donuts" may be dropped from the name. When "America Runs on Dunkin" came out last year it seemed that the fatty cake was on the way out. Fritalian seemed to help solidify the identity as a coffee shop as focus. Milian identifies some of the working class identity of the chain in the piece several times, and nails it with this paragraph

If words like those bespeak a paunchy guy in a Richard Seymour jersey pulling his pickup into a Dunkies in Waltham or Milford to get his lahge regulah, breakfast sandwich, and Herald, well, that image is hardly culled from the realm of fantasy. Dunkin’ Donuts has always courted a working-class image, whether or not it’s always been explicit. Indeed, the namesake act of dunking a donut has proletarian roots: a once ill-mannered habit, born of the necessity of eating stale pastry.

Krispy Kreme has come and gone in the area. There are still some remnants, but once the "glaze waterfall" left the Pru Mall it seemed the nails in the coffin, and Dunkin' had won. But Krispy Kreme had a late surge in the market, it was back in the 1980's that we saw all sorts of doughnut shops open up, and subsequently shut down (Bess Eaton anyone?). We'd keep this going but it's time to print out Milian's article and finish reading it as we head down the street to the Dunkies (we've measured) 873 feet away.

Take the jump for two classic ads featuring Fred the Baker (aka Michael Vale who helped make the brand on TV). One for the coffee, one for the donuts.

Image from Flickr user psd