this hurts me more than it hurts you

i love coffee.
i love it so much.
i love coffee so much that i think i've caused permanent damage to my stomach drinking its burning deliciousness. therefore i consider myself something of an expert on the matter of coffee. therefore my opinion is valuable.

so then, when i say that Dunkin' Donuts makes a great cup of coffee, i'm not lying. that statement carries a lot of weight.

so then, when i tell you that Dunkin' Donuts has made a giant blunder, that too must be taken very seriously by the masses.

allow me to explain.

for starters, i agree with john goodman. the pride of seattle leans a bit towards the pretentious side of things. venti? grande? barista? naming its coffee chain after a Mellville character?

if starbucks were a person, i don't think i would like it very much. it would reference obscure movies and songs to impress others around them. it would wear fancy clothes no matter what the occasion. it would waste its saturdays saving whales. it would never drink coffee out of a cup that's not biodegradable.

Dunkin' Donuts, on the other hand, seems to be the opposite of all these things. he's just a regular guy working 9 to 5, slogging it out in the fields like all the rest of us. he enjoys a good dirty joke. he loves styrofoam cups for his coffee.


















so when i saw the commercial for Dunkin' where it takes a jab at coffee shops that have menus written in "french" or "italian" or possibly (and i'm embarrassed for them here) "frettalian" i thought it might be a victory for the regular guy. because you see, coffee wasn't meant to be the official drink of the yuppies and pseudo-cultural types of the world.

and then during this commercial comes what must be considered the most hypocritical statement of all time. "Come try one of our delicious lattes this holiday season..." or something to that effect. notice anything strange about that sentence?

***

i once knew a girl in high school. she despised the cool kids because she wasn't one of them. and then she spent the next few years trying to become one of them. she worked hard at it, going to all the cool kid events, laughing at their jokes, sitting near them at lunch. and eventually they let her in. and somewhere along the way she lost herself.

i offer this as a warning to you, Dunkin' Donuts. its one thing to be phony. its much worse a crime when you're aware that you're being a phony and yet you chose to be phony anyways. the commercial's premise suggests that you know you're supposed to be the "regular guy." but the lattes suggest that you don't know who you want to appeal to. in fact, a recent story on NPR said D&D was exploring a new look for its franchise...exploring a departure from its traditional orange and purple/pink color scheme for darker, more serious colors. like, perhaps, pine green, white and black? it's also considering changing its name to Queequeg's Coffee. (1)

i could go on, but i won't. i'll just finish by telling Dunkin' Donuts how disappointed i am in them. don't pretend to be from the hood if you're living uptown. you're either one or the other. i'm never drinking a Dunkin' Donuts latte and i suggest you do the same. we'll get those from that frettalian place.


















1. this is not true