Stop? Who does he think he’s dealing with — rational people?
Faster than you could self-soothe with a quick “Yankees suck!” the fire started. One hundred comments, 200, 300 … soon more than 1,000.
“I don’t understand what people don’t understand about Dunkin’ Donuts,” read one not atypical response. “No one thinks it’s good. It’s a drug dealer. It pushes out cheap fixes on every corner.”
“You don’t go to Dunkin because you want coffee,” another explained, “you go bc you want Dunkin.”
“These are fightin words,” a third said.
And in an undisclosed location somewhere in the Merrimack Valley, the post’s author, a Reddit user named usernamechecksout978, allowed himself a small smile.
“Some people were telling me to ‘F off,'” he said, not un-proudly.
He had been reached by phone at his mom’s house, and at his insistence, he was speaking anonymously — in part for fear of getting sued by Dunkin’ — a 47-year-old man whose wife had recently been served an allegedly under-jellied jelly doughnut.
“My wife took one bite, then two, but she still hadn’t gotten to the jelly,” the man, who teaches English and other subjects in Malaysia, told the Globe. “We thought they gave us the wrong doughnut.”
Well, that was the inciting incident, but in truth, the peeve has been building for a long time.
The Redditor has happy memories of going to Dunkin’ as a boy with his dad, but over the years, as the quality “declined,” he said, and the locals’ obsession with the chain grew, he developed an obsession of his own: why are we so bonded to Dunkin’????
Jet-lagged and stewing in the wee hours of the night, he shared his feelings with the Internet, and the Internet shared back.
“I would argue that not being a very good coffee is exactly why it’s part of our personality,” a Redditor called itsonlyastrongbuzz wrote.
“It’s objectively bad from a [connoisseur’s] perspective,” but “it’s cheap(er), it’s open at the ass crack of dawn and they’re [expletive] everywhere.
“Construction worker starting a new project halfway across the state?” the user continued, “There will be a Dunks by the job site. Parent going to your kids hockey game four towns away? There will be a Dunks by the rink. Plow driver zigzagging up and down state roads putting down salt? You’ll pass a Dunks.
“It’s like the old Catholic Latin Mass,” the user concluded, “anywhere in the world whether you’re on vacation or a soldier overseas, from America to Zimbabwe, would hear the same mass.”
Redditor JoshSidekick pointed out another perk: “I’m not going to throw a good iced coffee at someone while driving,” he wrote. “Dunks lets me vent my frustration without breaking the bank.”
(Reddit being Reddit, JoshSidekick’s comment set off its own round of comments, in this case about a second major source of local pride: our feral driving. “Did you throw an ice coffee at me at the Braintree split a few years ago?” someone asked. “Maybe learn to use a turn signal next time,” another chimed in.)
Dunkin’, one Redditor pointed out, “is the connection between blue collar and white collar, Democrat and Republican, young and old. It might not be good, but it’s one of the last universal experiences pretty much everyone in the area knows. Dunkin unites this state.”
It’s a uniter in another way, too. It allows critics to fight a common enemy, the T of the sausage-egg-and-cheese world. “The coffee is passable,” a popular comment began, “but you have to admit the DDs has destroyed whatever quality was in their baked goods and sandwiches.
“It’s like the executives go down the menu every week and ask ‘How do we make this stuff worse?'”
Or maybe our whole Dunkin’ thing is just performative — a bit.
“What I love about this strange phenomenon is that it gives Massholes permission to take themselves less seriously,” Redditor ratiofarm wrote. “Because, and I say this as a transplant, this is the absolute best state in the country. … Drinking gas station-level joe and eating stale dessert for breakfast like it’s your identity is a flex.”
Meanwhile, in Haverhill, Massholes are having their Dunkin’ devotion tested by the — er — bouquet emanating from the largest Dunkin’ bakery in the entire country.
The mood seems to have been summed up by the New York Post: “Small town overwhelmed by ‘heavy’ fried dough smell from new Dunkin’ factory pumping out 1 million donuts per day,” the Dec. 16 headline read.
And yet, one neighbor told NBC10 Boston, “I’m not sure who’s complaining about Dunkin’ Donuts. Maybe Starbucks people.”
There’s been one city council hearing, in December, with plans to take it up again. But maybe, no matter what happens, the truth is this:
