Will Kus­sell

Pres­i­dent & Chief Brand Officer

Dunkin Donuts

Dear Mr. Kussell,

I am writ­ing due to my under­whelm­ing expe­ri­ence at Dunkin Donuts. First let me tell you I live in Mem­phis TN where we have just received our 1st (to my knowl­edge) DD fran­chise. I treat my kids to donuts about once a month on aver­age (we don’t Run on Dunkin we just “fun on” Dunkin) so we were excited about going to the DD which we had heard so much about.

First let me say the donuts are really good. Sec­ond I want to point out that the man­ager that works the drive through (more of a cat­tle shoot minus the elec­tric prod) is so stressed she is freak­ing out her fel­low work­ers. I can see it on her face and those around her. I’m sure she is try­ing very hard to do her job and it is a busy store but the lady needs some sup­port and some deep cleans­ing breaths. I’ve had to go into the store each time we visit to cor­rect my order. This is always fun in that I’m nor­mally still in my paja­mas so I get some admir­ing glances at my super­man pj’s.

Fur­ther more, the drive through process seems set up for the con­ve­nience of the donut deal­ers and not the donut con­sumers. There are vir­tu­ally no pic­tures of donuts on the drive through dis­play, but I will admit tons of pic­tures of flat bread egg white healthy break­fast type do dahs (not only do we not want these items from a donut shop we don’t want to be reminded of the fact that this is what we should be eat­ing!) and when I asked if they had a “cheat sheet” at the win­dow I was told, “no the donut selec­tion changes so much you have to come in and look at what we have.” Kind-a shoots a hole in the drive through idea, huh?

The man­ager was also per­turbed that I didn’t know how many donuts I wanted before I started my order. It’s too early to be doing math! I just let the kids pick what they want, add the one dou­ble choco­late that I had bet­ter not show back up at the house with­out (hell hath no fury!) and then when all is said and done there is a total donut tally. Donut buy­ing is not pre­med­i­tated for us. I don’t care if you charge per donut, per sprin­kle or per dozen I only ever buy 6 or 8 and it doesn’t break the bank either way.

All that said, I under­stand why you have diver­si­fied your menu and why you have worked to stream line your process but please make it easy and fun for us to buy some donuts once in a while! And if the plan has been just to get me to come into the store so you can see my super­man paja­mas let me know and I’ll send you a pair. Thanks and take care.

Sin­cerely,

John

aka. the donut buy­ing dad.

This week I have eaten out a cou­ple of times, which I don’t nor­mally do. Twice I’ve had notable ser­vice. Once good, once bad. The first time was a break­fast appoint­ment. I asked the server for orange juice WHEN the meal came. On cue she brought my omelet and my OJ just the way I like it. The sec­ond time was tonight. My wife and I wanted to go out for soup (we’re hav­ing a cold snap in TN). We ordered an appe­tizer and two bowls of soup. Guess what came first? Yep, the soup. Food just isn’t as good in the wrong order. No apol­ogy, no offer to comp the appe­tizer. So here is the secret. Lis­ten to peo­ple when you have asked them a ques­tion. If you do this you will be way ahead of a lot of your competition.

I snapped this shot while stand­ing in line to a get a new license plate. What’s wrong with this pic­ture? In my opin­ion this seems a lit­tle back­wards. It’s like Alan Weiss says, ” You can’t make this stuff up!”