Dear Dunkin Donuts,
Its time to get a new Supplier: the old one makes a crappy product. No, not you’re Donuts, although I have no doubt they may have contributed to more deaths annually than AP ammo. No, not your coffee, which came in most expensive, but at best “inoffensive” in a recent national taste test, well behind McD’s.
No, I’m pitting you for something else you sell, something that you trot out as ‘special’ and ‘high quality’. I’m pitting you for something bright and shiny and appealing to the half awake working people who just want their coffee and to get to work before starting time. I’m pitting you for your merchandise, specifically your high-quality “Stainless Steel Travel Mug”.
First, you make us wait in these long-ass lines, making us smell and desire your baked goods… baked goods that do nothing but contribute to heart disease and make us fat. I didn’t walk into your shop wanting ass-enlarging donuts, but damn me if I wasn’t craving them by the time I walked out. And I start to look around and lo-and-behold…there’s a stainless steel travel mug to hold my coffee! It won’t put fat on my ass (your condiment additions may vary) and it will be a treat that I can spend money on that (supposedly) won’t shave years off my life. Plus, this mug is vacuum-sealed with a stainless steel beverage compartment, so it will last almost forever, right? Certainly, it’ll last longer than the red plastic mugs you usually trot out. So, I bought my coffee and I bought your mug, the one proudly displaying “DD” on the side. I brought it into the office and I went about my day happy. Until it broke.
It was empty and on a counter by the office coffee machine when I brushed against it, moving it off balance. The floor of the coffee room is lined with linoleum (not the hardest of substances a travel mug might be expected to bounce onto, and certainly more forgiving than asphalt). The cup bounced and, to my credit, I caught it in air after one bounce. Most of it anyway. The cup part was in my hand, but the cheap-ass plastic handle was skittering across the floor like a ping-pong ball being played with by a cat. I looked at the cup and found that there was more than a handle missing: there was now a thumb-sized hole on the plastic shell housing the vacuum seal where the handle used to be glued. With the vacuum seal gone, almost the whole purpose of the stainless-steel liner was gone, as the coffee would get cold just as fast, if not faster, than any other mug.
Look, I’m a coffee drinker, not a travel mug design engineer, but Dammit, Don’t you think you could have built these mugs a tad stronger? Caffeine addicts on a Monday morning are not the daintiest of creatures on Og’s green earth, as you should well know. If the handle was designed to be break-away, might you not have designed it to break at the glue-point, so as not to yank a chunk of plastic out of the shell along with it and ruin the mug? How the hell do you test these things, anyhow? The store wouldn’t replace it; they couldn’t as there were none left (but they didn’t seem like they would anyway). I wrote to the customer feedback area of their website, Dunkin Donuts.com (also conveniently printed on the mug) but I’ve heard nothing. Maybe this rant is as weak as their coffee and maybe this is all just sour beans, but all things being equal, I feel like I got burned.
