jencollins.com

FOREVER YUM

Originally appeared on hermenaut.com, 03-28-01

The Dunkin’ Donuts 2001 Calendar by Dunkin’ Donuts (2001)
Review by Jen Collins

September, 2001: A toddler jumps into a pile of leaves. She giggles and sings as the leaves blow in the air and swirl all around her. Then she’s pelted by a blueberry-muffin storm, each oversized sugary muffin at least as big as her head. Enjoy the foliage a special way. The way you used to. Is that how you remember your childhood? Then what were the editors of the 2001 Dunkin’ Donuts Calendar going for when they picked the images?

This year’s calendar, though free as always, disappointed me. In the very special calendar year 2000, Dunkin’ Donuts treated its customers to a 50-year retrospective. They featured photos of smiling bakers and delicious-looking hand-cut donuts, and a paper-doll history of the Dunkin’ Donuts uniform, from the adventurous, polyester yellow-and-turquoise jumper waitresses wore in the early ‘60s, to the lackluster polo-shirt-and-khakis combo that servers — waitresses no more — wear today, dressed-up like they’re middle-management, team players, dupes. The 1995 calendar was “a tribute to the true entrepreneurs of the world.” In 1996, the calendar was filled with exciting trivia: In one year we pump enough jelly filling to fill over a million basketballs. I enjoyed knowing that. Including that fun-fact proved somebody was thinking about what would be good on the calendar.

This year’s model urges us to Loosen Up a Little, and I don’t need a calendar to tell me that. It’s full of sappy, inspirational sayings like Be thankful for the little things and not so little things — like maybe those huge, dangerous muffins? Give unto others and hope they do the same to you. Thank you, Jesus, I’ll take a dozen. Who wants that with their coffee break? Maybe Dunkin’ Donuts is going after the Sunday donuts-and-coffee-after Mass crowd. But you always find these treats at AA meetings, too. Maybe the calendar should be in 12 steps, one for each month, with January insisting that we admit we are powerless, and December instructing us to take this message to other munchkin-holics.

The 2001 calendar looks like it was thrown together at the last minute. This October’s kid is wearing a purple Anne Geddes-style dragon costume, just like last October’s kid. They’re cutting corners: no interviews this year, no digging through the archives for factoids about crullers and munchkins. Bet you didn’t know that Dunkin’ Donuts first introduced munchkins donut-hole treats in 1972. See? That’s good to know, isn’t it? It’s last year’s footnote, however. Have they run out of trivia, depleted their store of anecdotes, turned a blind eye to history? Maybe Double-D is putting all their capital into new products now. My suggestion: focus on the coffee. Not the Dunkaccinos or the Coolattas or any of that pumped-up crap. Just the coffee. My family drinks nothing but the finest Dunkin’ Donuts house-blend. When I moved to Los Angeles from Boston, my mom started Priority Mailing me two pounds every couple of months. That’s devotion. That’s Forever Yum.

Once, while I was waiting for coffee at the Dunkin’ Donuts in Davis Square, Somerville, Rod Stewart’s “Love Touch” came tinkling out of the speakers. Rod Stewart is the patron saint of Dunkin’ Donuts, I thought. He’s indirectly the originator of the 50-Year Anniversary Calendar’s slogan, Forever Yum. That must be why so many Dunkin’ Donuts employees adopt his fancy hairstyle. If the marketing department at Dunkin’ Donuts had any sense, they’d ask Rod for a calendar concept. Something sexy, catchy, and colorful. Nothing so goony or impractical as Skip down an entire city block. No, just something cheerful we can look to when we want to see what day it is. Something we can remember. Every picture tells a story, right? And the stories the pictures in the new Dunkin’ Donuts calendar are telling me are about a chain of donut shops that doesn’t have time for me and my memories anymore. That’s another anchor gone. They don’t call donuts sinkers for nothing.