Behavioral Observations of Dunkin' Donuts Customers
Working in retail in the majority of my jobs over the course of my lifetime has been one of the most inspiring things to credit. The retail experience was cemented as a part of my life when I started working my first job as a cashier at ShopKo in Quincy, IL. Thenceforth, working in a customer-driven environment has been a forte of mine, given that I am usually pretty amicable towards people, strangers included, and I can relate to their needs most of the time.
I know what it's like to be waiting in line at a cash register, ready to check out, when somebody in front of you has thirty items and two of them don't have price tags.
"It's $8.99!," she says. It doesn't matter, I need a UPC to scan so that you can purchase this item.
Still, as frustrating as they are sometimes, the customers are the driving force of retail, and, in turn, the driving force of my most memorable experiences in retail. Every business has its regular customers, but none, I would say, more loyal than those of food retail establishments. Once a person finds a recipe he/she likes, they tend to stick right by it for their food retail needs. A perfect example of this is Dunkin' Donuts.
Those who know me know I have been a longtime supporter of the D, or DnD, as I have come to call it. I fit right in there with the regular customers. Never more so then when I worked at the one across the street from my apartment in North Arlington, NJ. I chose to work there for its proximity, as well as to satisfy my curiosity of working in one, in pursuit of one of my life goals, which is to open Dunkin' Donuts franchises in my home area of Quincy, IL, where there aren't any at the moment.
Working there gave me insight as to how much people on the east coast take it for granted. People in these towns in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey live and die by Dunkin' Donuts. I found it to be kind of pathetic that when I was working on Christmas Day last year, people still came in to buy coffee. Some of these customers could not take one day off.
It is not fair for me to judge of people of North Arlington, NJ, merely based on their consistent patronage of Dunkin' Donuts, but I had no other basis. When I was not working at DnD, I spent my time holed up in my apartment watching movies, or in the city doing city things, trying desperately to escape the reality of my New Jersey residency. Nothing brought me back to life worse than going in on a Friday for a ten-hour shift beginning at 2:00 in the afternoon, knowing what I had to look forward to that evening.
When I first started, I worked nonstop, I was available all day everyday, so as to get ahead and earn as much money and credit as possible. At first, when I thought the business was legitimate, I worked hard. I showed up on time, I came with my shirt tucked in, I attended to the customers earnestly without wavering. I sacrificed time spent with my family and friends to go to work at a job that was just abusing me.
It took me a while to come to realize that, but when half of your colleagues are illegal Indian immigrants who don't speak a lick of English, the writing's on the wall. When I started working, customers consistently asked if the owner or management had changed, as they were not used to a white guy being behind the counter. From what I could tell, they all seemed to like me. It took me a little while to get used to the job, as it would for anyone, but repetition makes for very good practice.
I became used to seeing very familiar faces. I worked with a select number of people in the afternoon shift, but only one of which I actually became moderately close friends with. My immediate supervisor, the afternoon shift leader, and the gentleman who hired me, shared the afternoon/closing shift nearly everyday. He taught me a lot of the Dunkin' Donuts trade, the how-to's of the business, the food preparation, the cleaning up. I received an education in Dunkin' Donuts as his protege.
We more-or-less tended the same customers day-in and day-out. The great thing about having regular customers is getting to know them little-by-little, day-by-day. You remember what they order, and you can have it ready for them before they even get to the front of the line. That effect is satisfying for both the customers and the purveyor of snacks.
Of course, the more bizarre the order, the easier it is to remember. A lot of them were really simple. One guy always ordered a small black coffee, and he always winked at me when I got it to him. Curious. One lady always came in dolled up in all kinds of makeup and perfume, and the most cheerful demeanor anyone could ask for. She was always talking about the weather. She ordered a large coffee with two sugars and milk everyday. She grabbed a straw at the door and brought it with her to the front of the line so that she could stick it in her coffee right away, and she always left the wrapper on the counter. It drove me crazy.
Most of the customers really came in and talked to Ricky, my supervisor. He was the veteran on the job, he already knew these people and had a re pore with them, while I mostly looked on as his stooge. He would give me orders and I would do them until I came unto my own with these folks. A few of them liked me, too. They got to know me and like me after a while, as I did them.
One of my favorite customers who came in everyday was a feeble old lady. She walked to the store everyday from down the street (even when it was snowing!) to come into Dunkin' Donuts, and sit down at a table with her large black coffee with cream on the side and a sliced and toasted wheat bagel with a plastic knife. She obviously brought something with her everyday to spread on her bagel, though I never did find out what it was. This sweet old lady came in everyday, and I once even saw her on the street and said hello to her. I guess that's what Dunkin' Donuts will do to you.
One thing it will also do to you is make you go crazy. In my case, I think I quit soon enough that I didn't go completely A.W.O.L., but I was about to, if I had stayed any longer. The customers, the difficult ones, are relentless. Cranky, impatient, dissatisfied. We got all types. Only one person stands in the way of their coffee, me. But I have to make it correctly, and I have to take care of all the people in front of you before you can get yours. A lot of people did not seem to understand this.
"Gimme a medium regular!" Yeah, I really love it when you demand your coffee instead of ask for it like a polite human being. And what the hell is regular? What does that mean? Regular means a lot of things to a lot of people. So they would get frustrated when I would ask my follow-up question, which was, "cream and sugar?" For the majority of people, this is what it meant, so I got used to understanding that a regular coffee was one with cream and sugar already in it, as if it came off the vine that way. Nevertheless, other people would get terribly offended if I asked them if they wanted any foreign substances in their coffee. So if you wanted it black, why didn't you just ask for it black, like everybody else does?
A lot of what goes in your mind when working a humiliating job like this is trying to figure out what people are actually thinking when they order or when they shop and check out. That is one of the most fascinating parts of the job, without a doubt. It was also hard for me not to think of why I was working this job this job in the first place, already in possession of a college degree. I'd be out sweeping the parking lot or taking out the trash in the freezing cold thinking about how much I'd like to tell the next customer, "I have a college degree! It's in my apartment! I could get it and show you!!"
Oh, and, by the way, in any part of the food service industry, restaurant or fast food, there is no such thing as cleanliness. No health department in the world could keep track of what goes on behind closed doors in your favorite food establishment. As much as I tried to feign cleanliness, always using the wax paper handling the donuts, discarding dropped lids or coffee stirrers, it didn't really matter. I might accidentally brush your donut with my thumb while putting it into a paper bag, but that is nothing compared to what some toothless immigrants were doing to it twelve hours ago in order to make it what it is. Trust me.
The absolute worst part of the job was the kids. The Dunkin' Donuts in North Arlington is nestled in between the two high schools of the town, to the north being the public high school and to the south being the Catholic high school. The two schools obviously held a lot of kids, they all had open lunch during the day, and so they all came parading in during the lunch hour, and immediately after school got let out. An assortment of teens, dressed in their high school clothes, with their punk attitudes, with their cliques, with their budding hormones all came in for no other purpose other than they had nothing else to do. They would spend hours in Dunkin' Donuts! Sitting at the tables, drinking their iced tea or their milkshakes, opening sugar packets and pouring them on the floor, putting their gum under the chairs and tables, making a lot of racket the older folks, myself included, did not appreciate. As if that weren't enough, they had nothing else to do on Friday and Saturday nights than go to Dunkin' Donuts and hang out. These pesky teenagers made Dunkin' Donuts their primarily destination. They would meet there, stay until we kicked them out, then come back twenty minutes later. Each time more annoying than the last. You couldn't get mad at all of them. Some of them were good kids. But if one got on your nerves, it spoiled the whole lot of them. The worst part about them were their attitudes. Each and every one of them had such a smarmy attitude as if they were so privileged to be living in North Arlington, have such good friends as these they could meet at a Dunkin' Donuts on a Friday night and slap five, stand outside and smoke cigarettes, and talk about God knows what. I don't know what they could have talked about, they didn't do anything except go to Dunkin' Donuts! I cannot remember a time in high school when I thought it was necessary to hang out at a fast food establishment for long periods of time when not eating. Granted, where I went to high school, we did not have a Dunkin' Donuts. And, even though I distinctly remember going to Pizza Hut quite often, we never hung out there if we weren't eating pizza.
I got to know a few of the kids and asked them why they didn't go out Friday or Saturday nights, go to friends' houses or parties or movies or anything. I never really quite got an answer. After cleaning up empty liquor bottles in the bathrooms and learning of their admiration for Paris Hilton, I came to the conclusion that I would have to change before they would, which let to my departure.
It got to a point where I could not go on. While I did not like idea of quitting a job before I had something else lined up, continuing to work at the D effectively killed my motivation to go on living. I ended up putting in my two weeks only to find out that my immediate superior had walked out in frustration on my day off, something I had often pondered. The last two weeks I was there I was partnered with whatever ringer immigrant they could get to cover the shift at the last minute. That place was miserable.
As you might expect, though, I would not trade my experience for anything in the world. I would certainly never do it again. The customers, the contacts I made, and, to some extent, the work provided with enough inspirational fodder to keep me thinking about it for quite a while. It will be fun to look back on that experience, and tell people what I did when I was younger and more naive, as I just did.
I know what it's like to be waiting in line at a cash register, ready to check out, when somebody in front of you has thirty items and two of them don't have price tags.
"It's $8.99!," she says. It doesn't matter, I need a UPC to scan so that you can purchase this item.
Still, as frustrating as they are sometimes, the customers are the driving force of retail, and, in turn, the driving force of my most memorable experiences in retail. Every business has its regular customers, but none, I would say, more loyal than those of food retail establishments. Once a person finds a recipe he/she likes, they tend to stick right by it for their food retail needs. A perfect example of this is Dunkin' Donuts.
Those who know me know I have been a longtime supporter of the D, or DnD, as I have come to call it. I fit right in there with the regular customers. Never more so then when I worked at the one across the street from my apartment in North Arlington, NJ. I chose to work there for its proximity, as well as to satisfy my curiosity of working in one, in pursuit of one of my life goals, which is to open Dunkin' Donuts franchises in my home area of Quincy, IL, where there aren't any at the moment.
Working there gave me insight as to how much people on the east coast take it for granted. People in these towns in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey live and die by Dunkin' Donuts. I found it to be kind of pathetic that when I was working on Christmas Day last year, people still came in to buy coffee. Some of these customers could not take one day off.
It is not fair for me to judge of people of North Arlington, NJ, merely based on their consistent patronage of Dunkin' Donuts, but I had no other basis. When I was not working at DnD, I spent my time holed up in my apartment watching movies, or in the city doing city things, trying desperately to escape the reality of my New Jersey residency. Nothing brought me back to life worse than going in on a Friday for a ten-hour shift beginning at 2:00 in the afternoon, knowing what I had to look forward to that evening.
When I first started, I worked nonstop, I was available all day everyday, so as to get ahead and earn as much money and credit as possible. At first, when I thought the business was legitimate, I worked hard. I showed up on time, I came with my shirt tucked in, I attended to the customers earnestly without wavering. I sacrificed time spent with my family and friends to go to work at a job that was just abusing me.
It took me a while to come to realize that, but when half of your colleagues are illegal Indian immigrants who don't speak a lick of English, the writing's on the wall. When I started working, customers consistently asked if the owner or management had changed, as they were not used to a white guy being behind the counter. From what I could tell, they all seemed to like me. It took me a little while to get used to the job, as it would for anyone, but repetition makes for very good practice.
I became used to seeing very familiar faces. I worked with a select number of people in the afternoon shift, but only one of which I actually became moderately close friends with. My immediate supervisor, the afternoon shift leader, and the gentleman who hired me, shared the afternoon/closing shift nearly everyday. He taught me a lot of the Dunkin' Donuts trade, the how-to's of the business, the food preparation, the cleaning up. I received an education in Dunkin' Donuts as his protege.
We more-or-less tended the same customers day-in and day-out. The great thing about having regular customers is getting to know them little-by-little, day-by-day. You remember what they order, and you can have it ready for them before they even get to the front of the line. That effect is satisfying for both the customers and the purveyor of snacks.
Of course, the more bizarre the order, the easier it is to remember. A lot of them were really simple. One guy always ordered a small black coffee, and he always winked at me when I got it to him. Curious. One lady always came in dolled up in all kinds of makeup and perfume, and the most cheerful demeanor anyone could ask for. She was always talking about the weather. She ordered a large coffee with two sugars and milk everyday. She grabbed a straw at the door and brought it with her to the front of the line so that she could stick it in her coffee right away, and she always left the wrapper on the counter. It drove me crazy.
Most of the customers really came in and talked to Ricky, my supervisor. He was the veteran on the job, he already knew these people and had a re pore with them, while I mostly looked on as his stooge. He would give me orders and I would do them until I came unto my own with these folks. A few of them liked me, too. They got to know me and like me after a while, as I did them.
One of my favorite customers who came in everyday was a feeble old lady. She walked to the store everyday from down the street (even when it was snowing!) to come into Dunkin' Donuts, and sit down at a table with her large black coffee with cream on the side and a sliced and toasted wheat bagel with a plastic knife. She obviously brought something with her everyday to spread on her bagel, though I never did find out what it was. This sweet old lady came in everyday, and I once even saw her on the street and said hello to her. I guess that's what Dunkin' Donuts will do to you.
One thing it will also do to you is make you go crazy. In my case, I think I quit soon enough that I didn't go completely A.W.O.L., but I was about to, if I had stayed any longer. The customers, the difficult ones, are relentless. Cranky, impatient, dissatisfied. We got all types. Only one person stands in the way of their coffee, me. But I have to make it correctly, and I have to take care of all the people in front of you before you can get yours. A lot of people did not seem to understand this.
"Gimme a medium regular!" Yeah, I really love it when you demand your coffee instead of ask for it like a polite human being. And what the hell is regular? What does that mean? Regular means a lot of things to a lot of people. So they would get frustrated when I would ask my follow-up question, which was, "cream and sugar?" For the majority of people, this is what it meant, so I got used to understanding that a regular coffee was one with cream and sugar already in it, as if it came off the vine that way. Nevertheless, other people would get terribly offended if I asked them if they wanted any foreign substances in their coffee. So if you wanted it black, why didn't you just ask for it black, like everybody else does?
A lot of what goes in your mind when working a humiliating job like this is trying to figure out what people are actually thinking when they order or when they shop and check out. That is one of the most fascinating parts of the job, without a doubt. It was also hard for me not to think of why I was working this job this job in the first place, already in possession of a college degree. I'd be out sweeping the parking lot or taking out the trash in the freezing cold thinking about how much I'd like to tell the next customer, "I have a college degree! It's in my apartment! I could get it and show you!!"
Oh, and, by the way, in any part of the food service industry, restaurant or fast food, there is no such thing as cleanliness. No health department in the world could keep track of what goes on behind closed doors in your favorite food establishment. As much as I tried to feign cleanliness, always using the wax paper handling the donuts, discarding dropped lids or coffee stirrers, it didn't really matter. I might accidentally brush your donut with my thumb while putting it into a paper bag, but that is nothing compared to what some toothless immigrants were doing to it twelve hours ago in order to make it what it is. Trust me.
The absolute worst part of the job was the kids. The Dunkin' Donuts in North Arlington is nestled in between the two high schools of the town, to the north being the public high school and to the south being the Catholic high school. The two schools obviously held a lot of kids, they all had open lunch during the day, and so they all came parading in during the lunch hour, and immediately after school got let out. An assortment of teens, dressed in their high school clothes, with their punk attitudes, with their cliques, with their budding hormones all came in for no other purpose other than they had nothing else to do. They would spend hours in Dunkin' Donuts! Sitting at the tables, drinking their iced tea or their milkshakes, opening sugar packets and pouring them on the floor, putting their gum under the chairs and tables, making a lot of racket the older folks, myself included, did not appreciate. As if that weren't enough, they had nothing else to do on Friday and Saturday nights than go to Dunkin' Donuts and hang out. These pesky teenagers made Dunkin' Donuts their primarily destination. They would meet there, stay until we kicked them out, then come back twenty minutes later. Each time more annoying than the last. You couldn't get mad at all of them. Some of them were good kids. But if one got on your nerves, it spoiled the whole lot of them. The worst part about them were their attitudes. Each and every one of them had such a smarmy attitude as if they were so privileged to be living in North Arlington, have such good friends as these they could meet at a Dunkin' Donuts on a Friday night and slap five, stand outside and smoke cigarettes, and talk about God knows what. I don't know what they could have talked about, they didn't do anything except go to Dunkin' Donuts! I cannot remember a time in high school when I thought it was necessary to hang out at a fast food establishment for long periods of time when not eating. Granted, where I went to high school, we did not have a Dunkin' Donuts. And, even though I distinctly remember going to Pizza Hut quite often, we never hung out there if we weren't eating pizza.
I got to know a few of the kids and asked them why they didn't go out Friday or Saturday nights, go to friends' houses or parties or movies or anything. I never really quite got an answer. After cleaning up empty liquor bottles in the bathrooms and learning of their admiration for Paris Hilton, I came to the conclusion that I would have to change before they would, which let to my departure.
It got to a point where I could not go on. While I did not like idea of quitting a job before I had something else lined up, continuing to work at the D effectively killed my motivation to go on living. I ended up putting in my two weeks only to find out that my immediate superior had walked out in frustration on my day off, something I had often pondered. The last two weeks I was there I was partnered with whatever ringer immigrant they could get to cover the shift at the last minute. That place was miserable.
As you might expect, though, I would not trade my experience for anything in the world. I would certainly never do it again. The customers, the contacts I made, and, to some extent, the work provided with enough inspirational fodder to keep me thinking about it for quite a while. It will be fun to look back on that experience, and tell people what I did when I was younger and more naive, as I just did.
posted by Leland J. Fischer at 12:15 AM
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