In praise of customer service at Dunkin’ Donuts

I don’t "do" Starbucks.

Yes, I like and admire the fact that they give people a coffee-house-ish place to hang out.

I like that they offer Wi-Fi.

I like that they have a certain canned hip to them, and that they offer their workers benefits.

But I don’t "do" Starbucks.

I do Dunkin’ Donuts.

This is partially in support of a home-town operation. Partially out of frugality - a cup of tea is a cup of tea. And partially out of convenience: there’s a DD in the building that also houses The Writers’ Room of Boston, where I hang out most days. And on most of those days, I stop by Dunkie’s for a cup of tea or an iced coffee. Sometimes I get a bagel. When I’m feeling supremely indulgent I get a muffin. (They have chocolate chip muffins that are actually full of chocolate chips, not just with a couple studding the top.)

The Dunkin’ Donuts I frequent would never be mistaken for a coffee house.

There are a couple of forlorn stools set against a narrow, window-side counter. Occasionally, I see a couple of tourists or someone who’s working outside hunker down there, but the set up is hardly inviting.

The decor is vintage DD: white (with those charming pink and orange accents, straight out of the ’60’s) and glaring.

And the folks who work in "my" Dunkin’ Donuts are by no means baristas.

Most of them are young, many of them are immigrants (and a lot of the women wear head scarves), and - while I’m sure that they all have "real lives" somewhere else, I never get the impression that they’re really artists-writers-actors-jugglers-singers-dancers-whatevers who are supporting themselves, or slumming, by working there. I’m guessing, just by their youth, that a lot of them are students. But that’s about it.

What they also are is unfailingly polite, calm, and pleasant. They’re not in-your-face-cheerful. (This is, after all, New England.) They’re just good at what they do, which is sell tea, coffee, donuts, muffins, bagels and a few other things. (No CD’s, no designer mugs.)

A couple of recent incidents have solidified my appreciation of Dunkin’ Donuts.

The other day, I ordered a bagel and cream cheese, and asked for cream cheese with chives. It doesn’t taste all that different than plain old cream cheese, but I really prefer it. So I was disappointed when the server opened the cream cheese drawer and found the cupboard bare of the chived variety. Although the place was fairly busy, the server - a young man with an Middle-Eastern sounding name (which I’ve forgotten) and accent - went into the back room and retrieved a carton of chive cheese. He could just as easily have said, "We’re out," and I would have been disappointed, but fine with it.

When I thanked him for it, telling him that I really appreciated his extra effort, he gave me a big smile. (There are "no tipping" signs all over the place, or I would have given him one.)

More recently, I had a situation that was a bit more critical than whether or not I got chives in my cheese.

On a dreary Sunday morning, I picked up a cup of tea and a bagel and parked myself in The Writers’ Room.

At about 4 o’clock, I decided to check my e-mail. We don’t have a broadband connection here, let alone wireless, but you can use our frustratingly slow dial-up connection if you want to do a quick hit. For the privilege of using dial-up, you throw a quarter per 3 minutes into petty cash.

I went to get my wallet out so that I could throw my 50 cents in - it may be a quarter for 3 minutes, but 3 minutes barely gets you online - when I realized that my wallet wasn’t in the coat pocket where I thought I’d left it. Nor was it in any or the myriad pockets of my back pack.

My heart started to sink, but before I let myself start panicking, I went downstairs to DD.

The young woman (accent, head scarf) who’d waited on me earlier in the day, smiled when she saw me come in.

"I was hoping you’d come," she told me. "If you hadn’t, I was going to leave a note for the people working tomorrow to let them know that we had your wallet."

Relieved, I ordered a cup of tea and a celebratory chocolate chip muffin. The woman mis-heard me and put a blueberry muffin in the bag.

"No," I said, "I wanted chocolate chip, please."

She handed me both muffins, "We just throw them out at the end of the day. You might as well take it."

Now, I really hope they don’t actually throw them out but, rather, give them to the servers, or to a shelter. (There’s a shelter for homeless veterans up the street where we sometimes bring left over food from a Writers’ Room gathering.)

But I’m not going to quibble about waste here.

I’m just going to say that I’m delighted that the Dunkin’ Donuts clerk was honest enough to put my wallet aside for me.

"He who steal my purse steals trash," and all that, but I did have about $50 in there. Plus a Charlie Card (for Boston public transit) with about $40 worth of fares on. Plus a half-dozen train tickets worth over 5 bucks a piece. Plus a Dunkin’ Donuts gift card (with a picture of my niece Molly on it - her Christmas gift to me, and one I keep adding to). Plus a couple of lottery tickets from a while back which, if I ever remember to check, may turn out to be worth millions of dollars. Not to mention a couple of credit cards…

There was plenty in there that could tempt someone making minimum wage to say, ‘finders keepers.’

But, no, my Dunkin’ Donuts clerk was not someone who’d play that game.

Given how often we have to deal with surly and snotty clerks who couldn’t be bothered, and given the current attitudes toward immigrants in general, let alone Mid-Eastern immigrants, I want to sign the praises of the little Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner of Broad and State, in beautiful downtown Boston.

P.S. I did eat the chocolate chip muffin, but saved the blueberry one for a later date.

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