As part of a summer trip to New England on the way top Houston, we managed to visit the first Dunkin’/Dunkin Donuts and Ben & Jerry’s. The first Dunkin’, originally Dunkin’ Donuts, is in Quincy on the edge of Boston. Compared to many first locations of famous restaurants and companies, it was rather understated in signifying that it was the original venue. Whilst modernised, it still had a Dunkin Donuts sign, rather than the contemporary Dunkin’ brand and had a small sign underneath stating that it was ‘The Original Dunkin’. Inside it had some neat old images of places, but it still operated like a normal Dunkin’ with no different merchandise or anything unique to the first location. Which is quite different to the offering at Starbucks first store in Pike Place Market in Seattle.
Whilst, on the New England trip we also visited the Ben & Jerry’s factory in Vermont. This has a specific visitor offering, providing tours of the factory and tastings of fresh ice cream, including flavours unique to the location. They also had some interesting features, including a flavour graveyard, detailing all the past flavours which are no longer made, which offered an interesting stroll. The comparison between the first Dunkin’ restaurant and the Ben & Jerry’s factory in terms of offering a visitor experience was quite stark. It might suggest that people don’t hold Dunkin’ as sentimentality as I do and they don’t get many people who go out of their way to visit, or maybe the franchise nature of Dunkin’ doesn’t support deviating from the norm.
Robin Bell 