By Dan Bodine
Center against Social Minimalism
CLEBURNE, TX--Dunkin’ Donuts said this week it’ll add almost 7,000 new stores to its nationwide chain in the next 20 years, CNN reported. Don’t know for sure any of those will be in Cleburne or not, but knowing the community the way I do I’d be willing to bet a dozen doughnuts on it. Good doughnuts are sumpthin’ sweet in Cleburne.
I’m not kosher on those plans yet either, a spokesman for the Cleburne store on South Main told CSM’s rovin’-eye reporter Jethro by phone late yesterday afternoon. But you can bet one store will be added here at least. Hell, the way people eat doughnuts in Cleburne, the company may even add two or three more.
Hee, hee. The way folks eat good doughnuts here is they eat a lot of them! If they’re indeed good ones, that is. Before image came along, doughnut businesses floated or sank on quality alone.
And eating good ones is in this community’s bloodlines. Growing up there in the 50’s and 60’s you just had to follow your nose to find doughnuts being made somewhere.
My very first paid job was selling doughnuts door-to-door in Cleburne. Fourth grade, I think it was. Maybe some of the third, too. Place was on the west side of North Main just north of Marshall Edward’s Texaco Service Station. Year or so after Ike’s election, which would‘ve put it ‘53 or ‘54.
The building was one of those that stuck back out over Buffalo Creek. The rear part sat on what I always called “stilts.” You could walk down the side of the building, down underneath it, and then on down further to the creek
Some uppity 8th grader co-worker once, after I’d accused him of stealing a watch he wanted to sell to me, drug me off down there to pound the you-know-what out of me, I remember. Mad at being called a thief by some little red-headed, freckled-faced, 4th grade punk, he was.
My body wasn’t exactly petrified. I was actually shaking so bad he never could commence the fisticuffs. It startled him, it did.
How come you shaking so much, boy!? You scared?
N-N-Naw, I’ve got this here d-d-doctor’s disease. W-W-Whenever I g-g-git ready to kill somebody I s-s-start s-s-shaking.
I really don’t think it worried him any, my killing him. The wife of the owner came down and broke it up, and the owner fired the boy the next day. He wasn’t that much of a salesboy anyway. Never could outsell me. I was among the tops in the sales fleet. Red-headed, freckles, speech and all.
Selling doughnuts was easy in Cleburne. Especially if you stuttered. Folks were anxious to get to those doughnuts and didn’t want to wait a couple of minutes on some stammering idiot on the porch to finish his sales pitch.
They’d just slip their change out the door to me and take a sack from my basket. Here, kid, they’d say. Those things are getting cold.
Door-to-door, it was--afternoons after school, and 4-5 hours on Saturdays. We doughnut salesboys fanned out on our bicycles all over town--each with six dozen, freshly sacked doughnuts on weekdays, and eight on the weekend.
Sold them for sixty cents a dozen; 30 a half dozen. Kept a dime for every 60 cents we sold. On weekdays we were given four dozen sacks and four half-dozen sacks; Saturdays it was six dozen sacks and four half-dozen sacks.
And we sold until we sold ‘em all, it was. Regardless how late at night it was you had to be peddling. Company policy. Don’t bring me any old doughnuts in here tomorrow, the manager would flat out tell us. We won’t money. You sell until you ain’t got no more to sell, you hear? If you want to keep your job that is. Excellent sales incentive, it was. Really got to believe in your product that way.
I don’t know where the child labor laws were in those days. Didn’t exist, I guess. I was happy with it. ‘Cause I had a job. Built respect for myself and an image as well. Selling good doughnuts. Something people wanted because it was wired into their brains that if it’s both sweet and gummy it’s good for the tummy. And it made me some spending money.
Plus we always got a bonus of two doughnuts first thing the next day when we went in for selling out the previous day. Damn good job, it was! I learned to eat a ton of doughnuts! And I learned to respect myself for being an income earner around the house despite having to always untangle myself emotionally with my speech. Excellent therapy it was, too.
The welfare state wasn’t planted yet. And its opposite reactionary force, radical capitalism (with its uppity gotta-have images and niggardly way of treating the poor and less fortunate--aka, those who ain’t with us the stiff-nosed cultural or business elites), thus wasn’t an issue either. Simple things like eating and selling good doughnuts took on values all by themselves.
But the Sunbelt’s explosiveness swamped us all in later years with a frenzied drive to make money, at the expense of these old simple values, I’ve longed claimed. Complicated our lives with additional driving instincts.
Our stomachs and taste buds alike became convoluted by a New Right selling machine that pre-empted basic moral values. The sake of the greater community good became linked to collective individual divine riches instead. Progress, at all costs, it was. With the caveat the greater good was good only if it made you individually rich first.
The more money you acquired, more proof it was God had a particular smile for you, you rascal! So we went about the business of making money not for the sake of God‘s kingdom but to show people we were a king or queen in that kingdom.
Becoming a corpocracy, once we understood the new rules, wasn’t that complicated. As an old friend still in Cleburne is prone to point out occasionally about this new golden rule business, he/she who has the money, rules.
Which meant you ate up unmercifully all the competition in sight, all you could afford to get your hands on. Creative financing to the max! And paid Congress for special laws to both favor and protect you, while on the other hand streamlining services along with employee salaries and compensations. Our humanity shunted in a competitive fixation to squeeze the most with the least.
When the stock market crashed in late 2008 many of these radical capitalist ideas on steroids began surfacing. And a period of corrections set in.
But have we seen the light? To the point we’ve changed our wicked ways? (Sometimes, swear, I can still hear Bro. J. C. Lott at Chase Av. Baptist screaming those word to the rafters overhead! I need to write the story of saving Baldy ‘neath the hedge bushes one day. Hee, hee.) But in a bit of irony over all this, look no further than the doughnut maybe.
In the Wednesday CNN story about Dunkin’ Donuts, it was reported the coffee and doughnut chain also had finished streamlining its supply chain, putting four regional suppliers under one group named National DCP to further cut costs in its nearly 7,000 stores.
But it will not go after its quality--in either coffee or doughnuts. A simple one-two strategy they’ve stuck with thru thick and thin throughout the spiffy decades of the Sunbelt.
That’s bad news for Starbucks, its chief rival. Dunkin’ Donuts controls roughly 23 % of the country’s coffee and snack shop market, the Los Angeles-based IBIS World reported in the CNN story; Starbucks, with 11,000 stores just in the U.S. alone, controls a whopping 32.6 %. But the clash of the titans is gearing up.
Starbucks (clinging to its elitist image as above the crowd, has hedged on actually making doughnuts in its fine stores. Instead it’s partnered with fellow Seattle company Top Pot, a boutique doughnut maker, to market a “hand-forged" variety. (Hee, hee. Gimme a break! Is that an ad blitz or what?) One of the stories on this initial 2005 launch into doughnuts can be found here on Starbucks Gossip.
Initially planned for just the Seattle market, the old idea that was put into a new trendy package quickly blossomed into other states as well; and now Starbucks is busy expanding Top Pot marketing into all of its 50-state stores, seattlepi reports.
But how is that going to take a bite out of Dunkin’s “fresh-made daily” doughnuts? The logic won’t wash in Johnson County, I don’t think. Not from someone who use to stand stuttering late into the evenings on darkened front porches trying to sell his last sack of “f-f-fresh-made” doughnuts.
Dunkin’ Donuts has three stores just in Cleburne alone. In the surrounding Johnson County communities there are at least nine more--one each in Keene, Alvarado, Grandview, Rio Vista, Joshua, Godley (of all places); and three more in Burleson.
Hee, hee. Johnson County may be one of the very few suburban counties in Texas with more doughnut shops than strip joints. In the decades following my growing-up years there, developing my ol’ philosophy as a radical capitalist critic, I’ve often thought of that. And how it affected me. Instead of reading tea leaves, can we read doughnuts?
There’s some vacant land a couple of blocks from my house on a major artery here in El Paso. I’m writing the company to get on with it; put a store there. I’ll help with a publicity campaign startup. Hell, I ain’t got but 3-4 teeth left from eating doughnuts all my life anyway; might as well let ‘em go out with a splurge!
I’ll eat doughnuts daily to this new venture! On my walks to lose weight. Hee, hee. We having fun yet?!
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