I’m a firm believer in Dunkin’ Donuts.  I love their hot coffee, I love their iced coffee, I love their bacon, egg and cheese breakfast sandwiches and I LOVE their dunkaccinos.  There are SIX DD’s within a mile of my aparment and I am very happy about this.  For the longest time, I truly believed that America really did run on Dunkin.  But when I came to grad school and met kids from across the country I realized that, as it turns out, there are a lot of people that don’t “Run on Dunkin.”  Heck, they don’t even drink it let alone run on it.  I was shocked.  How can you NOT love Dunkin’ Donuts when they have a commercial like this:

Growing up in East Lyme, there was no Starbucks (we got our first one about two years ago).  It was only small mom and pop cafes/bakeries and Dunkin Donuts.  When I went to the University of Connecticut for undergrad, it was the same scene – most people I knew went to Dunkin’ Donuts.  We did DD runs every Sunday morning before recapping our weekends, before sitting down to cram for every exam and before every early morning class.  There was a Starbucks on campus, but I think I might have gone once in my entire four years.  So imagine my surprise when a look of pure disgust ran across the face of a friend of mine at the mention of this coffee chain (she’s from Michigan).  She turned to me and said, “No one from the midwest or the west coast likes Dunkin’ Donuts.  America runs on Dunkin’? Puh-lease.”  Another classmate hailing from the great state of Missouri confirmed.  I couldn’t believe it.

Had I been so closed off from the rest of the country, had so little interaction with those not from the East Coast, that I didn’t even know that brand as huge as Dunkin’ Donuts wasn’t liked everywhere? The thought hadn’t even occured to me.  I guess it wasn’t so much the idea that my friends didn’t like Dunkin’ Donuts as much as the fact that I now felt like I knew so little about that other half of the United States.  Looking back on it, until coming to graduate school, I had had little to no interaction with people from anywhere else in the U.S. other than New England.  Sure I’ve been on vacations in Florida and California, but even at UConn, most people were from the Northeast.  I was shocked to realize that I knew so little of my own American culture.  I’d travelled to Greece, Switzerland, Spain, Kenya even, and yet, I barely even knew what my country was about.

It’s not a big deal really, them not liking Dunkin’ Donuts.  It was more the fact that I didn’t even know that America didn’t run on Dunkin’.  I’d spent so much time in school learning how to not be ethnocentric and how to be open-minded to other cultures and other countries.  It’s funny that while schools try so hard to teach you about foreign cultures, they forget to teach you about your own culture.  It’s like we learn how American began and how its being run, but we don’t really ever learn about the culture.  I wish I had been able to learn more about my own country, so that I wasn’t so dumbfounded when silly Dunkin’ Donuts wasn’t as popular as I thought.

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