A Dunkin’ Donuts! In Indy! Don’t they know this is Krispy Kreme country? Actually, the south is the die-hard Krispy Kreme territory and Indiana is more like a border state. I sense a turf war coming on. I hope I don’t get caught in the crossfire when donut shop employees start shooting donut holes at one another. Dunkin’ Donuts is mostly a northeastern and mid-Atlantic food chain. When I visited Boston last year there seemed to be one on every corner. It reminded me of the movie Demolition Man where in the future all restaurants are Taco Bell. In Boston all restaurants are Dunkin’ Donuts. According to Inside Indiana Business, Dunkin’ Donuts plans to open 80 new stores in the Indianapolis area in the next 6 years. The first two opened in September and they even donated money to the Special Olympics at the opening to make people like them.

There are only a couple Krispy Kremes in Indianapolis and none of them are near me. However, the local Kroger sells boxes of them, usually located near the front of the store in an evil marketing campaign to get people to break their diets (which worked rather well back in 2004 when I fell off the wagon.) I don’t think I’ve eaten any Dunkin’ Donuts recently, nor do I have any plans to, so I don’t know whose product is actually superior. I do have several childhood memories associated with Krispy Kreme though. We’d eat them before quick recall tournaments. It was fun driving by a store and seeing the light turned on to indicate donuts were fresh and hot out of the oven. Krispy Kreme glazed donuts are best eaten hot. Once when I was waiting in a long drive-through line with a friend they actually gave us free donuts to apologize for the wait. So, even though I don’t really eat donuts much anymore, my loyalty is with Krispy Kreme.

The interesting thing is that according to an article originally published by The Boston Globe, Dunkin Donuts is a “coffee company disguised as a doughnut company. Fifty percent of their sales come from coffee, whereas Krispy Kreme does 90% of its sales in donuts. I guess you do need something to dunk your donut in if your store is called Dunkin Donuts. Starbucks is one of their main competitors, which is funny since a Starbucks just opened on my way to work. It’s screwed up my traffic pattern since people now pull out of the parking lot directly at the point in the right lane where I usually merge into it. There was already one Starbucks on the way to work, but somebody got shot in their parking lot the other month. Be careful, you want the drive-through not a drive-by. Thankfully, I don’t like coffee, otherwise I might think the makers of full-fat lattes were stalking me. It’s harder to avoid tasty foods when they start plopping them down right there on your daily travel routes.

There is also a White Castle on the way home from work, which they tore down and rebuilt recently. There is a time in my life when the two-month disappearance of small, square burgers would have been devastating to me. If I had never lost weight, I’m sure I would have been stopping at that conveniently placed fast-food restaurant all the time. Thankfully, I learned how to cook and I’m not dependent on my ability to roll down a window to get a meal, so I was completely unaffected by its demolition and reappearance. I think the appearance of these 80 Dunkin’ Donuts will similarly have little affect on me. It’ll be just one more place to drive by without driving through. And hopefully no one will get shot there, with bullets or donut holes.