You gotta wonder what lead up to the creation of this sign at a Dunkin Donuts in Bushwick (a DMZ-esque area of Brooklyn being penetrated by the forces of gentrification) covering every possible angle of not giving you a cup of ice water. Maybe there were even previous versions of the sign that had to keep being tweaked as people kept coming in asking for a vessel of chilled H20. How might that encounter have gone? Let’s take a peek inside The Consumerist Miniature Theater Machine:
“Can I have some ice water?”
“No ice water, read the sign.”
“Ok then, how about an empty cup?”
“No.”
“Why not, it’s not on the sign?”
“Get out! I call cops!”
“I’m coming back with my boxcutter, just as soon as my friend is done using it to hold up struggling musicians.”
Door slams.
“Damn, we need to make a more comprehensive sign.”
Annnd scene. Hey, at least they’re celebrating earth day by reusing the buy 6 donuts get 6 free signs.
Free H20 In Any State, Won’t Be Served At Dunkin’ Donuts [ANIMAL]
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Okay, I can understand that a business should have every right to refuse to serve someone, and refuse to server something. Since we live in a capitalist nation, businesses are at their own discretion to the conduct which they hold themselves, as long as they stay within a certain boundary.
Here’s my point: It’s some water. Seriously, just water. It may “cost” them something, but its still only water.
Now, if you were a business owner, would you refuse to serve someone water? If you were a customer, would you expect them to serve yourself?
It’s not smart business, its caring for another human being, something we have forgotten about. We don’t NEED to share, but we live in a society and we can only function as well as the people within it.
i had a summer job at a convenience store (UDF) when i was in high school. i remember the only cups of value were the foam coffee ones, all the paper ones weren’t worth jack shit.
we used to have these plastic ones, that cost a little more but you could bring them back for really cheap refills. the logic is that we can make money off the other stuff they buy if they come back. people would bring their own coffee mugs, plastic cups, and we would only charge .99 cents for any refills, i think we even had free coffee refill mondays.
i dont understand why DD can’t just charge for the cup at cost instead of not offering water anymore. i mean if someone buys stuff from there, it wouldn’t kill them to give out free cup of ice water.
What is up with all the harshness towards “bums & winos?” Didn’t we used to have some fucking empathy? And do not get me started on the grammar issues.
Why should I have any fucking empathy for bums & winos?
They stink and and I’m sick of panhandling. They’ve chosen their lives.
Things would be much more pleasant if they’d lock them up the way they used to.
I’d turn a fire hose on the filthy bastards.
I worked in at a small diner, and the owner was basically eking out a living. He didn’t mind customers drinking water, but he did ask that they pay for the cup. When the profit margin is so thin, he just couldn’t afford not to charge customers for his cost.
@morganlh85: only in arizona. Also in arizona, if some dude shows up on my doorstep and asks for water, I’m required by law to give it to him.
Of course that’s probably a law that has never been tested in court.
@WV.Hillbilly: @xtc46: @ludwigk: @Git Em SteveDave: These are all silly excuses to deny someone a glass of water.
It’s only a matter of time till someone figures out how to charge for the breathable air in their restaurants.
WV.Hillbilly — Your kindness is truly inspirational
I know some of the Dunkin’ Donuts around here have drinking fountains in them, so this would get around the need for any kind of cup. But I think it is a law that if you make a food purchase, free water must be provided on request…but the sign seems to be more directed to freeloaders.
@Asvetic:
a glass of water isn’t a right. It’s a convenience.
@sean77: You took the words out of my mouth
@Shadowman615: Or using a system that supports Compose (OS X or any flavor of Linux/Unix), it’s Compose, c, /: ¢!
(Invaluable for typing in Romance languages…)
There is nothing free for any business…. we pay for everything. What we “pay” for the item is sometimes quit irrelevant as we must judge the total cost of the service or product.
The city requires me to have public toliets. I am industrial supply house in a business park with miminal in-store traffic. WTF do I need with public toliets? But I got them. I also have a sign that says no pubic toliets.
What does it cost me to provide a public toliet? I say $18 per user per event. How do I compute $18? I used the base salary of my janitorial staff, added the appropriate payroll taxes, benefits and overhead charges for 1 hour of work. Why 1 hour? ‘Cause I had to pay a janitor for an hour of work to clean up the fecal mess left behind by a bum with poor anal control.
The no public restroom policy went into effect the very same day.
Of course if your 3-year old has to go tinkle and the McD’s across the way has busy restrooms, by all means you may use my public restroom. A car load of teenagers? Nope, go visit McD’s.
I have soft drink station. It is a “free” benefit for employees. Cups, concentrate, CO2, ice, janitorial service to clean up the stations and handle the trash. I figure it costs me $1.12 per employee per day to operate the drink service.
I could have a dispensing service that sold sodas by the can or bottle, but then I would have to deal with the trash and recycling of plastic bottles or AL cans.
See, nothing is “free”. At least this way the employee can “see” the free benefit because the cost of the beverages don’t come out of the pocket of the employee AND I can reduce the cost of refrigerators to store employee beverages brought from home.
If you are a real customer the drinks are free. For everybody else the drinks cost $3 per serving. That $3 really keeps the bum traffic coming into the store ’cause McD’s has cheaper sodas and bigger cups.
Just a hint for DD. Ice/water/cups are $3 or free with 6 donuts.
Why the hell should an establishment be forced to provide free water?!?!
When I’m out jogging, should it be required that the DD on my way home provides me with water if I ask for it?
Sure, they may do it as part of customer service, but to be FORECED to do it? Absolutely rediculous…
Aaah, I wish I’d had been allowed to make a sign like that when I worked food service. We were forbidden to give away cups for water. If you wanted water there, buy a pop and fill it with water instead. Franchises have to penny-pinch to turn a profit or survive sometimes.
And yet people still would honestly go “Then can I have a cup for ice?” if they couldn’t have a cup for water.
It kind of made my brain bleed.
It’s their business, they can do what they want. It’s crappy customer service, but it *is* a private business.
Of course, if they were in Arizona, the manager could actually get arrested for putting out a sign like that, due to a state law there regarding requests for glasses of water…
no donuts get bought here
no donuts
no dunkin
no donuts
f$#@ dunkin donuts and their no free h2o
even your enemy will give you freakin h2o
this is ridiculous
dunkin donuts bites ballz
@smirky:
Can two girls share one cup?
Actually I do remember one place that not only gave away free ice water, but advertised that fact on billboards for at least 1500+ miles:
[www.walldrug.com]
We’re required in Texas to offer free water to people as well.
Sometimes, we’re too busy to deal with running to the sink and give them a bottled water for free instead(I work in a bar).
When you pay $4 for 30 bottles of water and charge $1 each, you’re making a ridiculous profit anyway.
These guys just need a water fountain.
I have no problem with a business not giving away free cups or ice. But whats with the quotes?
Its water, not “water”.
@Asvetic: @loueloui: “excuse”? It’s the TRUTH. I didn’t get reamed out by my boss b/c he lost a few bucks. This was a thousand cup or so crate, and it cost him a shit load of money. As to your Sonic, I don’t know who owned it, but some franchisers make their money off supplying the franchises w/ their branded merch. If the crate I had screwed up on only cost $100, my boss would have been cool. But it didn’t. As to your assertion that you can just walk in and take soda, no you can’t. I don’t know the exact way to explain it, but as you keep buying more and more cups from the supplier, you get a “premium” or “commission” type break. This reduces the price of the cups a small amount and starts to pay for the soda, which is relatively cheap per unit when done w/ a fountain machine. In the end, you want a large volume so you make a few cents selling each cup of soda, and when you multiply that by hundreds of cups, if adds up, albeit slowly.
This is not about “denying” someone a glass of water. Would you say expecting a place give you free food and drink and them refusing is “denying” you? I will put five dollars on the table that if ten people walked in there tomorrow and asked how much a cup of water is, they would get a price, and the store owner would accept the money and give you the cup. This sign merely lets people know they can’t get a FREE cup of water, and prevents time wasted in telling EVERY person the same.
I’ve got plenty of sympathy for small business owners eking out a living, but a lot of these places that have become total pricks about a glass of water seemed to have stayed afloat before the advent of bottled water. Five years ago, free tap water. Now, $1.29 for tap water in a bottle. Total b.s.
@SkokieGuy: I was at a 5 guys the other day and the manager got into a shouting match with a couple of teens who had asked for “water” and were drinking orange soda instead. They actually tried to convince the manager that it was water!
@Scuba Steve: That’s a low blow on New Yorkers.
I just got back from a business trip to Aberdeen, where the tap water is better than the bottled water is over here in the States. I mean, right now I wish I could have a glass of the tap water at the frigging hotel. Undiluted with the local whisky, even.
And those idiots drink bottled water all the damn time. In a restaurant, you order water, and they ask you, “Still or sparkling?”, and they bring you a bottle unless you SPECIFICALLY ask for tap water. Nuts.
@Git Em SteveDave: Cups don’t cost a dollar a piece. More likely the soda inventory sold during a period is guesstimated by the number of cups used during that period. So if you lose a cup, you are short on your audit whatever the price of the soda that would have filled the cup. Because it’s comparatively easy to tell how many cups have been used during an audit than to take your beginning inventory of syrup (usually a bag in a box) plus your purchases and less your ending inventory.
That’s also why convenience stores have different cups for soda vs. slurpees, or don’t have a universal hot/cold cup for all beverages. Coffee’s easier to count than bags of syrup, so they don’t want that to mix up the numbers.
I do agree that they should be able to charge for a cup of water, say a dime or a quarter per cup,
@Git Em SteveDave:
BULL. There is no way those cups cost a dollar each. These places are franchised, DD corporate buys those cups for pennies. This is just a case of not having to be kind to people and calling it “policy”.
No, I believe I heard Rachael Ray herself say it on the Dunkin’ Donuts TV–
“No ice water,
no empty cup;
No cup of water,
or cup of ice.
Buy six donut,
Yum-O ! EVOO!”
Rachel’s all about them cups.
“Cups provided to customers only. Thank you for your understanding.”
@tawni: If somebody does refuse water, we ‘Zonies would be more than happy to change their mind for them with a 12ga. shotgun.
In the summer months, it gets hot enough around here that some asphalt streets literally melt and soften enough that cars can leave their tread patterns in them.
@Git Em SteveDave:
I can understand your point. I just think your boss is a dick, and he’s lying to you. If you check out this site [www.dollarnights.com] I, you, or anyone else can buy 32 oz. styrofoam cups at retail for $.06 each. These are even better than the flimsy ones they usually give out for free. You can bet he is spending that much or more in advertising per customer.
Fountain beverages are one of the most profitable items in any restaurant or store. Why do you think you can buy a double cheeseburger for $1? Because you want something to drink with that right?
I can only take this to mean one of a few things:
The owner of this Dunkin Donuts just doesn’t give a shit about his customers, and would rather make them pay for something to drink or he has a problem with kids, the homeless, freeloaders, or whoever coming in to ask for water. This is easily remedied by charging a small amount (10-25 cents) to recoup his costs. What about a sign that said ‘water or ice cups 10 cents’ ?
This to me seems to be an ignorant solution, and it’s a problem I have seen with a lot Dunkin Donuts. They seem to be willing to give anyone with a pulse a franchise. Maybe they should spend less on flighty celebrity endorsements, and focus more on customer service.
Yeah, if this is Brooklyn the policy is more for bum control than anything else. Any freebie you can stop giving away will reduce bum traffic – as well as the number of atrocities committed in your rest rooms.
A long time ago when I worked summers at a place that served beverages, we reconciled sales for that day by counting the cups we had left over, versus what we started with at the beginning of the day. We weren’t supposed to give out free cups because our number would be off at the end of the day. Each employee was given one cup a day to use over and over again for their own drinks, and we subtracted those off the total used for that day.
Nowadays when every corner store uses a computer POS (no, not that POS) system, that’s not necessary anymore.
I love it when people who have never worked one day in the Food and Beverage industry reply to these threads. Those paper Pepsi cups, 50 cents each, Starbucks paper cups 75 cents each. If you own a restaurant in a busy area with lots of foot traffic you could quickly find yourself giving away hundreds of dollars a week. Why is the sign written like that, because I hate to point this out to you, but people are assholes. It’s the result of having idiots bug you all day long.
How would you like it if random strangers came in and demanded 50 cents from you 10-20 times a day.
I don’t understand this gimmie something for free attitude people have when it comes to the service industry.
@Rider:
Yeah, it especially sucks because you totally can’t make up those costs with the $0.17 worth of sugar syrup and water that you fill the cup with and charge $2.49 for….
That aside now what the hell am I supposed to pour my 40 of Colt45 into while I loiter in the back of Dunkin?!
No Dunkin Donuts ever has had a soda fountain. Just coolers with juices, milks and sodas.
It would be nice if they provided cups and water for free. But all they really have to do is charge a quarter or fifty cents for the privilege.
I don’t quite get how people here equate a free water with lemon in it from Panera or Starbucks to a Dunkin Donuts…
Yep, Panera and Starbucks– leather seats, cushy chairs, free wi-fi, fireplaces, and upscale sandwiches that cost up to $7.00., Yeh, I better expect a small dixie cup of ice water with lemon.
Dunkins– busy, crowded, sometimes cramped and dirty. Oh yeh, gimme free water. The people who ask for that are lucky they don’t dunk a cup in the toilet and give it to you. And I like Dunkin a lot.
As someone who has operated food concessions I’d like to offer a few insights:
1. Many food concessions keep track of their “shrink” rate by counting cups and comparing it to what was wrung up. If 100 cups are consumed during a shift and only 75 are rung up, you’ve got a problem. Most likely staff members are either comping their friends or pocketing some of the sales. The usual work around is to have a separate type of cup, distinctly different from your saleable cups, for water.
2. Busy city venues usually come complete with their own share of neighborhood “color” (not racist here). These are street people, homeless, mall rats, etc. These are not your customers but loiter in your business driving away your customers. Do you want to be sipping your latte next to the guy with the tinfoil hat who hasn’t bathed in months and is talking to aliens on a broken transitor radio? You are operating a business not a shelter.
3. The cost of freebies adds up. You could easily go through a case of cups in a month ($60), lids ($30), straws, etc. If these are folks who are likely to be customers, then its the cost of doing business. If these are folks who are just leeching from you, then no.
4. If its a busy venue, as I suppose the DD was, they also take your staff away from paying customers or doing what they’re supposed to be doing. This can really add up to one employee a month on your payroll doing non-business related work.
5. I would always give a paying customer water. You buy a coffee and want a glass of water for some meds, no problem. I had an issue with this at a Starbucks at the Mirage in Vegas. I ordered $25 worth of their overpriced drinks and asked for a glass of water to take some pills with and was charged a buck. I told them to keep the rest of the order.
My rule was if you came into my store and were now or before or potentially ever a customer, you’d get the water. If you were a street person or a “mall rat” that was just going to use my cup of ice to chill the drink that you bought at the convenience store across the street, no.
@scoosdad: Actually with a POS system its just as important. You could easily have rung up only 3/4 of what you gave out.
@katylostherart: It doesn’t usually ever go over 100 degrees in Brooklyn. The all time record is 102, and it’s usually low 90′s at its highest.
If someone asks for water, sell them a cup and fill it with water.
I used to live in a real city coffee shop, and often when random people asked for water, they would use it to shoot up in our bathroom stalls or right outside. We didn’t want to encourage that, so we gave water to customers we knew only.
We would also have shady people use the empty cups to go over to our milk and cream jugs and serve themselves a cup of milk. If you’re really thirsty, you can go in the restroom and drink from the tap!
@soulbarn: Thank you. I was reading the comments and yelling the same things. Seriously people, I love my ‘hood, but this DD is in what I like to call the “ghetto strip mall.”
If they gave out free cups, every crackhead in a mile radius would be begging with a DD cup and coming in for water every half hour, scaring off the actual paying customers.
And no, you can’t just have the staff discretely inform them of the policy. You need it in writing, a big sign.
@loueloui: These weren’t plain cups. They were 7-11 branded cups. I saw the manifest later, and saw what the price was(I forget the exact figure now), and also had this explained by one of the others workers to me. Perhaps things have changed, but judging by this article from consumerist on Quiznos [consumerist.com] (read the NYT article, and they mention the restriction franchise owners are binded to, such as buying goods from only ONE retailer at inflated prices)which has a 7-11 owner talking about how bad messing w/ the corp can be and cost.
@moorem2: You are right. D&D gets them for pennies. But since you can’t by the “required” D&D cups at Sams Club or Costco, you have to by them from D&D. How do you think a franchiser makes their money? They make it by selling franchises and the supplies therein.
@MayorBee: True, the cups don’t COST a dollar. But that is how much the franchise owner pays for them. Do you think resturants charge you what their food costs? No, that’s how they make profit. 7-11 sells the cups to the franchise and they make money. The 7-11 sells the cups to you, and they make a small amount of money. The more cups you buy from 7-11, the more of a “break” you get on pricing, which adds a little more profit to each cup you are now selling. Since you can’t sit on the cups, it encourages you to sell as many as you can so you can start to earn money.
Oh my god!
I know that place!
I actually just moved out of Bushwick a few weeks ago, I remember that place, it was right under the JZ El.
It was without a doubt the dirtiest dunkin doughnuts I have ever been in.
I was with my girlfriend once, and we just wanted a cup of ice, and they charged us 50 cents, and gave us a receipt for a “munchkin”
I can see why they did it though — there are at least permanent homeless people living in the station outside.
Also, I am almost certain that it is *illegal* in New York City, for a food service establishment to refuse to give someone tap water on demand.
@Black Bellamy: That made me laugh way too hard.
FYI, I am pretty sure this is a trend the Dunkin Doughnuts in Manhattan also do that.
I get tap water a lot.
When I roam around in the city, I just go into the nearest Starbucks or McDonalds to get ice water for free, and I have never had them give me trouble about it.
What else should I do? Buy bottled water? LOL
@Trai_Dep:
ALT 4 on a mac will do ¢
Interestingly enough ALT 5 is ∞
So if I want water at this particular D&D my only option is overpriced bottled water that most likely came from a municipal water source to begin with and was packaged and produced so some huge corporation could make a fast buck? No thanks.