dunkindonuts.org was a "gripe"
website
A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google Search, Google, Facebook, Amaz ...
operated for two years by David Felton, a 25-year-old school teacher from
Hamden, Connecticut
Hamden is a town in New Haven County, Connecticut, United States. The town's nickname is "The Land of the Sleeping Giant". The population was 61,169 at the 2020 census.
History
The peaceful tribe of Quinnipiacs were the first residents of the ...
.
Felton founded the site in 1997 after he discovered that
Dunkin' Donuts
Dunkin' Donuts LLC, also known as Dunkin' and by the initials DD, is an American multinational coffee and doughnut company, as well as a quick service restaurant. It was founded by Bill Rosenberg (1916–2002) in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 195 ...
coffee
Coffee is a drink prepared from roasted coffee beans. Darkly colored, bitter, and slightly acidic, coffee has a stimulant, stimulating effect on humans, primarily due to its caffeine content. It is the most popular hot drink in the world.
S ...
stores in
Hartford, Connecticut
Hartford is the capital city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. It was the seat of Hartford County until Connecticut disbanded county government in 1960. It is the core city in the Greater Hartford metropolitan area. Census estimates since the ...
did not carry certain items, such as 1% milk.
The site was established as a hotbed for complaints, inviting Dunkin' Donuts customers and disgruntled employees to vent their opinions about the company and its service for the world to see.
Its comment form logged troves of messages from customers across the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
. Media coverage put dunkindonuts.org in the national spotlight as one early example of corporate criticism on the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
. The
.org
The domain name .org is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) of the Domain Name System (DNS) used on the Internet. The name is truncated from ''organization''. It was one of the original domains established in 1985, and has been operated by th ...
site was sometimes listed on search engines before the company's own website.
Corporate response and demise of site
Dunkin' Donuts responded to some complaints in a constructive manner, adding missing items to its menu
[ and sending coupons via e-mail to customers who had complained on the .org site.
In July 1998, Dunkin' Donuts sent a ]cease and desist
A cease and desist letter is a document sent to an individual or business to stop alleged illegal activity. The phrase "cease and desist" is a legal doublet, made up of two near-synonyms. The letter may warn that, if the recipient does not dis ...
letter to Felton, to which he responded by telling them to purchase the site from him.
See also
*Consumer complaint
A consumer complaint or customer complaint is "an expression of dissatisfaction on a consumer's behalf to a responsible party" (London, 1980). It can also be described in a positive sense as a report from a consumer providing documentation about ...
References
{{Reflist
External links
Early capture of the front page
(no complaint content intact)
Defunct websites
Criticisms of companies
Internet properties established in 1997