This story is full of donut holes

October 30, 2022 11:14 AM

A Dunkin’ occasionally doubles my order and then gives me a 50% discount. Why?

A woman I presume to be the owner / manager at my local Dunkin’ will always double whatever I order and then apply a 50% discount. It winds up being the same charge to me in the end and she hands me my receipt which clearly shows what she did so I doubt she’s trying to scam me. I think there’s something fishy going on but I can’t figure out what it is. Is she just trying to make it look like they’re selling more items than they really are? Or is something else going on here? I get what I originally order and I'm not a member of their loyalty program.

posted by Diskeater to Human Relations (14 answers total)

Are you a very regular customer? She may just know your face, know you're not in their loyalty card, but want to keep you coming back or even spreading the word that you might get double donuts if you go there. If you lived in my town and told me, I'd go check it out :)
posted by SaltySalticid at 11:26 AM on October 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

Maybe she is giving you donuts that are reaching the end of their shelf lives and would otherwise be thrown out.
posted by Stuka at 11:28 AM on October 30, 2022 [3 favorites]

Diskeater said she’s not giving them the extra food/drink.
It sounds to me like she’s trying to make the store’s food loss/shrink numbers look better.
posted by ZabeLeeZoo at 11:35 AM on October 30, 2022 [11 favorites]

My guess is that their point of sale system double-enters items, and with a single-item order, it’s easier to just apply the 50% discount than to void an item. If your order had four items and they double-entered one of the four, they’d probably void the bad one - most Dunkin employees’ math skills probably aren’t good enough to determine what percentage $1.59 is of $6.73 - but for a single item (guessing it’s coffee) it’s probably not worth the effort to go through the void process.
posted by kevinbelt at 11:48 AM on October 30, 2022

Response by poster: Yep, I get what I ordered. If I order two breakfast sandwiches and one coffee the receipt will show four sandwiches and two coffees minus a 50% discount but I will get two sandwiches and one coffee.

This is also definitely not a mistake or if it is she's made the mistake a dozen or so times.

Stealth edit: This ONLY happens with this woman. If anyone else is at the register the order is entered and charged correctly.
posted by Diskeater at 11:48 AM on October 30, 2022

And you don't get the double order right? You just get what you ordered?
posted by Carillon at 11:58 AM on October 30, 2022

AOV (average order value) is something that retailers and restaurants are constantly looking at (does the average customer spend $3 at your store, or $15? The Dunkins with a $15 AOV looks like a much more successful store).

I suspect that for whatever reason the discounts that are issued at the register aren't subtracted from the order data (or maybe they are, but she doesn't realize that -- how long has this been going on?). So I don't think she's committing financial malfeasance as much as she is inflating her store metrics. As owner/manager she may get cash bonuses based on her store's success which does sort of tilt this toward financial malfeasance, but the target/victim is the corporation, not the customer. If there are no cash bonuses (etc) involved it may not be illegal but it's definitely shady and certainly against corporate rules.
posted by kate blank at 12:06 PM on October 30, 2022 [4 favorites]

I agree that this sounds like it's trying to hit some corporate metric. The managers at a retail store I worked at would do weird things like that when they were on registers to make up for the rest of us not trying hard to enough with campaigns that irritated the customers. So here maybe someone has decreed from on high that they're all supposed to be encouraging customers to double their orders–"such an easy upsell! they're already getting one donut, why not two??"–but of course the average cashier would much rather just move you along without the extra hassle. The store's percentage of double-upsell orders is therefore abysmal, but only management has that percentage actually tied to anything that matters to them (usually punitive for failing, rather than a bonus for success), so they alternate between begging the workers to actually comply and pushing through faked transactions that look good to the algorithm analyzing the data.
posted by teremala at 12:16 PM on October 30, 2022 [17 favorites]

It could also be they are giving left over donuts to the homeless/staff/food banks and this shady accounting is a way to make corporate pay for them instead of the local franchise owner. The cost of food items like these are 90% overhead, the ingredients will cost a few cents so whatever they are up to, it's not worth losing any sleep over.
posted by Lanark at 12:26 PM on October 30, 2022 [4 favorites]

Are you paying with a card? This could be the coverup for a scam where when other customers pay with cash, she cancels the orders rather than ring them through, and then pockets the cash. Just giving the items away for free will eventually be discovered (or at least questioned) when reconciling inventory vs sales, but if she were also "selling" them to you, that would compensate for the items that the computer thinks should be in inventory. This would be a dumb way to run this scam, long-term, but if management isn't paying attention to discounts and only to inventory, you might get away with it.
posted by yuwtze at 4:28 PM on October 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

All Dunkin's are franchised -- i.e., there isn't really a "corporate" that owns the shop or pays for anything. "Corporate" Dunkin just collects royalties, it doesn't pay for anything in the store. So, if it is some kind of scam, it is probably a scam of the manager against the franchisee owner. Something like what yuwtze suggests - i.e., selling stuff for cash on the side and then trying to rebalance the inventory with fake sales. Or maybe hitting some kind of goal for quantity of products sold per shift.
posted by Mid at 4:39 PM on October 30, 2022

Is it possible she is laundering money? I vaguely remember Walter White's wife ringing up fake orders in the car wash.
posted by CathyG at 8:12 PM on October 30, 2022

There could be all sorts of reasons. Most of them involve fiddling the books (for head office, for franchise, for tax, who knows?). I would file that place under “flaky” and tend to other places
posted by tillsbury at 10:37 PM on November 2, 2022

Why don't you ask why she does it?
posted by oneirodynia at 2:33 PM on November 3, 2022 [2 favorites]