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Krispy Kreme strikes deal with kid who drives 250 miles to resell its doughnuts
- arthurfm 7y agoArticle for those of us in Europe. https://outline.com/CaUjCw https://outline.com/CaUjCw
- dagdesheren 7y agoJust what I needed, Thanks!
- webwielder2 7y agoAnother indictment of our bizarre, inequitable society masquerading as a feel-good story.
- mikepurvis 7y agoYeah seriously. Drop this garbage in the same file with all those stories about communities who came together to cover someone's insane medical bills or outrageous legal defense.
- chrisseaton 7y agoAre you being sarcastic? Or are you saying that not having local access to a particular brand of doughnuts is the same hardship and moral travesty as having to pay a crippling medical bill?
- etrautmann 7y agowhat? The parent wasn't claiming equivalency of the severity of the issue - instead the brokenness of a society that resorts to this flavor of solution or response.
- chrisseaton 7y agoSo what is this file that contains complaints both about doughnut preferences, and also sickness and financial ruin? Must be a pretty broad file.
- mikepurvis 7y agoThe file is "heartwarming stories celebrating Americans solving uniquely American problems."
- cannonedhamster 7y agoHe's saying these feel good stories only exist because of terrible situations to begin with. The company C&Ded him but after public backlash changed that heart. The hospital gave a patient an $800k medical bill after the insurance company refused to put her baby on the insurance but they magically could after publicity. The ability to get publicity and bad press should not be the arbiter of fair treatment, fair treatment should be the norm not the outlier.
- chrisseaton 7y ago> terrible situations Not being able to get your preferred doughnut?
- frandroid 7y agoNo, cutting that guy's source of income.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- asdfman123 7y agoNah, this is an instance of someone seeing a business opportunity and exploiting it. Although that kid should try out renting a bigger car.
- gremlinsinc 7y agoHe should rent a truck, and hire some friends to distribute.
- tptacek 7y agoThis is a story about a college student with a part-time job.
- mcherm 7y agoAll this really shows is that public pressure can affect a company's policy choices.
- grenoire 7y agoI am just bothered by the idea that the common folk have to explicitly police these corporations to do the right thing. This kind of justice allows people to risk bad policies just because they might, on the off-chance, get away.
- rbritton 7y agoI think that's only one aspect of the current arrangement. At one of the extremes is the rise of the cancel culture. A subset of people have learned that if they complain loud enough, even in small numbers, corporations will bow to almost any demand. These corporations seem completely devoid of any kind of rational arbiter for such decisions and are purely reactionary.
- Aloha 7y agoIn this case, its us telling the corporation that we don't think they have liability for a guy reselling their product. Liability is used as a boogyman in corporate american to squash all sorts of good and bad ideas.
- socalnate1 7y agoUnfortunately it's a very real boogeyman in the US. "The U.S. has the highest liability costs as a percentage of GDP of the countries surveyed, with liability costs at 2.6 times the average level of the Eurozone economies" https://www.instituteforlegalreform.com/uploads/sites/1/ILR_NERA_Study_International_Liability_Costs-update.pdf https://www.instituteforlegalreform.com/uploads/sites/1/ILR_...
- asdfman123 7y ago"Today, we reached out to Jayson to express our appreciation for good PR and admiration for not getting bad PR," a spokeswoman for Krispy Kreme tells CNN regarding their recent total 180.
- stephenr 7y agoBecause apparently no other bakeries existed locally and produced donuts. It’s dough and sugar, the name on the box is meaningless.
- xanamander 7y agoClearly his clients believe otherwise, else he wouldn’t have a market
- skyyler 7y agoyou would do well to research the power of branding :^)
- benbristow 7y agoYou could say the same thing about any chain. "Because apparently no other burger restaurants existed locally and produced burgers". They do taste pretty good do Krispy Kremes!
- pfisch 7y agoDo pepsi and coke taste the same? Are all soft drinks interchangable? I don't really care about this, but Krispy Kreme donuts taste much better than Dunkin Donuts.
- stephenr 7y agoIf you show me someone who buys coke at twice the price because they don’t like Pepsi I’ll show you a fucking moron.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jamesmishra 7y agoI grew up in Minnesota, and Krispy Kreme was legendary while they had stores here. Schools and workplaces would commonly bring in hot, freshly-baked donuts to motivate students and employees. And then Krispy Kreme left the state. After that, it became common for university students to do fundraisers where they drive to the nearest out-of-state Krispy Kreme to fulfill orders. Of course, now the donuts are not hot after the 250-mile drive, but the brand is still very powerful. I just don't understand why Krispy Kreme doesn't open just ONE store in Minneapolis. Maybe we don't have the demand to fulfill one hundred stores, but only having one store would be clearly profitable.
- scrumbledober 7y agothey probably don't want to deal with the supply chain logistics of supplying a single store in the state.
- disillusioned 7y agoThis is the sort of calculus that's prevented White Castle from expanding westward for so long. They just last week opened their first family-owned location west of the Mississippi, in Scottsdale, and they claimed they were only comfortable doing that because the two franchised locations in Vegas had forced their supply chain hand enough that they would be able to piggy back off of that.
- cvhashim 7y agoI also recall my parents grabbing these from the local cub foods for us but I guess Cub stopped selling Krispy Kreme at the turn of the decade. Anyway that kid is gonna get easy money if he has a monopoly on the entire state. Btw just realized I follow you on twitter, always interesting to see your thoughts and tweets.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pkaye 7y agoThey are giving him 500 dozen donuts. He is charging up to $20 per a dozen. That is $10k right there!
- ChrisSD 7y agoBy 21 years old I think you're no longer a "kid". In any case it seems like he needed the money to pay for college so he ran a side hustle. The only thing that's remarkable here is, when found out, he used social media to turn it into a PR issue which in turn forced Krispy Kreme to deal with it on PR terms rather than legal ones.
- PopeDotNinja 7y agoI was not mature at 21. Maybe I wasn't a kid, but I certainly didn't act like an adult.
- adim86 7y agoWhy criminal terms? He did nothing wrong, he decided to serve a market the abandoned and it is not a crime for him charging more than Krispy Kreme does due to his value add (Transportation). yes but his use of social media, forced Krispy Kreme to react publicly
- ChrisSD 7y ago1) handling of food usually has laws attached 2) using the Krispy Kreme name
- Pfhreak 7y ago> By 21 years old I think you're no longer a "kid". Neurological development continues well into your twenties. I don't know what it means to be a 'kid', but someone in college seems like kid could still be reasonable depending on context.
- gremlinsinc 7y agoI'm nearly 40.. I have a 2 year old and a 9 month old. I still feel like I'm a kid sometimes. I def. make stupid decisions. But to a 16 year old I'll always be old, and 80's music is now classic rock and oldies....
- chomp 7y agoSure, but I don’t think this publication was thinking about that. Call me jaded, but I feel like they were more thinking “hey can we call him a kid to get more page impressions?”
- downwithkamdar 7y agoThey just wanted a cut of the sales. I doubt he is making 10 bucks a dozen anymore
- umvi 7y agoIs it just me or is Krispy Kreme really trigger happy with its lawyers? I only have two points of data - this and Froggy Fresh. But still, are there any companies out that that don't care to fire off petty lawsuits when people use their name or resell their product at small scales? Like, if I made a unicorn called "Hukino" and then 10 years later some YouTuber used that as his rapper name or some college students made "HukinoOS" or someone started reselling my widgets in the arctic... would it kill my company if I just ignored them? Is there a precedent of a company not aggressively protecting its IP getting screwed over? I'm just trying to imagine a world where companies like Nintendo don't instantly axe projects like Chrono Resurrection/Pokemon Uranium/AM2R/etc. because that's the kind of world I want to live in.
- chowells 7y agoI mean, there are the famous cases of Xerox and Kleenex. They're what led to the current situation. I can't think of any more recent examples, though. Probably because of lawyers trained on those results.
- umvi 7y agoI would argue that still happens though when a product becomes ubiquitous. Read: "Don't say Velcro" campaign
- frandroid 7y agoIn your case, it would be a problem because you need to defend your copyright in order to keep ownership of it. But in this case, the guy isn't making a different product with the same name, he's just reselling the bloody product. So this has nothing with trademark protection, just their "quality standard", as if people buying the donuts from his trunk didn't know that they spent 4 hours in his car before getting there...
- andonisus 7y ago"Shut down operations"...or what? <Laughs in First Sale Doctrine>
- zwieback 7y agoI'm happy for the kid and surprised KK didn't see the backlash coming but there's also something that makes me a little uneasy about this. Deciding not to sell in a market seems like a totally reasonable decision and it seems just a little too easy to exploit social media blowback for individual profit.
- IronWolve 7y agoWhen I go to Portland, my friends bug me to get some voodoo doughnuts. Its a common thing in Seattle to portland trips to pick some up for people.
- lwhalen 7y agoThe real pros know that Blue Star makes the superior fried pastry, just sayin' ;-)