18 January 05

Dunkin’ Donuts girls

One of the added bonuses of spending so much of last weekend travelling by car was that I learned, via my math teacher birding friend, what is considered cool among teenagers in Massachusetts these days.

There are the obvious things—iPods, for instance, the newer and snazzier the better. He’s given up trying to regulate cellphone use in last period (it’s illegal to use your cellphone in class) and instead starts off telling everyone to check their messages now before the end of school so they can get the scoop on what’s happening afterwards—which siblings to pick up, where their parents are going to be. (They all have cars and they all drive them to work, which makes for interesting town hall meetings when a new $300,000 parking lot for the high school is being discussed; riding the bus is, you guessed, not cool.)

And then: there’s the distinction between Starbucks girls and Dunkin’ Donuts girls.

Teenage girls apparently all show up to school looking like their mothers these days, which is to say they’re holding the obligatory cup of coffee complete with handprotector and plastic lid. Coffee at Dunkin Donuts makes sense: it’s good, it’s cheap, it’s easy to park, and there’s no line.

But of course it’s not cool.

So the girls aspiring to coolness at Andover High have to get up earlier in order to park, stand in line for ages, and get their exorbitant latte, so that when the question gets asked “is she a Starbucks girl or a Dunkin Donuts girl?”, they will come out on the right side of a divide whose significance is known only to their peers and that will one day, soon if they’re lucky and way longer if they’re not, come to seem as absurd as it does to old farts like me who don’t like coffee, least of all the overpriced gunk that pours forth from Starbucks.

Posted by at 06:52 PM in Miscellaneous | Link |

  1. So what I don’t get is: Why is it so cool to stand in line?

    Because the lack of a line at DD is because, well, they’re not besieged by the girls trying to be cool.

    Whenever I see a line of people huddled in the rain—not to vote or get soup, but to get into a NIGHTCLUB—I think, “This is why I’ll never fit in. I wouldn’t do that to be cool …”

    — Jarrett    18. January 2005, 19:19    Link
  2. Ahhhh yes: DD. I wonder whether Starbucks has replaced it in the standard Boston method of giving directions—you know, “Go up theah [MassAve, CommAve] to the first Dunkin Donuts, turn right, go down two more Dunkin Donutses, hang a left, and it’s right theah, across from the Dunkin Donuts.”

    Too bad so few kidz ever figure out that the coolest way to be cool is not to care whether you’re cool or not. And what are they all doing, drinking coffee while they’re still growing? We weren’t allowed!

    — Doc Rock    19. January 2005, 06:23    Link
  3. I know this little topic has been done to death elsewhere, but I find it truly frightening how children / teenagers (hell – people) these days are taught that their identities depend on what they buy. We define ourselves by our purchases. There’s something twisted about the notion of shopping / purchasing as expression.

    I don’t know. Again, there’s nothing new about this. It’s just that the belief seems to escalate, and to become more and more entrenched, as time goes on. J Crew or Abercrombie was bad enough – one could at least make the argument that one’s clothes are expressive – but DD or SBs? It’s tragic.

    — Siona    19. January 2005, 11:11    Link
  4. Yeah…we all know where this leads. Siona’s right, it IS tragic.

    — beth    19. January 2005, 15:32    Link
  5. Heh. My first thought was to go to Starbucks once, get a refillable mug, and ever after fill it up with cheapo stuff. The second thought was to just use some random quirky mug, and damn the consequences. (If I drank coffee in the first place, and if I cared, which I don’t, in the second, and if I had had that level of self-confidence in high school, which I didn’t, in the third.)

    But yeah, I’ve long had issues with those who confuse style with substance. There’s nothing wrong with style on its own, but it’s not a good substitute for something more substantial and lasting.

    — Rana    19. January 2005, 15:45    Link
  6. When I was a junior in high school (in south Texas, about fifteen years ago) I was in AP Biology, which three days a week began at 7:30am instead of 8am to give us time for longer labwork. On those days, the bio prof usually made tea in a beaker over a Bunsen burner, and usually had donut-holes or cookies on-hand as well. To me, that lab breakfast—Bunsen burner tea in a geeky science-motto mug—was the coolest thing imaginable, because it made me feel like a real scientist.

    I guess that makes me profoundly uncool by the standards of the high school elite, but honestly? I’ll take my brand of cool over theirs any day. *g*

    — Rachel    20. January 2005, 08:05    Link
  7. what siona said. exactly.

    my daughter loves mochas, but we get ‘em from the radical coffee place with a drive-thru. does that mean she’s going to end up labeled goth? :-)


    — susurra    25. January 2005, 08:31    Link

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