Krispy Kreme strikes deal with kid who drives 250 miles to resell its doughnuts | Hacker News Reader

Krispy Kreme strikes deal with kid who drives 250 miles to resell its doughnuts

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37 pointsmonsieurpng61 comments

I 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.

I 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.

they probably don't want to deal with the supply chain logistics of supplying a single store in the state.

This 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.

Article for those of us in Europe.

https://outline.com/CaUjCw

Just what I needed, Thanks!

All this really shows is that public pressure can affect a company's policy choices.

I 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.

In 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.

Unfortunately 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_...

I 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.

"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.

Another indictment of our bizarre, inequitable society masquerading as a feel-good story.

Yeah 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.

Are 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?

He'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.

> terrible situations

Not being able to get your preferred doughnut?

No, cutting that guy's source of income.

what? 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.

So what is this file that contains complaints both about doughnut preferences, and also sickness and financial ruin? Must be a pretty broad file.

The file is "heartwarming stories celebrating Americans solving uniquely American problems."

Nah, this is an instance of someone seeing a business opportunity and exploiting it.

Although that kid should try out renting a bigger car.

He should rent a truck, and hire some friends to distribute.

This is a story about a college student with a part-time job.

Is 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.

In 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...

I 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.

I would argue that still happens though when a product becomes ubiquitous.

Read: "Don't say Velcro" campaign

They are giving him 500 dozen donuts. He is charging up to $20 per a dozen. That is $10k right there!

I'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.

When 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.

The real pros know that Blue Star makes the superior fried pastry, just sayin' ;-)

They just wanted a cut of the sales. I doubt he is making 10 bucks a dozen anymore

If he bought them and resold them, don't they already get a cut since he has to buy them in the first place?

He never was if you count gas

"Shut down operations"...or what?

By 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.

I was not mature at 21. Maybe I wasn't a kid, but I certainly didn't act like an adult.

> 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.

Sure, 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?”

I'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....

Why 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

1) handling of food usually has laws attached

2) using the Krispy Kreme name

Because apparently no other bakeries existed locally and produced donuts.

It’s dough and sugar, the name on the box is meaningless.

> It’s dough and sugar, the name on the box is meaningless.

Agreed. This is why I don't bother with CPUs from Intel or AMD. I just pour sand onto my motherboard.

Clearly his clients believe otherwise, else he wouldn’t have a market

Do 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.

It's Dunkin now. They too hip and trendy for donuts, you pleb. Forget that Dunkin got started by providing working class people garbage coffee with warm donuts. It's all upscale now and they don't need no donuts, or Onion bagels.

Edit: Pepsi and Coke taste worlds different. I don't prefer either but they do have massively different flavor profiles.

There is a vast difference in the style of doughnut between a regular glazed krispy kreme and a glazed dunkin. It is a big enough difference that they almost don't seem like the same product. Not saying one is automatically a lot better, but people have really strong preferences that make sense given the difference in style.

If you show me someone who buys coke at twice the price because they don’t like Pepsi I’ll show you a fucking moron.

Hey, could you please review the site guidelines and stick to them when posting here? We're trying for a bit better than internet default.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

People routinely buy Pepsi|Coke at twice the price of off-brands and I wouldn't call them moronic.

You mean the price of Coke and Pepsi vs Big Shot cola?

I would prefer buying nothing at all vs dunkin donuts. I guess I would pay double for Krispy Kreme because to me we are talking about something I want vs something I never want even for free(Dunkin).

I won't pay twice the price (disregarding that the restaurant price is probably already twice the price of getting it at Costco), but I may just grab a water.

FWIW I think fountain soda costs less than $0.25 a serving, the restaurant markup on soda is way bigger than most people realize

You 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!

you would do well to research the power of branding :^)

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