Is the Dunkin’ Donuts® Valentine’s Day Donut the solution to all emptiness and loneliness that we feel in the modern day?
In our modern consumerist society, we are bombarded with constant encouragement to purchase every variety of product imaginable. This is especially true when it comes to love and relationships. Want to impress your date? Pay. Want to express your love to your significant other? Buy them things. Want to spend the rest of your life with someone? Spend thousands on a ring. But everything we buy has an inherent emptiness. This is exemplified perfectly in a donut, the beloved confectionary treat whose very center, soul, and substance is inexplicably absent, with a glaring hole left in their place.
The Dunkin’ Donuts® Valentine’s Day Donut, however, is whole, holeless, and in the shape of a heart, the very symbol of love. Where an average donut leaves us feeling empty and incomplete, the Valentine’s Day Donut is “filled with delicious Bavarian Kreme and topped with strawberry-flavored icing and red and pink sprinkles”. Yummy!~ Just as that special person completes you and replaces all the meaningless treacle that society offers you, the Valentine’s Day Donut presents the substance that all other confections have been lacking.
This cycle of buying the products that are thrown at us, hoping they’ll complete us, and coming to find they lack any meaningful substance repeats time and time again. We approach our relationships through the angle of CONSUME , expressing our care to our loved ones through BUYING , rather than through acts of love, and when these gestures end up feeling vapid and empty, we’re left feeling so empty that we are urged to repeat the process. The perfect circular donuts, produced by machines, thoughtlessly, by the thousands in mere seconds, exemplify this process. They loop eternally, with no end in sight; no escape from the cycle. The Valentine’s Day Donut, however, does away with the same played out round shape, and offers a route to finally feeling whole, with a heart as full of love as the heart-shaped Valentine’s Day Donut is full of Bavarian Kreme.
But don’t take my word for it. Let’s see what some locals had to say about the Dunkin’ Donuts® Valentine’s Day Donut. “No, sorry. We sold out this morning,” said one Dunkin’ Donuts® Employee. Wow. The Valentine’s Day Donut has moved so many people that the hard-working employees simply can’t produce them fast enough to satisfy the adoring crowds. I am immeasurably disappointed that I wasn’t able to experience the overwhelming emotional experience that is sweeping over America, but my heart is truly warmed by the fact that so many people have.
