Soon I hope to do an update on how well my
TomTom 910 GPS performed last
month getting me around California. But tangentially, some donut news, one of my
favorite subjects. We’re getting more
Dunkin’ Donuts nationwide (the
nation of the US, that is). And I’ll even make it TomTom related.
See, when I got my new TomTom, I also got into wanting to use it to locate
nearby merchants. I especially wanted a list of all the Targets. I went looking
for a list to download into it and had no luck. But I did come across
this database
of nearly 5,000 Dunkin’ Donuts locations in the US.
It’s neat. Download the POI list to your TomTom, and then you can search for
the nearest one. I did, from my location in California, and the closest was in
Massachusetts. Sniff.
That wasn’t a shock to me. I
already written how they’d all seemed to have disappeared from Southern
California, where I grew up. But on my next East Coast trip, this is going to be
great. I’ll be able to locate them — or even better, have the DD logo showing
up on the TomTom screen if I’m getting near one when just driving along.
The whole thing make me think that as a retailer, putting out POI databases
of your stores needs to be a new marketing move. Of course, I also discovered
that the TomTom already has a really good database in it that lets you find
these type of places. It worked wonderfully to get me to the local Target or
Toys R Us or whatever. But those places didn’t get to have their logos show up
to alert me beforehand.
I’ll talk more about that in the future. For now, back to the donuts.
Big Fight Brews For Average Joe in the Washington Post coves how Washington
DC and Baltimore are about to get more stores as part of 10,000 that are to
rollout over the next decade. Of course, I’d already posted that Dunking Donuts
was going to do an expansion. Now it really looks to be happening.
But come on — Chicago’s getting more? Chicago already seems to have one on
every street corner, much to my happiness. Show California some of that old time
love we had. Or someone bring in the Tim Hortons. Mmm –
Tim Hortons, yum.
{ 4 comments }
Hmmm… Tim Hortons, indeed. One of the trade-offs of living up North is the multitude of Timmy’s up here.
sweet baby jesus! Yay for TomTom, Jane & the DD!!! woohoo – we’re gonna have fun now:)
i happened to go to chicago a few weekends back (flew into midway) and was surprised by the relatively few in that area of the city- tomtom would have been super to find more along my way to wisconsin.
oh well, we’ll just hit the downtown chicago DD’s in Dec!
Amen to Tim’s. That week in San Jose was horrible – first thing I did when I got back to Manitoba was stop at a Tim’s for my fix!
Echoing thebassman… I think it is one of the great est parts of living in Canada. I was born and raised in the city where Tim Horton was killed (St. Catharines) – at one point it had the most Tim Horton’s per capita. Oh, how I miss having a Tim’s on every corner!
HI, i DOWNLOADED THE zip file but winzip says its not a real zip file, can you help me out, i would really like to have the locations as I am on the raod 5 days a week all over the NE.
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