Jan Polanik, a Dunkin' Donuts customer based in Worcester, MA, went to a local shop and asked for a bagel with butter. It turned out he was given a butter substitute - and so he sued. And locals might get free food because of him.
The The New York Times reports that Polanik sued 23 Dunkin' Donuts franchises in Massachusetts, because he paid 25 cents for butter and nobody told him he was getting a substitute. He has reportedly settled with Dunkin' Donuts, though the paperwork has yet to be approved, and the settlement is pretty great if you live in his area.
If the deal goes through, as many as 1,400 people can get up to three buttered muffins, bagels, or baked goods - with the real stuff, no substitute. Those people have to go to the 23 specific Dunkin' Donuts locations in Grafton, Leominster, Lowell, Millbury, Shrewsbury, Westborough, and Worcester. And all those stores will be required to use only butter for a year, and after that, they have to disclose whether they're using a substitute.
Dunkin' Donuts responded to the lawsuit with a statement: "The majority of Dunkin' Donuts restaurants in Massachusetts carry both individual whipped butter packets and a butter-substitute vegetable spread." In 2013, the company told the Boston Globe that they often use a substitute because "for safety reasons, we do not allow butter to be stored at room temperature," so a substitute is easier to spread than cold butter. If a customer asked for butter, he or she received it on the side, but if an employee was spreading it, it was usually a vegetable spread.
Polanik himself will win $500 for representing the class-action lawsuit, while his lawyer gets as much as $90,000. It's not a huge payday for Polanik, but it was the principle of the thing, his lawyer says. "Candidly, it seems like a really minor thing, and we thought twice or three times about whether to bring a lawsuit or not," Thomas Shapiro told the Boston Globe. "The main point of the lawsuit is to stop the practice of representing one thing and selling a different thing."
A final ruling on the case likely won't happen for a few months, so don't start lining up at your local Dunkin' just yet. But for now, it's an interesting look at what's really going on your morning bagel.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/dunkin-apos-donuts-customer-sued-163219492.html
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