MIT Runs on Dunkin’
Donuts, dollars, and dismissals: The Student Center Dunkin’ encounters friction between management, ownership, and MIT.
Author’s Note: The information presented in this article is a synthesis of several interviews held, over a period of months from June to October, with the former management team of the Student Center Dunkin’ and other individuals familiar with the situation. These accounts were corroborated by documentation—such as forms and contracts, financial reports, and private emails and text messages—obtained by The Tech. Supplementary details also presented here are based on an analysis of news articles, public disclosures, and other online archival records.
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I sit by the Student Center Dunkin’ sometimes when I’m struggling through homework or staking out a story for The Tech. I see other students, tourists, miscellaneous workers and contractors sitting at the plastic lime-green benches adjoining the outside of the five-story-tall Brutalist behemoth, with white paper bags from Dunkin’ in front of them. Half-eaten cream donuts and half-finished green tea refreshers line the tables. Someone might trip and spill an iced latte every couple of days, cursing themselves at having run out on their luck right at the start of the morning, and I would watch the brew seep into the gravel in front of the Student Center or run unimpeded along the uneven floor inside of it.
***
My first conversation with Chuck Thompson was in June, four days after he was fired by MIT Dining heads Mark Hayes and Heather Ryall.
It was 3 p.m. on a lazy Saturday in June (the 15th to be exact) and I had just gotten settled into The Tech’s fourth-floor corner office of the Student Center when a colleague sent me a snapshot of a photo beginning to circulate around the Institute. I looked at it briefly: it seemed like just an everyday operational notice taped on the glass door of the Student Center’s first-floor Dunkin’ Donuts shop. It read, Dunkin is temporarily closed to transition to a new, local franchise owner. We apologize for any inconvenience during this period.
The message didn’t initially set off any warning bells. Stay tuned for reopening news, including longer daily hours and seven days per week operations. MIT is often described as a “food desert,” with very little on-campus food options and no retail venues that run past 10 p.m. (i.e. peak student hours), and I knew some students were complaining about the Dunkin’ not running on Sundays and about it closing too early to keep up with their late-night study habits. The Dunkin’, at the time, closed for the night at 4 p.m. on weekdays and at 2 p.m. on Saturdays. Perhaps it was a good thing that its hours were being extended.
But there was a curious sharpied-on message at the bottom of the paper in the photo, one that was cut off from the note by the time I ran down from my office to check later that day: We all got fired. Thanks, Mark and Heather.
The full note had been posted since the Wednesday before; the sharpied-on message showed up at around 6 a.m. that Saturday and was removed by lunchtime.
Barely an hour had passed from the initial tip to the time that I got the store manager’s phone number from one of my editors at the paper, who had it to coordinate donut deliveries for another student group he was a part of.
“My full name is Charles Thompson,” Chuck said over the phone at 5:30 p.m., as I hastily wrote out an initial list of questions for him to probe into a situation I knew little about. “But everyone calls me Chuck. I’ve been the store manager there [at the MIT Dunkin’] for 11 years.”
***
The Student Center Dunkin’ opened during the 2006–2007 academic year, replacing an Alpine Bagel Cafe that itself replaced a pub kitchen called Courses in the summer of 2002. The conversion was officially announced to students by Sisi Zhu ’08, then-chair of the Undergraduate Association’s dining committee and chair of the now-defunct “Campus Dining Advisory Board.” Contrary to popular belief, Dunkin’ Donuts does not only serve unhealthy fast food, Zhu’s May 19, 2006, email read. They also have bagels, breakfast sandwiches, and blended fruit smoothies.
(Over the years, the Institute has seen the rise and fall of various working groups meant to inject student representation into dining affairs. A rabbit-hole of archival research, including of articles and student-submitted opinions submitted to The Tech, indicates that campus dining has been a hot-button issue between students and administrators for a number of decades.)
Chuck, 56, was brought in as the establishment’s store manager 11 years ago, after taking a year off from work to take care of his children while his ex-wife was in school full-time for her bachelor’s. He’s an authentic working-class Bostonian, his accent replete with broad As, dropped Rs, and a gritty drawl: he sports a worn baseball cap and a sweat-stained pewter tee.
The store manager is the head of day-to-day operations for a retail dining establishment and is the point person for coordinating between an establishment’s working staff, the franchise owner who holds the contracting rights with a given brand or controls the business that owns the establishment, and, in the case of MIT, the administrative dining team.
“When she [my ex-wife] was done with school, I had my application in one of those online sites, and some lady had seen it, and she said it was perfect because I had pizza experience and fast-food Dunkin’ experience,” Chuck told me during one of our conversations. “She saw it as a perfect fit.” He has, by his account, been in the food industry for all of his life: his first job was at Papa Gino’s, a pizza place in Bedford (“at 19 years old, I became the youngest general manager that they had” he said) and he would, over the years, continue working at various food chains all over Massachusetts.
Campus dining options at MIT—both dining halls at dormitories and contracted retail vendors—are overseen by the administrative MIT Dining team, headed in the present day by Director of Campus Dining Mark Hayes and Assistant Director of Dining Operations Heather Ryall. Mark and Heather joined the dining team in January of 2018 and 2020, respectively. They have overseen a wider restructuring effort across campus dining options since the beginning of their tenure: the closures of LaVerde’s Market, retail vendors and cafes; the creation of the CommonWealth Kitchen Launchpad; continued pushback on student and worker dissatisfaction; and several rounds of meal plan price hikes.
Most recently, a multi-year plan was implemented to gradually mark up required meal plan commitments, which was first proposed in February 2020. (In the 2021–2022 academic year, sophomore-and-up minimum plan requirements sat flatly under Block 125, then $1,969. Starting this year, sophomore minimums sit under Block 190, now $3,114.50, and juniors-and-up under Block 160, now $2,780.80.)
Chuck was also store manager of a now-defunct Cambridge Grill on the other side of the Student Center. Both the original Alpine Bagel at MIT and the Dunkin’, alongside the shuttered Cambridge Grill, were owned (or in the case of the Dunkin’, franchised) by Nashville businessman Jeff Bunting.
***
Jeff Bunting can be described as a busy man. I phoned him for the first time at the end of June, roughly two weeks after the affair in the Student Center. It was a meeting that finally came into fruition after a week and a half of rescheduling. (He was in and out of flights all over the East Coast in the preceding days.) He’s an unusually honest and open character for a businessman, but with it came a penchant for delayed or sporadic communications and at-times rambling dialogue. (It usually takes me a couple of tries and a couple of days to reach him for conversation, and our talks often meandered.)
One of Jeff’s primary business ventures, and the one through which he first began working with MIT, is his company Alpine Bagels & Brews, which he co-founded in 1996 as Alpine Bagel with his brother Marc and former Towson University roommate Christopher Sullivan. The company continues to operate bagel cafes on university campuses all over the East Coast.
“20 or some years ago, we started a bagel concept that was geared towards college campuses,” he said. “As our bagel concept grew around the country, we would add other concepts... whatever it may be: a smoothie shop, a pizza place [like Cambridge Grill]...”
Jeff began operating at MIT when an associate from Duke University, where he had also opened one of his bagel cafes, transferred positions to the Institute. “The second-hand position [for campus dining] over at Duke took a position at MIT. He’d seen what we had done at Duke and wanted us to come up.”
Healthy fast foods were the gist of his broader bagel cafe concept, Jeff said, but its MIT installation was eventually replaced with the Dunkin’ reportedly at the campus dining team’s request. “MIT, at the time, wanted to get a Dunkin’ on campus. They asked us to operate it.”
But from its launch, the Student Center Dunkin’ was marred with controversy: a local businessman with franchise rights in Cambridge—in our discussions, Chuck said that multi-unit franchise owners had de-facto “territories” in their areas of operation that other aspiring owners were, legally or otherwise, not supposed to encroach upon—took offense to Jeff opening up a shop in his territory. It became a quiet legal battle that was eventually settled by MIT’s lawyers in Jeff’s favor (he had more campus operating experience than said businessman) but which also prohibited Jeff from opening any other Dunkin’ in the area. (It is unclear to me whether that ban remains in effect to this day.)
When the Dunkin’ was finally allowed to open, the numerous parties involved signed off contract after contract to finalize the agreement. Jeff held a franchise agreement with the overarching Dunkin’ Brands Group that cemented his use of the brand, and he held a lease agreement with MIT that allowed him to operate the leased franchise installation on campus, to be overseen by the campus dining team for a period of five years. (Jeff would have to renew these agreements with both groups periodically.) His employee team running the operation was contracted under Jeff and his business directly, not under MIT. 18 years later, in 2024, the Dunkin’ would have 14 employees: Khady, Gilberto, Marilu, Ezekiel, Abigail, Keyla, Juan, Danny, Diogenes, Doris, Mildred, and Neris, who were all paid by the hour, and Chuck and his assistant store manager Seomara Melara.
***
Seomara was in the middle of a break at the nail salon she was working at when I met with her. (It was another job that she had held at the same time as her work with the Student Center Dunkin’.) There was a certain sharpness to her Spanish-accented voice and a curtness to her responses, but also a kind of intimate hospitality to it. She was assistant manager to the Dunkin’ under Chuck and “loved working at Dunkin’.” None of the staffers knew about the firing until Tuesday on June 11, she said, when Jeff flew in to meet with Chuck.
He had flown in early that Tuesday, a rare occurrence. (He only steps foot on campus a few times a year, perhaps once or twice, to check in on the business—usually to meet with the dining team or to review financials and operations.) He laid out the situation directly: “They weren’t going to renew our lease,” Jeff said to Chuck privately as the team continued their routine work in serving donuts and other Dunkin’ foods to students, staff, and miscellaneous passersby.
And Chuck, later that day, somewhat frazzled from the news and uninformed of the exact circumstances that led to it, recounted the situation—the bits of it that he could, at least—to his staff soon after. The employees who were clocked in that day continued to work but closed up shop early, as Chuck rebuffed an apparent request from MIT Dining to keep operating over the rest of the week. The shop was closed on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday; on Saturday, at around 5 a.m., Chuck stopped by the place to take back the last of his personal items when he saw the note posted up on the shop’s front door.
“I saw the note in the window and they’re like, ‘oh yeah, open more hours,’ just bragging about what they were going to do—[fourteen] people just lost their job,” Chuck recounted to me, flustered.
At the time it was all still moving parts, and the details surrounding the lease dismissal wasn’t clear to anyone from Jeff’s team—though Jeff had known about the notice over a month before he brought it up to Chuck. An email sent to him from Mark Hayes on May 1 read, We were just notified by Inspire Brands that they are not extending your operating agreement beyond June 30, 2024. (Inspire Brands LLC is the franchise conglomerate that owns the Dunkin’ brand.) But then the question arose: was the agreement with Jeff terminated on Dunkin’s side or on MIT’s side? Mark was telling him that Dunkin’ was apparently dropping him as a business partner—all while he was in the middle of the contract renewal process with the brand.
The answer seemed to be in the emails: as Jeff continued his back-and-forth with Mark Hayes and Heather Ryall over the course of May, he was still coordinating with Dunkin’ Brands to renew his franchise agreement. Signed: Jeff Bunting, the resumptive signed disclosure with Dunkin’ read. Date: May 15, 2024. And so the franchise agreement was being secured, but Jeff also had to have Mark and Heather sign off on his lease agreement to continue operating in the space.
That second contract from Mark and Heather never came, Jeff said, and his lease ultimately expired. And since his lease with MIT expired without a renewal, Jeff said, he was no longer permitted to operate his Dunkin’ franchise there. It snowballed: no establishment, no employees.
On the week of June 9, the first week of the month, the store’s weekly revenue totalled to $12,023.91, and the staff payroll racked up $4,194.43 in employee wages. Sales reports for the rest of the month remained unfilled as the store closed under Jeff and Chuck’s management for the last time that week.
***
Over the following months, Jeff, Chuck, and Seomara described to me more stories of their complex relationships with MIT Dining, which they said may have contributed to their falling-out with the campus dining administrators and eventual firing.
“Mark and Heather told me that Jeff wasn’t responding to their emails,” Chuck said, recounting conversations he’d had with the pair just weeks before the firing. (Jeff can be a hard man to reach, from my experience, so I could relate to the sentiment.) “But if they had questions about the store, why didn’t they come to me? I was the one actually running it.” This was a sore point for Chuck, each time I asked about it; he had felt betrayed by the loss of agency he had over what he saw was first and foremost as his store.
But according to Jeff: “Mark and Heather would call me, and they would say the store wasn’t doing as well as they had hoped. Their problem was with Chuck and the way he operated the store.” (Perhaps that was the case; I’d read a few scathing reviews here and there, from over the years, posted online of apparent poor customer service at the location. Many of the reviews were positive, though.) And he expressed disbelief when I told him about the complaints specifically directed at him.
Seomara told me about the dining team’s issues with their working hours. “We were super busy, and it’s already hard to cover shifts when someone calls out. We’ve tried hiring new people so that we could run later in the day and on Sundays. If anything, MIT should have helped us find more people. I feel like they didn’t even help us.” Chuck echoed the sentiment.
Jeff had heard the same: “Listen, Jeff, this should come as no surprise to you ... Chuck needs to be open seven days a week,” Jeff said Mark and Heather had told him before his lease was dropped.
He continued: “Mark told me on the phone before I ever received [notice of the lease being dropped], he said, ‘listen, Jeff, we’ve been unhappy with Chuck operating this for a long time. We’ve talked to you about it for over a year. We’re not getting the hours we need.”
I think they were looking for an excuse to kick us out, all three said to me during our conversations. I think they wanted to kick us out for a long time, they said. One main point that the dining team apparently shared with all three was with what the dining team saw as the shop’s apparent underperformance. Mark and Heather were dissatisfied with how much the shop was making—that “Dunkin’ Donuts isn’t doing as good as it used to,” Seomara recounted to me. Jeff, Chuck, and Seomara all disputed that claim.
“We were doing better than we ever did before COVID,” Chuck said.
Over May and June of 2022, the shop cashed in total revenue around $19k and $10k weekly, respectively; in 2024, the weekly numbers averaged $24k for April and May, and $12k for the one week that the shop was fully operating that month, according to financial documents I reviewed. (Fall-off between May and June over the years seemed to be a consistent consequence of dampened student presence after the end of the semester.) That being said, operating costs also grew. Expenses across April and May 2022 stood at a weekly average of $5054.37 (for purchases) and $3213.17 (for hourly payroll); in 2024, it was $6188.01 and $4556.50.
Not long after the announcement was made to him, Jeff began preparing to fight back with a team of lawyers and assembled a team to review documents and contracts, but ultimately decided against it. It just wasn’t worth the cost. (Jeff commented once during our conversations that an attorney working on behalf of the dining team apparently said to him, “You’re out. We’re not renewing the lease,” but I was unable to verify that statement.) And the team’s relationship with MIT Dining—like many other vendors’, according to Chuck, who remains in close contact with the many workers and staffers running MIT whom he had befriended over the years—was quite chilly. It was not likely to warm up after an extended legal affair that the Institute, with its army of lawyers and an Institute-wide endowment of over $20 billion, would likely win anyways.
So, Jeff sold the equipment he owned in the venue to MIT, about $9k of it, Chuck said, and left behind around $7k worth of inventory like food, paper, and chemicals. He’ll keep paying for Chuck’s health insurance until the end of the year. And, finally, he turned over the store to its new owner, an Iranian immigrant named Afshin Omid.
***
Afshin, who goes by “Benny,” first met the staff on Tuesday the 11th, the last day of the shop’s operation under the old management. He was there to address staff concerns. They were all allowed to reapply for their positions, he said, and if accepted they would be able to stay on the team. And he asked them to avoid contact with the old owner.
“I don’t know what happened between him and MIT,” Seomara recalled Benny saying, “They don’t want you guys working for us.” It isn’t clear to me where that sentiment may have come from.
“At that moment, I couldn’t believe anybody,” Seomara told me, frustration creeping into her voice.
Benny owns a couple of Dunkin’s in northwest Boston, one at 219 Cambridge St and another at 209 N Harvard St, both in Allston. I tried to reach him a couple of times over email and by phone, none of which were answered. My only communication with him, ultimately, was in an August 26 email where he told me three things: one, that he was “not available” to meet with me; two, that the franchise transfer was “handled by Dunkin’ corporate” and not MIT Dining; and three, that he had “never met” the “previous franchisee’s management team.” When I received his message, I looked back in confusion at some emails that Jeff had forwarded to me just two weeks before: in one of them, from a June 11 email titled “MIT Dunkin Donuts,” Benny reached out to Jeff—it looks like for the first time—to ask to meet.
Good morning Jeff, I hope this message finds you well, the email read. My name is Benny Omid and I am the Dunkin Franchisee in Boston that’s taking over your Dunkin in the MIT campus [sic].
***
Before talking to Chuck, Jeff, and Seomara for the first time, I had never once stepped foot in the shop; I had never bought a single thing handmade by Chuck’s staff; I had never greeted Chuck or Seomara at the register while at the front of a busy line. These days, since the store’s July 9 reopening, it’s a different cast of characters: I spot the current store manager Adriana, a short heavy-set Latina woman with wide-rimmed glasses and dark brown hair all scrunched up in a tight bun sweeping the floors at times, on occasion accompanied by multi-unit manager Maria with her dirty blond hair and her clipboard. The only times I’ve gone in since was to stake out the place or make my futile attempts at reaching out to Benny through Adriana and Maria.
(A multi-unit manager supervises and coordinates operations across several regional stores operated by a central owner. Jeff’s Dunkin’ had a multi-unit manager named Steve Ellar, who left the team during COVID; since then and up until June of this year, Chuck reported directly to Jeff.)
Benny, Adriana, and Maria all declined to speak with me for this article. Mark and Heather did not respond to numerous emails and requests for comment. A spokesperson for MIT Dining, when asked about MIT’s role in the change in ownership, declared that they had limited control over a process that was apparently initiated by Dunkin’ Brands and denied requests to speak directly with Mark and Heather. Several current and former administrative staffers, all named and described to me by the various individuals I spoke with, also did not respond to requests for comment. Dunkin’s public relations department did not respond to numerous emails asking for comment on the matter.
I still sit by the Student Center Dunkin’, sometimes, when I’m struggling through homework or staking out a story for The Tech. I see students chewing on bagels and muffins and breakfast sandwiches now made by different people. And I know that they don’t know about the people who lost their jobs over these bagels and muffins and breakfast sandwiches—that they don’t know about Chuck Thompson, or Jeff Bunting, or Seomara Melara, or Khady, Gilberto, Marilu, Ezekiel, Abigail, Keyla, Juan, Danny, Diogenes, Doris, Mildred, and Neris.
(Some of the hourly employees were eventually re-hired by the new management team after undergoing a traditional application process and now continue to work at the Student Center Dunkin’; a spokesperson for MIT cites a figure of seven re-hires but also gave other info that contradicted payroll data I reviewed. Seomara and her high school-aged daughter, who also worked at the Dunkin’, did not take the offer. Chuck says he was never offered a position at all.)
Seomara now works full-time as a nail tech. Jeff has cut all of his ties with MIT and continues to operate all of his other business ventures with all of his other university partners. Chuck remains unemployed. He continues to send out applications for foodservice management jobs in the area.
And I look back down to my laptop, closing the screenshot that my colleague had sent to me back in June, and blending back into the masses of students frantically keysmashing at assignments well past due—and I stop thinking about the people whose journeys I had intimately followed for over four months.