Hello All.
I wanted to have a discussion about changing the category for Dunkin’ from fast food to cafe. It falls more in line with a Starbucks, Tim Horton’s, etc. Which are categorized as Cafe. Would appreciate some thoughts on this. It is a global brand and would have a significant impact.
This article discusses the rebranding of Dunkin’ Donuts to Dunkin’ and it’s focus on becoming a coffee shop.
I think this is a reasonable thing to suggest. When I’ve been to Dunkin’s (is that the plural?) recently, it’s usually been to get coffee. Their format and set up these days definitely seems more similar to other cafes/coffee shops (like e.g. Starbucks) than, say, a traditional donut shop where you assemble your dozen by pointing at the case. All that to say, I agree that Dunkin’ is currently more of a cafe that has donuts than a donut shop that has coffee, so amenity=cafe probably makes more sense than amenity=fast_food.
Of course, beyond the logic, big changes like this have to be so worthwhile so as to overcome the barrier of altering existing tagging, a real cost in an ecosystem as big as OSM. This would be a pretty major change affecting about 14,000 locations, that would require buy in from the US community and others worldwide. One potential issue is that I don’t know the format of Dunkin’s in other countries and whether it differs from those in the US, for one. But perhaps any change could be limited to the US at first. It’s also worth considering whether any data consumers are currently relying on the existing tagging, although since the stores would be moving to another well-established tag, the chances of completely breaking an application seem slimmer.
Practically, implementing this would probably entail both a bulk edit and changing the Name Suggestion Index that OSM editors use to suggest default tagging. Just for the record, it looks like this post was prompted by an attempt to change the NSI: Update cafe.json (move all Dunkin' (Q847743) from fast_food.json) by jhutton1 · Pull Request #10829 · osmlab/name-suggestion-index · GitHub, to which a maintainer (justifiably IMO) pointed to the forum to assess the community consensus.
I agree that amenity=cafe makes more sense than amenity=fast_food for Dunkin’.
This is funny because a few years ago there was a discussion on the OSM US Slack about potentially making the opposite change for most Starbucks locations. The argument was that Starbucks had become so much like Dunkin’ (née Donuts) that it was now fast_food rather than cafe. 
Here in Spain they have been called Dunkin’ Coffee since 2007, which seems to emphasise the coffee shop aspect, but I believe was also related to an existing “Donuts” trademark. Or at least I think of them as Dunkin’ Coffee … but looking at their website now they seem to have moved towards plain Dunkin’. I must pay attention next time I am in a shopping mall or train station.
In any case I don’t have strong feelings about which one would be correct for Spain - they certainly serve a lot of coffee, but donuts are still displayed prominently and lots of people buy trays of donuts to take away.
But that is only a side-issue compared to what the world is really waiting for: a definitive decision on the correct tagging of totally-legitimate-and-not-in-any-way-a-shady-ripoff Duffin Dagels. Currently their 4 locations in Spain are split 2 each between fast food and cafe tagging.
Are dagels glazed bagels?