Things were different then. “On Sundays, I can remember times in our shop that we would make 1300 or 1400 dozen,” Dettore recalls. “By the time Mass got out — nine o’clock Mass was probably the biggest — you might have three bakers in the kitchen. And the manager, maybe even the owner, four or five counter people, everybody went to the counter at 9:50. You worked on selling donuts, and they cleaned you out.”

The next decades saw steady growth and greater attention to branding: Fred the Baker; “Time to make the donuts”; “It’s worth the trip!” By the 1980s, everyone in New England knew Dunkin’ Donuts. But no one, it seems, remembers it ever being quite this popular. Airwaves blanketed with ads. New stores everywhere you turn. Lines 20-people long on Monday mornings. Curt Schilling shilling for the New England Maple Cheddar Breakfast Sandwich. Sidewalks strewn with pink and orange. When and how did Dunkin’ Donuts go from being a damn good donut store to an omnipresent symbol of Greater Boston identity?

“I think the transition happened probably 15 years ago,” Dettore speculates. That was when Dunkin’ expanded its business model to include kiosk outlets. Before then, each Dunkin’ franchise was a full-service shop, fully equipped and with its own baker. But bakers are the highest-paid employees in the donut business, and baking equipment is a major investment, so an outlet would have to attract some serious traffic to offset the expense.

In his day, Dettore says, “We would have our bakers doing minimal tasks just to justify their existence. If you let them produce as much as they can produce in eight hours, you have to throw most of it away.” Now, a smaller shop “can be part of a network where they have three or four kiosks in the area and they drop product off to each of those once or twice a day.” As a result, Dunkin’ counters have become ubiquitous, and brand visibility has skyrocketed.

Baked goods are only part of the story, however. Increased efficiency and expansion turned the brand into a local fixture, but the sales that supported that growth were fueled by one thing: coffee. Coffee, coffee, coffee, and then maybe a top off. The black stuff now accounts for 63 percent of Dunkin’ Donuts sales: 2.8 million cups a day, 16 percent of all coffee sold by the cup in the US. There have even some rumblings of dropping the “Donuts” from the chain’s name. “When they realized the strength of their coffee product,” Dettore says, “is when they started advertising more.”

WORTH THE TRIP: Top to bottom: Dunkin’ Donuts’s first store in Quincy, a recent franchise in Bali, and a translated sign in Chinatown (photo by Dan Watkins).

As coffee sales increased, the chain’s priorities changed. As did its competitors. Most Mister Donut outlets were swallowed by Dunkin’ Donuts’s then-parent company, Allied-Lyons, in 1990. Krispy Kreme’s briefly ballyhooed 2003 foray into New England was a bust. Dunkin’ soon had just one chief competitor. It may not be a coincidence that the beginning of the Dunkin’ Donuts apotheosis roughly coincides with the arrival of the first Starbucks in New England, on Charles Street in 1994.

“I would say what Starbucks has done is turn coffee into identity, as a way to make a statement about who you are,” says Bryant Simon, a history professor at Temple University who, as research for a book he’s writing about the Seattle–based coffee goliath, has been to more than 300 Starbucks locations in six countries. “That has meant that everyone has had to position themselves vis-à-vis Starbucks.”

It’s a simple dichotomy. And it shouldn’t be too hard to tell which side of the fence you’re on. Just look at the Starbucks in Central Square, and compare it to the Dunkin’ Donuts just across Mass Ave. In one, piped-in music percolates down and steam ascends ephemerally from behind a granite counter. Well-dressed people sit in upholstered chairs, squinting into placidly glowing laptops. In the other, folks line up in a spare and sterile space, brightly lit by fluorescent bulbs. They place an order perfunctorily — perhaps, on Valentine’s Day, an old man pauses for a moment to flirt with his favorite cashier. They get their coffee and their food. And they leave. Coffee as fuel. Coffee as lifestyle. Which you choose is up to you, but very few people choose both.

So why does Dunkin’ Donuts hold the edge in these parts? The home-town advantage is one obvious factor. Outside the original Dunkin’ Donuts — it’s barely recognizable now compared with the image in an archival photo; its sparkling Eisenhower-era cheerfulness and jaunty signage having been remodeled and abraded into a drab, generic strip-mall storefront — Quincy native John Menz, 65, confesses that he pops in “about once a day. I lived here all my life, so I been coming here since it opened. They’re an old Quincy family. Its roots are here.” And, not for nothing, “I like their products. I usually get a pastry, just to start the day.” He holds up his cup. “Lahge regulah.”