31 Flavors
[Ed: originally penned a piece back. Many of these sites have gotten their collective acts together in the interim. Good.]
The Baskin Robbins slogan "31 Flavors" brings back a lot of childhood memories for me -- the crunch of a sugar cone, the tasty sample satisfaction on tiny pink spoons, the staggering headache brought on by just one too many scoops.... I can still remember the tactics employed by my Mom: "If you two behave yourselves while I'm shopping, we can stop at Baskin Robbins on the way home." Well, my sister and I weren't the best in the behaving ourselves category, but we were damn good in the do-whatever-we-had-to-in-order-to-get-ice-cream department. This mostly involved bottling up our grievances until after we had finished our ice cream and were riding back home with Mom at the wheel of our '67 Camaro. Sometimes we couldn't control ourselves, though, and the Camaro's black floor carpets bore a few whitish stains, testament to these occasional premature fights and the old ice-cream-in-the-face maneuver.
Anyhoo, all this nostalgia prompted me to do a little searching. What better to supplement my dusty old memories than some dusty old links on the World Wide Web? I quickly discovered that Baskin Robbins is a really liberal franchise, allowing various franchisees to create their own sites. The truth is out there, but it ain't pretty:
http://www.baskinrobbins.com.au/ "Welcome to our 31derful world" This site features a sign-up form for the Australian Super Scoops Club, a page with a link to Mister Donut (no kidding), and a pathetically saccharin page of marketing mumbo-jumbo that reminded me of nothing more than Mr. Tweek from South Park. Given the name-gathering and the rah-rah company description stuff, I suspected that this may have been a site done by a marketing person using FrontPage. I viewed the source for confirmation, and was greeted by something disturbing -- <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Notepad/Vi">. For those of you who don't know what this means, it says that the site was done the difficult, meticulous way. For a moment, I thought that it must be one of two things -- either they've brainwashed a geek into thinking that this site has some value, or they're holding a geek at gunpoint, or boomerangpoint, or whateverthehell they do down there. Finally, I found that the site was done by DataTools. There was money involved -- many things are explained.
From http://www.baskinrobbins.com -- "The virtual Baskin-Robbins is no longer serving, the Web Site is closed. But our real stores are still serving your favorite flavors. Please visit the Baskins-Robbins nearest you." I can only speculate on the former contents of this Baskin Robbins website, and I'm no high-falutin' Internet consultant, but I'm guessing that ice cream just isn't ready for e-commerce prime time. I think the nicest touch on this site is that despite offering zero content, the franchise name is misspelled not once, but twice. That shows that the designers gave the site extra love and attention.
Speaking of sites that leave something to be desired, http://www.baskin-robbins.com features a lovely blank page with nothing but <title>coming soon...</title> in the header. Baskin Robbins Canada is in even worse shape -- the page 403s. I imagine that this is the kind of crap that they started to let slip in Rome just before the Visigoths came in and had a kegger in the Colosseum.
http://blackcat.brynmawr.edu/Restaurants/Baskin-Robbins.html features a rollicking debate about whether BR has the best chocolate chip milkshakes in the area, or their ice cream looks so horrible that one would never dream of eating it. Now that's what I call a sticky situation!
My childhood memories tarnished as I slogged through those yucky little pages (oh, the dangers of franchising), and I was beginning to lose hope when I came across http://www.baskinrobbins31flavors.com/. It isn't going to win any awards for Cool Site of the Year, but it at least has some spunk. They seem to be very involved in the community, and actually show some products (cakes) on the site, even if you do have to phone in your order. Perhaps the best feature of the site, though, is the fact that they have a Mobile Unit Party Assault Team. See for yourself -- makes the A-Team look like a bunch of actors.
http://www.baskin31robbins.com/ I could almost like this site, but they had to go and use a javascript to fade the content in and out... very cool the first time you see it, very annoying the hundredth. They did at least explain the significance of the number 31. Apparently, founders Burt Baskin and Irv Robbins felt that "31" would represent the variety of flavors well, since there would be a different one for each day of the month. In actuality, Baskin Robbins has over 700 flavors in their library... now that's some serious flavah.
And finally, winning the funniest feature award is this site, with hit counter that boldly proclaims that 369 people have visited. Being in a 31 kinda mood, I hit reload 31 times to bring the count up to 400. By using the magic of the number 31, I've created a tiny time bomb of joy for this franchise owner when he next stumbles to his home page and sees the skyrocketing traffic numbers. I love this country, and by god, I love the number 31 -- pray for me.