a long oneThe price of a dozen

A price without its date is not a price. This page holds the dated ones this project can actually cite, which is not many, and says plainly what is missing.

*39 cents each, 1 June 1968, North Kingstown, Rhode Island.* Frederick Alvin "Allie" Briggs opened Allie's Hand-Cut Do-nut Shop with about forty dollars in hand and a seven-thousand-dollar debt, and took $38 on the first day selling close to a hundred dozen.

*$50 plus a hundred sacks of flour, 1948.* What a new Spudnut Shops franchisee paid to open. By 1952 a franchise cost $1,750 plus equipment — an initial investment of about $5,000, or roughly $109,550 in 2024 dollars.

*2,400 calories and 144 grams of fat in a dozen, from 2004 onward.* Not a price, but the only per-dozen figure in this directory that somebody published — the Krispy Kreme Challenge prints it on the rules.

Menu prices with dates, for the shops written up here. A donut price changes faster than a record does, and an undated price on a directory page is worse than no price: a reader plans around it.

This project prints a price only with the date it was read and the source it came from. That leaves the page thin, and thin is the accurate state of it.

Not answered here. A national average would need dated menu reads across the country, which this project has not done. Inference — the spread is wide: a strip-mall dozen and a made-to-order dozen at a shop like Pip's are not the same product and are not priced as if they were.