After a years-long hunt, the internet finally found a Dean's Furniture commercial with this famous catchphrase
But over the years, as nostalgic natives looked to recall the good old days of Dean's, they all found the same thing: There seemed to be no video evidence of 'I doubt it!' anywhere on the internet. There were clips of
For more than a decade, these Dean's detectives posted online about trying to track down proof of those three words, and in 2022, Norwood native Nicholas Slye decided to launch a subreddit forum — r/idoubtit — to try to crack the case. More than 100 people joined.
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'It's the cadence in which he says it that really stuck with me as a kid,' said Slye, 35. 'You'd be at the lunch table with your friends, and we would all, you know — 'You think the pizza will be good today?
I doubt it.
' It was just like a Boston thing.'
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At last year's Medford Porchfest,
But users on Reddit dug up an
'I think we all assume, especially early on, that you can just look it up. It's online somewhere. But then when you don't find it, that natural human curiosity kicks in,' Slye said. 'You feel like you're the one that's going to find it.'
Finally, in January, someone did. 'I never doubted it,' wrote a Reddit user named browncommas in Slye's subreddit.
The post included a link to a YouTube video — a 13-minute compilation of commercials that aired on Comedy Central in 2000. Buried about 11 minutes deep is a Dean's commercial, in which you see a couple snoozing on one of the brand's double reclining sofas. The camera zooms in on their bare feet, which become anthropomorphized and marvel at the $544 price tag.
'Can you get a deal like that at those other stores?' a voiceover booms before the answer comes in the form of — finally — the long-lost tagline.
Users in the comments section of the post reveled in the holy grail finally being unearthed.
'Welp, pack it up boys. It's been fun,' one wrote.
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'I'm just so glad I'm here for it!!' wrote another.
The Dean's quest long outlasted the long-defunct homewares brand, which once dotted Greater Boston in cities such as Revere, Malden, and Lynn. In 2001, Dean's Home Furniture, as well as the owner of a Connecticut-based liquidator, landed in hot water with the Massachusetts attorney general for creating 'fictitious 'original' prices and phony 'mark down' prices on more than $800,000 worth of new merchandise at a 'going out of business' sale.' In 2003,
Weinstein did not respond to a call or text from a Globe reporter. According to his public LinkedIn profile, since his time as a furniture magnate, he cofounded a pet waste removal company in Brockton called Poop Away.
Though Dean's is firmly in the rearview mirror, for Slye, the hard-won triumph of confirming its battle cry felt 'surreal.' Sometimes, after all, the benefit of the doubt pays off.
'It felt like I gathered people, like-minded people, Bostonians, to search this out, and we did it,' he said. 'It was nostalgia, personified.'
Dana Gerber can be reached at
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