'cardboard doughnuts'? are you kiddin me?

No...ever bought them after 8pm?

deeby
I think the Timmy's explosion in the lower Island is now well and truly on...sadly they seem to be doing very well.

As for employee benefits and decent working conditions: I'm sorry to have to say that Starbucks could teach Timmy's quite a bit.

Gavin,

Big difference between the two - when was the last time you went into Starbucks and saw a recent immigrant. Everyone seems to be born in Canada. They pay better and provide better benefits to attract more fluent employees - simply put. Their employees are artsy, friendly and often attractive.

On the other hand, Tim Horton's provides recent immigrants and lower income people a chance to earn an income and enter the workforce. They should be applauded - not chastized.

When it comes down to it - it's all business - and share price. Go look at SBUX symbol - the stock pepetually reaches new heights - because morons like you fall for their social consciousness and over-pay for your coffee....

Howard Schultz is a genious. He is remarkable businessman, but an even better marketer. I am sure he cares, but no more that the Executives at Tim's. They run different models. Though, I am willing to bet you that if you download their financials - both contribute equal portions of their income to community outreach programs.....get a life.

On a side note - my agent at Cannacord couldn't get me in on the Timmy's IPO. I was pretty ticked, but it actually fell back to the offering price about a month or two later. I invested heavily, and have been rewarded. Tim Horton's is a stock to buy, hold and build wealth.

I've seen them starting to expand in Ohio, and I belive a US breakthrough is possible. Everytime I pass a location - it is packed...

Geez, only in Vancouver do people pontificate over which has the better coffee, Starbucks or TH's (Starbucks).

Since I was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and have many fond memories of Tim Horton's (including the very first one and the old-style ones with the swivel stools that those born in Vancouver have never had the pleasure to experience), I think I should share some of those memories.

1976- My dad wakes me up in the middle of the night to let me know "Mum is having the baby", and we rush to the hospital. My dad, who is one of those people who feels queasy in hospitals even though he isn't the one having a baby, takes me to Tim Horton's for a good strong cup of joe (him) and a donut for me. I'm six- it's the middle of the night; this is bliss. A trucker (on the stool next to me) asks me why I'm there and I tell him. He spreads the word to all the other truckers and everyone comes over to congratulate my dad- and tell him to get the hell back to the hospital.
1980- It's my 10th b'day and we stop at Timmy's on the way home; my brother gets carried away swinging around on the stools, falls flat on his face and is rushed to hospital- can't recall how many stitiches.
Many times between 1980-1986- We stop for coffee, donuts, sandwiches on our way to and from ski/camping/horse-back riding trips.
1990, London, Ontario- My roommates and I stay up all night at Timmy's cramming for exams and dreaming about the future.
1996-I am leaving for South Korea to teach English for one year and my dad drives me to the airport. We stop at Timmy's for one long, last chat. Everytime he drops me off and picks me up at the airport this will become our ritual.
Present day- Though I now prefer Starbucks coffee (must be the 5 years in Van- and the fact that they pay their empolyees better), I smile when I walk by Tim Horton's. I don't know, for some reason it brings back memories.

THAT is why us Ontarions get nostalgic over Tim Horton's.

Fii

I'm from the prairies and spent a few years in Ontario as well. I couldn't believe the way Ron Joyce finessed Tim Horton's widow when he took over the company - could never forget that...

I think you may have watched a few too many sentimental and very carefully crafted commercials. Sorry to disabuse you: Billion dollar corporations didn’t get to be that way by being nice guys. It’s not even a Canadian company anyway and hasn’t been since Ron sold out to Dave Thomas and Wendy’s.

I'm not surprised you’re building wealth Cappy, it's the only thing you give a damn about anyway – as your post on another thread here proved just before dinner tonight. I know people (college students who've worked for both corporations) and I'm sad to say every one of them says Starbucks beats Timmy blind as an employer. I guess some to that wealth you're building is on their backs dude.

Be proud, be very proud - but don't expect me to fall for it - I know exactly what you and Ron Joyce are all about – cheap exploitive employee relations – expensive advertising and addictive, high-sugar food.

Personally, I’m ashamed so many of my countrymen and women are so easily taken in. Mind you, it shows when you notice the way some of them kind of ‘doughnut’ out of their pants at the waistline.

Wow, I thought I was cynical, G West. I guess you missed the point completely. Did I mention anywhere that it brings back good memories because it's Canadian-owned? I honestly couldn't care less who owns it. It's always been a place where my dad and I, or my friends and I, have had good talks, where my family would stop for breaks on roadtrips. Perhaps my parents bought into the commercials and that's why they chose to take us there when we were kids, rather than to say, McDonald's, which I can't ever remember going to as a child. It's unfortunate perhaps that I was born in a country where the franchises and corporations win over the mom-and-pop stops every time, but that doesn't mean I can't be nostalgic for the spaces they provided.

Fii
I'm nostalgic about all kinds of mom and pop things - when they actually are mom and pop operations and not just carbon copies created out of marketing bs that Timmy's PR firm sells Canadians in those little 30-second vignettes. Look, I’m not trying to ruin your nostalgia of a childhood spent munching timbits. I just think it isn’t very much different from being nostalgic about the Golden Arches, that’s all.
If you have great memories of the times you spent with your family at a restaurant I’d cling to the source of those memories – a happy family – and stop imagining that they’d have been much different if you’d experienced them in a place that actually cared more about product and people than it did about the bottom line.

Is that cynical?

I don’t think so. I think the packaged experience is about as plastic as the food.

Quote:As for employee

As also for standards of customer service....

I got stuck on southern Ontario back in the summer of 1996, and was forced to go to Tim's, which barely existed out here at all in those days, except in places like Surrey and Langley. The coffee was execrable, the sandwiches boring white-man cuisine, the soups and chilis bland. Yet everyone raved about how great they were, which told me one thing - these poor doobs are so conditioned that they don't eat out much anywhere else, as they've been sold on the idea that Tim's is the best there is....and don't bother trying anywhere else. As if there was (in Ontario) anywhere else....

What's even more ironic is the way people treat Starbuck's as a foreign enterprise, and Tim's as a Canadian one. Both are owned in the States, yet a big hoo-hah was made when Tim's opened its outlet in Kandahar, as a symbol of Canadiana and how proud we were to make sure our boys had cardboard to eat, and dishwater to drink. As if it were our national cuisine or something. To me that's just more Central Canadian vanity-hype, the idea that what Ontarians like the rest of us should, and because Ontarians have spread out across the country and want their "national cuisine" with them, Tim's spread out too. More homogenization of the national fabric.

Now, as for Starbuck's, it may be US-owned, but if I'm not mistaken Greater Vancouver has the highest density per capita, and per area, of anywhere in the world. And it was Vancouver that turned Starbuck's from a local Seattle outfit into a major player internationally - their original outlet here at Thurlow & Robson was the int'l market-breaker and was the highest revenue per square foot of any retail outlet in the city! So there's a good case to be made that Starbuck's is as much a part of "our culture" as Tim's is, certainly when we're just talking about BC, more specifically the Lower Mainland. Tim's is a foreign presence - Starbuck's comes from 2.5 hours away.....

That the CBC is used as a shill for this American-owned food megalopoly (Tim's/Wendy's I mean) is shameful. Are we so short on national identity that bland, tasteless coffee and generic donuts and sandwiches are what defines us as a "nation"?

And that's not chili, not worthy of the name. It's bean-and-burger-and-tomato stew....they're gonna have to change that recipe if they try marketing this in Texas...."That ain't chili, that's spaghetti sauce!"

I tried to pos just LOL - by itself - and ran afoul of the length police. But it's the chili police who're needed....Don't they serve some kind of chicken gumbo in a bread bowl - or was that last year's promo?

I dunno. I only know that the farther south you go the spicier you make the food. Even for gringos. Hence Louisiana and Texan and Arizonan cusine, and of course upper class Mexican society (mostly white) Tim's is like a diner version of transplanted English food run through a processed-cheese machine. I didn't like sharp and hot stuff when I was young until I got turned onto Mexican, and then all kinds of hot food, once I'd had it in LA as a kid; then I'd eat my pepper, which I didn't used to like at all. Then I hit the Rumah Bali and got opened to Indonesian - Balinese in that case of course - version of hot food, and Thai since. There must be something in the northern blood; Scandinavian staples, or Norwgian anyway, are things like cod, potatos, tapioca, more cod, more potatos, maybe some pyrogy/dumpling-like ''komle''. But the cheeses are rank, as are some of the fish preserves (''lytefisk''or ''lutefisk'' - lyed fish, left to rot and chilled, turned garish yellow and stinking even when it's frozen hard; being the most famous and the worst-smelling of all). Then there's ''gamelost'' - old cheese, which looks like hair and smells like, er, compost or something so bad my Mom made Dad unwrap it outside. Apparently nicer than Limburger once you get past the gag reflex...

The old Scandinavians here dig into the pickled peppers; can't say I saw much of that in Norway, and I've never heard of it in Scotland or Ireland. Pickled eggs, pickled eel, pickled what-not, but nothing spicy.

but then you go south. What's with that anyway? Is it just because those things historically grew better down there, and it's inbuilt into the cuisine because of that?

Then there's the Dunkin' Donuts in Bangkok. All, like, oh, 100 of them maybe; usually as a franchise within a 7-Eleven. I wonder how they're doing down there since those last few bombs, huh?

G'night.

I meant that in sympathy with the thai people, who don't deserve all this, and also sympathy rfor the King who's trying, no doubt, to bring it to heel in his usual kind and auspicious fashion. A living monarchy with a principle, eloquent man at the top can be an amazing thing, and Bhumibol is definitely one of the great monarchs of history anywhere, simply for being able to stave off coups and civil wars...[I]how[/I} many times? - by simple force of will and moral example. Amazing man....if I'm allowed to speak of him as a man. Lese majeste is still a crime in Thailand, and a serious one.

The Dunkin' Donuts was a reference to the pervasiveness of the chain down there only, not to any hope that one might be bombed, or as ithappens that Canadian tourists would even cancel a trip, which most haven't as usual in these situations (Americans are scaredy-cats, comparitively and cancelled in droves) . Various other chains down there proliferate, but the pink-and-orange is everywhere, as are 7-11s The Silom Road MacDonald's was a (long) block or two up from my hotel; a bit too much like home, but then nothing in Bangkok is really like back here. And you can buy flavoured milk, too, in the stores, and all kinds of relaly neat snacks. Like fried fire ants. Real spicy, apparently, because of the poison...crunchy, too. Then there were those big centipede things...

Then there are the silkworm crunchies in Korea... honestly, I don't really know what they were but the smell will never be forgotten. The dried squid I liked. Hmmm, perhaps THorton's should add those to the menu... donuts with silkworm crunchies in the middle... toasted sesame bagels with dried squid... shake things up a bit, make it a bit healthier. I think I may be on to something.

Yeah, you would have thought the Asian fast food industry, and West Coast fusion cusine, would have caught on to all these great flavours by now. Especially the longevity benefits attributed to things like silkworms, or the vitality associated with fire ants and such. The barbecued giant spiders from Cambodia, you'd think, would be a big hit.

Far too many BCers seem to think Eastern Canada ends in Ontario, or at least Quebec. But, as one with roots in the Maritimes, I am willing to posit that Tim's is more a part of the social fabric of towns on the East Coast than it is in Southern Ontario.

I like eating and drinking at Tim Hortons from time to time for the same reasons I sometimes like eating at greasy spoons and truck stops and drinking in dive bars.
It's the lowest common denominator. Some people are elitists, and let's let them have their $5 triple-decaf-say-tall-lattes (or whatever) and their lap dogs a laptops. I, on the other hand, appreciate all the people around me and am more than happy to have a so-so drip coffee and soggy donut while getting out to be with them. Give me the muddy work boots and the brown collars in addition to the Yaletowny accoutrements. I want it all.

Anyone who would comment on Tim Hortons and mention the quality of the coffee or food just does not get it. It's not a place that's ever been meant to be about cuisine. It's all about place and community and belonging and acceptance - though these are somewhat foreign here on the West Coast these days, in relation to the East Coast.

And because of chains like Tim's or Bucky's, the viability of truck stops and greasy spoons has significantly declined, and there's fewer of them. Acceptqance? Community? You've been sold a bill of goods, and have become part of the branding. You're a trained consumer, and that's that. When I want coffee - and a place to hang - I don't go somewhere that feels like a diner imported from 2500 miles away (and people to go with it). That it's sold as some kind of icon of two-bit nationalism is what makes it all the more sickening - our icons were Chinese smorgasbords, the White Spot, The Only and places like that; or here in BC, in nearly any smalltown and once common throughout Greater Vancouver's neighbourhoods and towns - the "Chinese and Western Cuisine" with its mix of chow mein and burgers (sure, there are a few of those left, but most have closed up shop or, some, have converted to pure-Chinese menu and up-market branding.

We didn't need a foreign chain to come here and show us how to have a "place and community and belonging and acceptance" as Canadians. We already were Canadians; it's just people from east of the Granite Curtain have this idea that WE are a foreign place, and expect to have their familiar surroundings imported here, like any immigrant/imperialist group. And by "foreign" here I don't mean American-owned - I mean from Eastern Canada. And yes, Eastern Canada begins at the Rockies....sometimes at Hope.

jrb
Um, No disrespect, but Timmy's did get it's start in and around the Golden Horseshoe.
Aand if you don't care how poorly paid the workers actually are - compared with other American firms like Starbucks - then I guess the facts don't matter much either does it?

Community includes the folks behind the counter working for minimum wage (or less if they're young in BC). The point is, it’s really not any better than McDonald’s and it certainly wouldn’t be a Canadian icon without all the phony high priced marketing and the shilling that certain groups like the military do for it.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have fond memories about the place; just don’t elevate it onto some kind of a pedestal and don’t call that bean and tomato stew ‘CHILI’.

You are definitely right about it not being about cuisine - it's about caffeine and calories - and that's about all.

I don't Ron Joyce's American creation and its stockholders have much to do with place, community, belonging and acceptance either. You may want it all, but you ain't gonna get it in a Tim Horton's doughnut.

First sentence above should be:
"Um, No disrespect, but Timmy's did get its start in and around the Golden Horseshoe."

Apologies to the Spelling & Grammar Police.

And, 1st sentence in last para should be "I don't 'think' Ron Joyce's......etc.