This is a love story. It’s not so much about boy meets girl. It’s more like: country meets coffee. Country falls in love with coffee. Coffee never lets country down. They all live happily ever after. The end.
Canada’s greatest love affair is with a coffee shop called Tim Hortons. It’s everywhere. On a continent where service is king, Tims is king of coffees. It’s worth almost $3 billion a year and, with more than 22% of Canada’s total fast food sales, it’s more popular than McDonalds. It’s in every community at least in the teeming communities of southern Ontario – and around every corner and it’s a Canadian institution.
It’s difficult to exaggerate the scale of this thing. Sometimes it seems like every Canadian has had a distinctive brown Tim Hortons cup surgically attached to their hand. It’s just accepted that everyone will have a Hortons coffee today. I hired a car and the person who delivered it had a coffee in the cup holder.
We were in a furniture shop and one of the salesmen was drinking from a Tim Hortons cup in the store. I turned on the TV and a man being interviewed outside a courthouse had a cup in his hand. It’s bewildering and ubiquitous and it’s always, always Tim Hortons.
By now you’ll be wondering about Tim Horton himself. Well, he was an ice hockey player in North America they simply say “hockey” who founded the chain just down the road from here in Hamilton, Ontario, in the 1960s. After Horton’s death in a car crash in 1974, his business partner, Ron Joyce, continued the company.
Using a model where people buy franchises at a cost of more than $500,000 each, showing how lucrative a franchise can be it has grown into a very large company indeed, with more than 4000 outlets in Canada and the US.
Here’s the secret: the coffee is great. The company slogan is “Always Fresh”, and it lives up to that slogan, ensuring that every cup of coffee was brewed within 20 minutes of being served. I can attest to the fact that it really is delicious and I freely admit that I’m addicted. In fact, the coffee is so good that the company is regularly forced to deny urban myths that its contains substances like nicotine or MSG.
For those of us who come from a country where a good-quality cup of coffee can be very expensive, Tim Hortons is also surprisingly cheap. The medium coffee I buy most often costs about a dollar and a half, which is just over £1. So, whoever you are, going out for coffee becomes an affordable part of daily life. I cannot express how happy that makes me. It’s just so civilised.
But that’s just the coffee. I’ve been avoiding all talk of the darker side of Timmys the donuts, the muffins, the cookies, the pastries. There’s chocolate dip and honey dip and apple glazed and the dutchie. There’s the honey cruller, the Boston cream, the Canadian maple and the walnut crunch.
There’s chocolate chip and banana nut and fruit explosion and I have to stop now before I run out of the house and down the road to Tim Hortons and they have to call the cops because a fat Scotsman is eating all the donuts and crying and refusing to stop.
And, relax. I need to calm down. I think I’ll go to Tim Hortons.