A rchive Date
[ 22-07-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[Why do we all go to Tim Horton's?
It's one of the great, unsolved mysteries of our time
By Peter Desbarats - For the London Free Press
July 22, 2000
Summertime is as good a time as any to leave aside the great questions of London politics - Why is the arena going to be on the Talbot site? Why is the mayor going to Washington? - and consider one of the great mysteries of our time: Why does everyone go to Tim Horton's?
Free Press Business Editor Paul Berton took a stab at answering this last month by asking his colleagues at The Free Press to test coffee from various caffeine outlets. The results of this experiment were confusing and inconclusive but I could have told him at the outset the scientific method wouldn't work.
Even Albert Einstein, who understood the force of gravity, couldn't have explained the powerful attraction of Tim Horton's, one of the strongest forces in the universe.
But one fact is certain. It has nothing to do with the coffee. I can bear witness to that because I go to Tim Horton's and I am not a coffee drinker.
Most of the time I drink tea.
Tim Horton's doesn't pretend to be a tea shop and with good reason. Its tea is unremarkable and unpourable. You know those little tin teapots with the loose lids that dribble? If Tim Horton's didn't invent them, it has engineered them to a new peak of imperfection.
Someone once told me a supposedly secret method of using this type of pot.
The secret is you lift its lid before you start to pour. I can tell you an even better secret - it doesn't work. Lifting the lid only burns your finger and thumb while enabling you to see exactly how the tea flows from the inside of the pot to the outside of the spout before cascading all over your table and splattering into your lap.
Tim Horton's has refined this tea torture by engineering its mugs so that the distance between the two sides of the rim is not quite equal to the hypotenuse between the tip of the spout and the base of the teapot. It's exactly three centimetres longer, which means that there is no way the twin streams of tea from the spout and the base can enter the cup at the same time.
This is known to Tim Horton's tea-drinkers as "Flow Down the Rim to Swim."
Despite all this, I'm a fairly regular customer. Several mornings a week you can find me at the one in my neighborhood, at Oxford and Adelaide streets, having an oatmeal raisin muffin and tea. If no one has left an old copy of The Free Press lying around, I'll sit there trying to figure out why the place is always so crowded.
Incidentally - and only a Tim Horton's regular would understand how significant this is - I've discovered in my travels that oatmeal raisin muffins are not found in every Tim Horton's. You cannot get them at the Tim Horton's further north on Adelaide at Huron Street nor at the one on Dundas Street East near the racetrack.
Which raises the question - Who determines which Tim Horton's carry oatmeal raisin muffins and which do not? Do they take customer surveys?
Does the fact my Tim Horton's stocks them mean that I am living in a dense cluster of oatmeal raisin muffin lovers? Is there someone at head office in Ohio who knows this and who decides which Tim Horton's get oatmeal raisin muffins and which get chocolate chip?
Yes, Ohio. Because Tim Horton's is named after a dead Canadian hockey player, whom I am old enough to remember, I assumed for years it was a Canadian chain, even a Canadian success story. After all, there are more than 1,700 Tim Horton's in Canada and only 110 in the United States.
While it was once owned in Canada, now the American tail wags the Canadian dog and this most Canadian of institutions is controlled by Wendy's International Inc. from some town no one has ever heard of in Ohio.
So if I'm not sitting in Tim Horton's because it's Canadian, because of the coffee or because of the paper napkins soggy with spilled tea, why am I there?
I can think of a few reasons. Because it's familiar. It always looks more or less the same wherever it is. Because it's clean. Because it's still relatively cheap even in our devalued dollars. Because it's predictable.
Because the people behind the counter are usually nice and so are the customers. Because there's always a murmur of good- natured conversation.
And because it's owned in the United States.
Come to think of it, that makes each Tim Horton's sound like a miniature Canada. Is that good or bad?
Hey, it's summer. Who cares?
Peter Desbarats is an author, journalist and former journalism dean at UWO.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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