Like us, you’ve probably pondered Starbucks’ complete and total domination by asking, rhetorically, “What’ll they serve next, beer and wine?” And the answer is yes—that’s exactly what they’ll serve next (in limited markets in the States). But while Starbucks is expanding into booze, Tim Hortons has been muscling into the Starbucks market with outlandishly sized coffees and espresso-based drinks. Sure, their espresso might “smell like aluminum” and their latte might taste “tinny,” but the move is a clear encroachment on Starbucks’ turf. Not to be outdone, Starbucks seems to be trying to woo some of Tim Hortons’ customers with its new blonde roast. In a promotional video, one of their roasters says the new offering is perfect “for the person who always wished that Starbucks had a roast like this.” In other words, writes Jessica Allen at Maclean’s, it’s perfect for the typical Tim Hortons customer. It’s a subtle play, but if Starbucks tries to sign Sidney Crosby or appeal to sleepy Canadian nationalism, we’ll know what’s going on. Read the entire story [Macleans] »

Starbucks vs. Tim Hortons cup sizes (N.B.: Starbucks’s trenta size not included, since it’s only for cold drinks)

In news that’s already sending shock waves across the nation, Tim Hortons announced today that it’s introducing a new, larger coffee size: the mammoth, 24-ounce extra large, which will appear in stores January 23. To accommodate the new name, the old 20-ounce extra large has been renamed large, the old 14-ounce large is now a medium, the old 10-ounce medium is now small and the old eight-ounce small is extra small. If this is a cash grab, it’s not a blatant one: consumers will pay the same price for the same amount of coffee (e.g. a new small will cost what an old medium used to cost). No word yet on retaliatory measures from Starbucks, whose puny 20-ounce venti has now been definitively outclassed (and no, its trenta doesn’t count; it’s only for cold drinks).

(Image: Christopher Drost)

Rob Ford is wrapping up his year-end interview circuit, having spoken to (most of) the city’s major dailies, along with a few local broadcasters. The media bits are mostly predictable affairs, with Ford repeating things he’s been saying since he ran for office. But there are a few gems hidden among all the talking points. In the Globe, for instance, Ford professes his love for quarterback Tim Tebow. While the interviews are disappointing, it’s worth noting that it’s Ford, not the reporters, who deserves much of the blame here (although not always). Ford’s the one who seems unable to stray from a small smattering of talking points. A roundup of the mayor’s media blitz after the jump.

1. The National Post nails it
Somewhat surprisingly, it’s the National Post that offered arguably the strongest year-end interview with the mayor. Sure, there’s the usual material—the vehicle registration tax, talk about graffiti, various unsubstantiated claims—but there’s lots of good stuff, too. The Post may have endorsed Ford for mayor, but that doesn’t stop its reporter from challenging Ford to explain what he means when he says he’s created jobs or pointing out that his definition of “service cut” is a tad warped. Oh, and the story notes that his math on Sheppard subway extension is way off.

2. The Globe and Mail reveals who Ford’s besties are
The Globe’s rapid-fire Q and A with the mayor makes for a healthy serving of absurdity divvied up in bite-sized morsels. The mayor says he wants to axe 7,000 jobs—“give or take”—and at one point, uses a football analogy to explain transit funding. Then, of course, there’s the mayor’s answer to a question about whether or not he eats his meals at home: “Tim Hortons and McDonald’s have become like best friends.”

3. CP24 lobs the mayor softballs
Stephen LeDrew and his fantastic eyebrows spoke to Ford last week in what looked more like a chummy Christmas chat than, you know, journalism. If Ford’s refusal to budge from his talking points weren’t so illustrative of his careful handling of his message, watching this clip would be completely pointless. Ford also said he gets “30 or 40” invitations to local events each night and expressed his surprise that that many events take place in Toronto.

4. Wait, Ford still talks to the CBC?
The CBC’s interview with Ford was more of the same. We’re just surprised, given that Ford froze out the Star for this, that he’s still talking to the CBC after the whole Marg Delahunty thing.

5. The mayor’s daily newsletter offers exactly what we would expect
The Sun spread their year-end coverage of Ford out over a couple of equally sympathetic articles and videos. Naturally, Ford says what he always says (and even dusts off a tried-and-true line about Kyle Rae’s $12,000 retirement party). Of course, Ford is losing support on council, hoping to pass an impossible budget, and watching his Sheppard fantasies slowly die, but the Sun doesn’t see it that way. According to the paper, he’s not in serious political trouble; he’s “defiant under fire.”

6. The Toronto Star finally lands an interview with Ford
Just kidding. Star reporter Daniel Dale, however, recommends the Post’s interview.

Bulldog owner Stuart Ross at his downtown coffee shop (Image: Meaghan Binstock)

Monday marked the arrival of the new line of Tim Hortons “premium espresso”–based drinks we told you about a couple weeks back. Nestled in next to the iced cappuccino machine at Ontario locations is a new spaceship-like contraption that spits out everything from a simple espresso ($1.19) to cappuccinos ($2) and fancy-flavoured lattes ($2) using powdered milk. With one press of the appropriate button, the drink comes out, coffee, milk and all (there’s also a happy face made out of sprinkled cocoa on top of each beverage). To mark the occasion—and satisfy our curiosity about the stuff—we asked Stuart Ross, the owner of Bulldog Coffee and a champion barista, for his professional’s opinion on Timmy’s latest creation. What followed was a lot of confusion and some less-than-smiley faces, starting with the espresso. »

See you latte; Tim Hortons executive chairman, president and CEO Paul House (Image: CNW Group/Tim Hortons Inc.)

Tim Hortons, that Canadian bastion of par-baked doughnuts and extreme folksiness, announced yesterday that it will soon be making espresso-based coffees available in 2,500 locations across Canada. The drinks, which include lattes, cappuccinos and espressos, will be selling for significantly less than at their competitors: a 10-ounce latte is priced at just $2, compared to $2.95 for 8-ounces at Starbucks.

While Tim’s has served cappuccinos for some time, they’ve always been made with a powdered substance. Apparently they also experimented with the real deal at a few GTA locations in 2005. The chain is now upgrading to genuine espresso, albeit run through an automatic machine as at Starbucks’s. Customers will also get real steamed or frothed milk, but without choosing from among their competitors’ tens of thousands of possible drink variables like decaffeination, fat and lactose content, foam or temperature.

While luxury coffee seems like an obvious route for expansion (even McDonald’s started selling the stuff), we admit we’re a little wary: Timmies has made its fortune on inexpensive, quick food and drink, and we’re not sure how well a premium product like espresso will do. For a glimpse at the potential harrowing future, consider the “lasagna” the company started offering last month. Ontario gets the $2 latte on November 14, while the rest of the country will have to wait until mid-December.

• Tim Hortons tiptoes into Starbucks territory [National Post]
• Tim Hortons to take on competitors with its own espresso coffees [Ottawa Citizen]
• Tim Hortons ramps up coffee chain wars [CBC News]

The coffee display at Manic Coffee (Image: Renée Suen from the Torontolife.com Flickr pool)

On Tuesday, the Toronto Star reported that Starbucks had raised its prices for coffee and other beverages across the country by anywhere from 10 to 15 cents for a grande bold (16 ounces). This comes after Tim Hortons raised its prices back in April, which interim CEO Paul House attributed to the increasing cost of coffee thanks to a fungus that destroys coffee plants in Colombia. We decided to survey several local coffee retailers to see how a shift in the market is affecting their business. Check out whose prices went up, whose stayed the same and what innovative measures are being taken to offset costs, after the jump.

First, a little primer on prices (skip down if economics makes your head hurt): coffee is the second-most-traded commodity in the world behind crude oil, with two of the most common types of beans traded in financial markets—Arabica and Robusta. Arabica is traded in the New York Mercantile Exchange, while Robusta is traded on the NYSE Liffe Exchange in London. Because of this, pricing can be affected by the macroeconomic and geopolitical environment, as well as by basic supply and demand and weather conditions. It is also positively correlated with other commodities such as cocoa and sugar. In May, coffee prices hit a 14-year high.

Here’s what the local shops told us:

• I Deal Coffee in Kensington confirmed it has indeed increased prices to offset increasing costs. “Bean prices have shot up, milk prices have shot up, energy, fuel—all those things just started eating away at the bottom line,” says manager Ian Jones. I Deal Coffee increased the price of a 12-ounce coffee from $2 to $2.25, but Jones says margins are still lower than they were a year ago.

• Then there’s Manic Coffee on College Street, where prices were raised in April but have since been dropped back to remain competitive based on neighbourhood pricing. At Manic, a 12-ounce cup of coffee is $2.

• Leslieville’s Te Aro kept the price of its brewed coffee the same, but the shop’s roasted coffee bean prices have increased noticeably in the last six months—a response to the price of C futures. Depending on the type of coffee, current prices range from $16 per pound to $22 per pound, up a dollar from previous costs.

• At Crema Coffee’s Bloor Street location, brewed coffee retail prices stayed the same, but a bag now costs $16 to $22, up from $14 to $21 in the last year.

• Similarly, Dark Horse in Riverside hasn’t increased the cost of its brewed coffee in five years, but the price of bag of coffee has recently increased from $12 to $18.

• At Sam James Coffee Bar on Harbord, prices haven’t risen—yet. Owner Sam James says he expects some sort of price increase to happen, but he notes that coffee futures are unpredictable: “I’ve heard that prices are going up globally but also that prices went down last week because of inconsistencies with oil,” James said. For James, pricing also depends on the roaster he buys his beans from—since those charges haven’t increased, neither have those at his shop.

• Things are noticeably different at The Common in Dufferin Grove. Sure, prices have stayed the same, but owner Ed Lau told us he’s made a few other adjustments to offset costs. “We’re experimenting with not having glassware because the labour [to wash them] is so high,” Lau said. “So we only have to-go cups, and it averages out that a week’s wage is almost 5,000 to-go cups.” This is the first time in its five years that The Common hasn’t had glassware, but rising coffee, milk and rent prices meant making changes in order to keep the cost of a cup of joe down to $2. “I think it’s a good deal and it’s something that’s important,” Lau said.

• Ezra Braves, proprietor of Ezra’s Pound told us it can be difficult for independent coffee shops to raise prices. “Often the perception is that an independent business has less of a right to raise its prices, and because the relationships are more personalized, there’s always a face to engage with in terms of pricing.” Ezra’s Pound increased its prices recently by about 10 cents, with the price of a hand-brewed cup of coffee now costing from $2.85 to $3.85. “Considering the love and labour that goes into making a cup of coffee the price is fairly inexpensive,” he said.

We’re pretty sure that Tim Hortons brass were excited to set up shop in Dubai last weekend, but going by initial reports, that’s nothing compared to the joy of expats who’ve discovered a tiny oasis of Canadiana away from home. Sure, we’re used to getting our fix at any of three locations within spitting distance, but Canadians living in the Middle East have had to live Timbit-free since leaving home. We decided to poke around the Emirati blogosphere to see how locals and blissfully re-caffeinated Canucks have taken the big news.

• Writer James O’Hearn rushed to be the first Tim Hortons customer in the United Arab Emirates, and was thus the first to discover some minor differences from homegrown Timmy’s: larger, American-size cups, no “everything” bagels (importing poppy seeds is apparently very, very illegal) and a distinct lack of a drive-through lane. “Yet for all the differences I saw,” he writes, “it still felt like home.”

• Roula and Samer, the former Torontonians behind 2 Foodies in Dubai, were appalled to see macaroni and cheese on the menu (something that’s on U.S. menus as well), but the rest was “a Canadian taste extravaganza.” Sampling just about everything, they were overjoyed to find that the bagels tasted like bagels, “like they do at every Tim Hortons in Canada and not like someone took standard bread dough and rolled it into a circle.”

• Sangeeta Reghu Nair of Sangry Words had never tried Tim Hortons before, but knew from Canuck friends that the coffee and Timbits are “stuff of Canadian legend.” The company’s plan to undercut the competition may be working; after marvelling at the price of the coffee, she writes, “I hate to admit but I need to say to all my Canadian friends that I sort of now understand their love for Tim Hortons. I feel half-Canadian this evening!”

• A defender of the faith delivered three boxes of Timmys to Ann Marie McQueen, the presumably doughnut-deprived author of A Canadian in Abu Dhabi. “Like a long-distance delivery of pure love,” she writes. “I am not going to lie—the sight of that logo choked me up a little.”

• A Waterloo lecturer teaching at the university’s Dubai campus (yes, there’s a Dubai campus) made friends with a pair of fellow Canadians over an Ice Capp. She noted, “That just doesn’t happen at a Tim Hortons in Canada.”

• The Dubai location prompted plenty of activity on Twitter. While most Canadians maxed out their 140 characters on exclamation marks, locals wondered what all the fuss was about, and one cynic even called it “one of those stories that alien intelligence agencies on a faraway planet read and think man, humans are weird.” And of course, it’s all over Foursquare.

• Tim Hortons Invades Dubai [Jimmy’s House]
• Roll up the Rim! [2 Foodies In Dubai]
• I feel half-Canadian this evening! [Sangry Words]
• Tim Hortons IN MY OFFICE, RIGHT NOW [A Canadian in Abu Dhabi]
• Tim Hortons—a Canadian Icon in Dubai [sandyindubai]

(Images: Dubai, Nelson Ebelt; cup, Tim Hortons)

(Image: Tim Hortons)

After fulfilling its mission to open three stores for every library in Canada, this weekend Tim Hortons went ahead and set up shop in Dubai. According to a story in The National, Canadian expats swarmed the “Tim Hortons Café and Bake Shop” on opening day, rejoicing that the coffee and doughnuts taste exactly the same—which is not surprising, coming from the company with the infamous finely tuned par-bake then freeze process. The Dubai location has the same menu we’re used to—sadly no fun McArabia Kofta equivalent—and the staff has been fully educated on what that whole “double double” thing means.

Of course the franchise can’t sustain themselves on Canucks in the United Arab Emirates forever, which is why they’re banking on their cheaper “value-priced” fare to keep them solvent in a mature coffee market. Tim Hortons has self-serve kiosks in Ireland and an extensive presence in the States, but this outpost stands as the company’s first true overseas export. The plan is to open 120 locations in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman over the next five years. Apologies to the Middle East, but resistance is futile.

• Tim Hortons outlet in Dubai mobbed by Canadian expats [The National]

Not a Tim Hortons (Image: Anthony Easton)

We suspect that “fact-checking the Fords” will be a growth industry for city hall watchers, especially after Ed Keenan’s piece in the The Grid giving a rundown of five examples in just one week. But this one, uncovered by the (library union–backed) advocates at OurPublicLibrary and picked up by the Toronto Star is kind of a howler: Doug Ford was quoted on the radio as saying “We have more libraries per person than any other city in the world. I’ve got more libraries in my area than I have Tim Hortons.” That statement is getting the drubbing it deserves on Twitter (look for the hashtag #booksnotdonutsforford), and the facts are pretty clear.

From the Star:

According to library union president Maureen O’Reilly, Etobicoke has 13 library branches and 39 Tim Hortons. Three library branches are in areas Ford represents, Ward 2, Etobicoke North, while the Tim Hortons website shows seven of their shops in the ward.

Ford didn’t respond to a request for comment…

Asked to comment, the library provided some comparisons. Toronto has one library for every 28,120 citizens, fewer than Hamilton (one branch per 21,629); Ottawa (27,527); and Vancouver (27,976). But Toronto does better than Mississauga (40,555); Montreal (36,833) and Calgary (61,346).

This is what’s kind of maddening about these kinds of statements. Civilization isn’t collapsing in Montreal or Calgary (though the latter’s mayor, Naheed Nenshi, has been pushing for more money for Calgary’s library) so there’s a reasonable argument to be made that yes, maybe Toronto could survive with fewer libraries. If there’s an over-served part of Toronto’s library system, let’s have that debate—and hell, let’s talk about stuff like evolving reading technology and whether fewer libraries could deliver the same services more effectively. But comparing libraries to the number of Tim Hortons franchises is meaningless, and making stuff up like “we have more libraries per person than any other city in the world” is just silly.

• Reality Check [OutPublicLibrary]
• Doughnuts vs books? In Ford’s Etobicoke, it’s 3-1 [Toronto Star]
• Top five Ford truthiness fact checks of the week [The Grid]

Joe Fresh

Of course there are some Canadian success stories, like Lululemon and Tim Hortons, but the Post seems to think that Joe Fresh’s main competition in N.Y.C. is Uniqlo, a Japanese retailer known for its collaborations with design stalwarts like Opening Ceremony and Jil Sander. Uniqlo has the advantage of already being a globally established brand, with a market far larger than Joe’s loyal followers of frugal and shopping-obsessed Canadians. But hey, this is Joe’s first step down that road. What’s there to be skeptical about? If Joe could get people to buy clothes while shopping for Memories of Marrakech couscous, we’re sure they can get New Yorkers to buy cheap sweater sets.

• Chic, Along Fifth Ave., Moves Below 50th St. [The New York Times]
• Joe Fresh follows tough path into cutthroat NYC market [The Financial Post]

Battleground: the hotel union has co-opted celebrity guests, such as Martin Sheen, to draw attention to its cause (Photographs: Strikers by Cristal Cruz-Haicken; Street by Jerryb8/dreamstime.com/Getstock. Illustration by James Dawe)

On a warm morning last September, the managers of the Fairmont Royal York Hotel had a PR problem. The Toronto International Film Festival had just begun, and celebrities were trickling into the city. The 1,365-room downtown hotel was booked solid, and the lush Library Bar stocked with the ingredients for $14 TIFF Tinis, but outside on the sidewalk, hundreds of unionized Royal York workers were on strike, angrily accusing the hotel of exploiting them. They pounded on overturned buckets and exchanged call-and-response chants: “What do we want?” “Contract!” “When do we want it?” “Now!” And they marched back and forth across the grand Front Street entrance singing “We want a contract” to the tune of K’naan’s “Wavin’ Flag,” and hoisting red and black banners emblazoned with the logo of UNITE HERE, the aggressive international union that represents 8,000 hospitality workers across the GTA.

Outside the main doors, Martin Sheen stepped onto the pavement and was immediately mobbed by the crowd. He gave a thumbs-up to the strikers and began shaking hands and slapping backs, looking every bit the left-wing political hero he once played on television. The strikers eagerly linked arms with him and marched before the cameras and TV crews that were scrambling to get the best angle. Someone thrust a megaphone into Sheen’s hands, and he gamely improvised a few slogans. “When it gets tough in labour disputes like these, people say that it’s a lost cause,” he said, his voice rising passionately. “Well, I’m here to remind you that lost causes are the only causes worth fighting for!” The logic seemed a little shaky, but the crowd roared its approval anyway. “Stick to it like a stamp!” he shouted with a final wave, before he and his son Emilio Estevez were whisked off in a white Escalade.

Sheen’s appearance on the picket lines was on all the newscasts that night­—as the union knew it would be—adding a little flash and glam to the story of a labour dispute. For the Royal York, a hotel with a history of peaceful and relatively progressive labour relations, the one-day strike was an embarrassment, the first time workers had walked out in almost 50 years. For UNITE HERE, it was a successful media event—a protest shrewdly designed to gain public support for the workers and send hotel owners across the city a message.

The hospitality industry is bouncing back after a disastrous 2009. Though it may be a few years before hotels return to the record profits of 2007, Canadian occupancy levels and revenue have both nudged upward. As hospitality corporations grow, UNITE HERE wants to make sure that workers’ benefits and salaries grow, as well. What was at stake at the Royal York was job security: the hotel’s owners wanted more power to add and subtract shifts depending on daily demand, while the union wanted a stable schedule—and a stable living—for a group of workers who are mostly visible minorities and immigrant women.

The union’s leaders have an even bigger agenda. In 2010, there were contracts up for negotiation at close to 30 hotels across the GTA. “We want to do for the hospitality industry what organized labour did for the auto sector,” says J. J. Fueser, a research analyst at Local 75, the Toronto branch of UNITE HERE. “We want to turn menial labour into middle-class employment.” It’s a tall order: they’re up against powerful multinational corporations and a public largely unsympathetic to unions.

The Fairmont Royal York is a behemoth, a château-shaped slab of limestone that stretches out over a large city block. The hotel’s main-floor kitchen is an east-to-west airport runway of fluorescent lighting, ochre tiles and gas oven ranges. Each year, the hotel washes five million pounds of laundry, which workers pile into industrial machines the size of suburban garages. When it was first constructed in 1929, across the street from the newly inaugurated Union Station, the hotel was the tallest building in the British Empire and the ultimate symbol of modern opulence. Ads from the time called it “a city within a city block,” but it’s more like a medieval castle, with managers and cooks and maids all coexisting under an almost feudal hierarchy within the building’s thick stone walls.

At the top of the chain are the mostly white and decently paid front-of-house workers. Craig Reaume, the manager in charge of day-to-day operations, presides over the hotel’s 1,200 staff. Reaume is a tall, slender, seemingly unflappable man whose most animated facial expression, produced during moments of extreme stress, is a bemused knitting of the eyebrows. Like so many of the managers at the Royal York, Reaume is able to appear simultaneously aloof and attentive—the precise demeanour that you’d hope to find in an experienced butler. Like many of the managers, too, Reaume is a lifelong student of the science of Making People Feel Comfortable. Hospitality is something that everyone at a hotel takes extremely seriously, from the managers to the bellhops. All high-class hotels have beds and televisions and tiny bottles of complimentary shampoo, so the difference between a satisfied guest and a less-than-satisfied guest—and this is not a minor, touchy-feely difference, but a multimillion-dollar distinction empirically measured by market research firms and then endlessly analyzed and worried over by upper-level management—generally comes down to hospitality, that delicate mixture of servility and human warmth that hotel managers have done their best to systematically instill in their workers.

In opening up the shop a few weeks ago, Turner wasn’t trying to make inroads into the city’s growing craft coffee scene (Parkdale’s caffeinated set already has options on that front, like Cherry Bomb and Capital). Instead, he’s just looking to offer fair-trade, organic java at a good price—single espressos are just $1.75, taxes in—and without the attitude. “We just want to give good coffee to everybody,” Turner says. “We don’t want to be too elitist.”

That said, the new shop fits right in with its West Queen West surroundings. Nearly all the furniture is second-hand, including a set of shelves discovered on a curb, and a table in the back “chill-out” area that was fashioned out of an old door.

All the coffee is sourced from Guelph’s Planet Bean and is also sold in bulk ($4 per 100 grams). Rounding out the user experience is free Wi-Fi, plenty of seating and pastries from Circles and Squares. For now, the shop’s hoping to pick up on the boom of new businesses in the area, as well as the void left by a recently closed big guy nearby: Coffee Time.

The Big Guy’s Coffee Shop, 1718 Queen St. W., 416-389-1161, Facebook page.

(Images: Jon Sufrin)

According to the Globe and Mail:

The company says it will accept debit payment at about 90 per cent of its 3,000 locations across the country.

Three years ago it began taking MasterCard credit cards and introduced a prepaid gift card option.

Tim Hortons has accepted debit cards in Western Canada since 2003.

Wait, what? They’ve been able to pay with debit out west since the Iraq War started, but it’s taken two prime ministers for this magical technology to percolate out east? Are Calgarians more patient when it comes to waiting for someone to remember their debit code after the third try? Do Vancouverites not tap their feet and sigh as audibly as Torontonians do?

Hopefully, the delays in lineups won’t last too long: a Tim Hortons representative told the Toronto Star that the caffeine-monger is always looking for new ways to improve service, including potentially adopting Interac Flash, a no-touch form of payment similar to what’s offered by Mastercard.

Debit-swiping Timmies customers will be able to start trying our patience by the end of the month.

• Debit in the cards for Tim Hortons [Globe and Mail]
• Tim Hortons to accept debit cards [Toronto Star]
• Tim Hortons allowing debit nationwide [Canadian Business Journal]
• Keep the change! Tim Hortons now takes debit [National Post]