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Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Tim Hortons is everywhere in Canada and they used to be decent. The current owners are subsisting on brand recognition and market inertia.

Once enough negative associations form with the brand, it'll be the work of a generation to turn things around. Tracking user locations probably won't have a huge impact. Most people just don't care enough about privacy issues.

Tim Horton's real problem is that they are becoming known for bad coffee, bad donuts, and bad food, while similarly ubiquitous chains, like McDonalds, now have decent coffee and have added donuts to their menus. If I have to choose between a McDonalds burger and a microwaved chicken-finger with a shelf-stabilized tortilla wrapped around it from Tim Horton's, the choice is easy. Practically every truck-stop town that has a Tim Horton's also has a McDonald's very close by, so it really is just market inertia propping Tim Horton's up at this point.

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> Tim Hortons is everywhere in Canada and they used to be decent.

Apparently before Wendy's bought them out (mid-90s) that was true, but I'm too young to remember. It certainly hasn't been true since that time. Even co-founder Ron Joyce lamented at the time about how the quality was decimated under their ownership.

> Tim Horton's real problem is that they are becoming known for bad coffee, bad donuts, and bad food

Tim Hortons' problem is that Tim Horton's daughter, who is a Tim Hortons franchisee, made some negative comments towards minimum wage workers which was mistaken to have come from Tim Hortons corporate.

The bad coffee, food, and donuts isn't anything new. They moved to the par-baked donuts in 2003 (a part of the same Wendy's push for cheapness). People were willing to overlook the bad quality for decades because they felt they were supporting an upstanding Canadian business. The aforementioned comments changed minds about that.

I do have childhood memories from the late 80s/early 90s where I remember them making the donuts in store. They were better and had a lot more varieties.

In the brief period when they were still baking in store and indoor smoking was banned, it was a pleasant experience to go into a Tims, even if you were just getting a coffee.

I used to live near the first Tim Horton's. A tiny, smokey storefront on the east side of Hamilton.

You could taste the cigarette butts in the crullers

The coffee was so weak it tasted like the cardboard-and-wax cups it came in. There's a reason why they marketed ordering "double-double" (double cream, double sugar), it's the only way to get any flavour!

In the early nineties they opened a fancy new non-smoking one in Westmount, and the donuts were freshly baked in-house. I would go out of my way to visit that one, the crullers would melt in your mouth, and the chocolate walnut actually tasted like chocolate and walnut.

It wasn't too long before the donuts were centrally distributed, and with that they became completely artificial. Nowadays every flavour tastes the same - sickly sweet with lingering sour-chemical note.

Personally I'd rather have the cigg butt taste back.

I still associate the smell of cigarette smoke with doughnuts.

Also worth noting that McDonalds started buying their coffee from Mother Parkers, Tim Hortons' longtime supplier, after Tims was bought by Burger King/Brazillians and switched to distressing dirty bean water to save money.

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