Douglas Hunter - Double Double: How Tim Hortons Became a Canadian Way of Life, One Cup at a Time

I N O CTOBER 2010, I received an email from a vintage paper collector. Attached was an image of a coupon. DROP IN AT Tim Hortons Restaurant, read the black type on yellow paper announcing the opening of a new outlet, at 353 Yonge Street in Toronto, in what had become a four-restaurant chain. This coupon was good for ten cents off 1 doz. delicious donutssixty-five cents instead of the usual seventy-fiveand promised Over 50 Varieties to choose from. The bottom of the coupon listed the three other restaurant locations: 1961 Lawrence Avenue East, at Wayne; 3092 Kingston Road, at McCowan Road; and 111 Lakeshore Boulevard, in Port Credit, to the west of Toronto. A note on the back of the coupon, the collector explained, was dated December 10, 1963.

I am trying to research these four locations and I cant find any information about them, she wrote me. Do you know if these are Tim Hortons locations?

In the official capsule history of Tim Hortons, these outlets and this formative period do not exist. The Toronto era of original restaurants bearing Hortons name remains a complicating prelude that the present quick-service (a.k.a. fast food) restaurant juggernaut doesnt address. Officially, the restaurant chains start is variously given as 1964, when the first franchise opened in Hamilton, or 1965, when the company Tim Donut Ltd. (TDL), the core legal entity of todays operation, was incorporated. And yet, as this collectors marvellous find reiterated, there were restaurants with Tim Hortons name on them in and around Toronto in 1963, and indeed doughnuts were involved.

Despite the fact that the collector said she couldnt find any information about these four restaurants, I had discussed them in Open Ice, my 1994 biography of the restaurant chains eponymous founder. I presume the book was why she contacted me in the first place. Except for Horton himself, who had been dead for twenty years, I had interviewed pretty well all of the principal figures in the earliest days of Hortons restaurant ventures for that book and knew at once that this coupon upheld my research.

The coupon was promoting one of the very first restaurants Tim Horton set up in 1963 with a partner, Jim Charade, through a company called Timanjim Ltd. The three outlets listed at the bottom were burger drive-ins (the one in Port Credit had home-delivery chicken). The new restaurant at 353 Yonge had an open grill as well as a display of doughnuts that were made at and driven down from the very first Horton-branded doughnut outlet, called Tim Horton Do-Nut, a separate business from Timanjim Ltd. that Charade operated in Scarborough, for which he licensed Hortons name. The coupon most certainly was made by a fellow named Dennis Griggs, who produced signage and promotional coupons for Charade, at one point ran two of the early doughnut outlets in Toronto and was a good friend of Hortons. Charade and Griggs were part of a milieu of small businesspeople Horton had gotten to know in Scarborough, during his glory days as a star defenceman with the Toronto Maple Leafs, as he looked for opportunities beyond the NHL even as he was in the midst of winning four Stanley Cups between 1962 and 1967.

To say the least, the Tim Hortons restaurant story had evolved considerably since Charade and Horton opened the fourth outlet in the Timanjim partnership and stuck some doughnuts from Charades Scarborough doughnut store in the window. But the story had also evolved considerably since I published Hortons biography in 1994. The chain, then privately held by Ron Joycewho entered the story as the third franchisee at the original Hamilton store in 1965 and became Hortons business partner in 1966had almost doubled in size since 1990 and was approaching 1,000 outlets when Open Ice came out. Nine days before I heard from the vintage paper collector in 2010, Tim Hortons, a publicly traded company listed on the Toronto and New York stock exchanges since 2006, had concluded its third quarter with an operating income of $133 million on net sales of $670.5 million from almost 4,000 outlets. But those numbers represented only Tim Hortons take as the franchisor. Systemwide, the restaurants were generating more than $5 billion in revenues annually.

I had wanted to return to the Tim Hortons storythe story of the restaurant chainever since Open Ice was published in 1994. By sheer coincidence, I had just begun working on the book you are now reading when the email from the paper collector arrived. The corporate-origins story I had previously told was buried inside a sport biography. Many of the people I had interviewed, including Tim Hortons brother, Gerry, and his widow, Lori; his original partner, Jim Charade; the first franchisee at the celebrated first outlet in Hamilton, Spencer Brown; and Hortons close friend on the Leafs, Billy Harris, had since died. The memories and observations they had all shared with me were precious records of the companys origins and of Tim Horton the individual. With this book, I could revisit those early days in the context of the modern company that bears Hortons name.

I was fortunate to have my interviews with many key people who were no longer alive, as well as other significant figures, including Ron Joyce. (As a note of style, I have flagged quotations from those past interviews with the phrases recalled for me and told me.) As I returned to these interviews, I found new issues to explore in the early history, among them the role of Harveys, the landscape of coffee shops in Hamilton when the first franchise opened, how this modest coffee-and-doughnut enterprise fit into the nascent quick-service restaurant (QSR) sector, and how Tims managed to emerge from this primordial entrepreneurial soup to dominate the Canadian QSR industry.

One of the most compelling issues today is the nature of identity and brand, of where (if anywhere) Tim Horton the man can be found in his namesake chain today. I also wanted to delve into how the chain has come to be embraced as a national cultural symbol in Canada, to the point of becoming entwined in the electoral fortunes of politicians and parties shaping brand identities of their own. I now also wanted to understand how Canada collectively was supposed to have somehow become Tim Hortons as well, which had not been the case almost twenty years ago. I also hoped to make sense of what the future might hold for such an iconic Canadian institution as it pursues expansion in the United States and confronts unprecedented competition in its own backyard.

N OTWITHSTANDING the Toronto backstory captured by the promotional flyer the vintage paper collector had come upon, the essential tale of Tim Hortons is that the chain began with the single franchise outlet in Hamilton in 1964, which led to a partnership between Horton and franchisee Ron Joyce in 1966. After Hortons death in a car accident in February 1974, the parent company, or franchisor, Tim Donut Ltd., became owned half by Joyce and half by Hortons widow, Lori, albeit with a trust instrument triggered by Hortons death that gave Joyce control. Joyce bought out Lori Horton in 1975 for $1 million and a company car. In 1987, Lori filed suit against Joyce and her lawyer at the time of the sale, claiming she had been mentally incompetent at the time of the sale because of drug and alcohol abuse and had been taken advantage of by a lowball purchase. The suit failed.