Tim Hortons
5
I work at Timmies.
I actually enjoy my job. I work with good people, reasonable management and supervisors, and the job itself is not too hard, and certainly not unpleasant. I work, however, for minimum wage.
Let me break it down for you all. I get paid enough to: serve you coffee, serve donuts, make sandwiches, keep the store clean, wear an ugly uniform, fill orders correctly 99% of the time, and fix any order that I don't fill correctly the first time with a smile and profuse appologies, etc.
I do not get paid enough to be treated like crap, yelled at, and I certainly do not get paid enough to be perfect.
This whole tea "controversy" is absurd. Steeped tea is the Tim Hortons' specialty. We assume that you want steeped tea if you come to Timmies and ask for tea. Mention a bag, and we know you want bagged tea. "Bag in" (still in the tea), "bag out" or bag on the side" is enough.
Our food is never stale. We are inspected by "mystery shoppers", and the coffee has to be dumped down the sink 20 minutes after it's made and the donuts eight hours after they are made or the store owner can lose the franchise.
We know coffee and tea better than you do. You may know your order better than we do (especially if it's weird, ie 1/4 cream, 2.5 sweetners [people who ask minimum wage workers to put half a sweetner in their coffee go to hell, btw]), so be clear and patient when you order. But we're not crazy for assuming that you want cream in your tea. Most people want cream in their tea. I even clarify, "is that double double with milk or with cream in your tea?" and about 75% of the time, it's cream people want.
We can't recycle. Most municipalities don't accept recyclables from businesses. I'm not sure why, but it has nothing to do with us.
We sell some items in much larger quantities than others (no one eats sour cream plain donuts), but we also sell freakish amount of certain products on some days, and I'm not sure why. We'll sell an unexpected amout of dutchies all at once, and so run out, and that's just one of those weird things, but why the hell would you be surprised that we run out of popular things like white buns or chocolate chip muffins? If we get unexpectedly busy, we sell a lot and can't keep up... Because we keep our batches small to ensure freshness! McDonald's never runs out of burger buns, because they don't make them a dozen times a day to keep them as fresh as possible.
If you go through drive-thru and get the wrong coffee, most likely, we didn't make it wrong, we handed you the wrong one. It's an easy mistake to make when you hand out hundreds of coffees a day. It's pretty hard to accidentally accept a large instead of an extra large if you only have one coffee to worry about. Think about it.
We don't carry extra-large china mugs. No Tims carrys them. They don't exist. Criticize any of my coworkers for their ethnicity, and I will bitch you out. That's unacceptable. If you don't like immigrants, don't live in Canada. I have in the past, and will not hesitate to again in the future, tell you to, "Get the hell out of my drive-thru, and out of my country. No. No coffee for you. Go home and make your own goddamn coffee. Better yet, go to hell."
It's a sad, sad society we live in when people think that they can treat anyone as horribly as my coworkers and I have been treated. The $1.40 you pay for your coffee does not entitle you to treat me like crap.