So, Tim Hortons (aka the Church of Canada) opened up a franchise or two in Korea in 2023, with plans to expand to 150 stores within... a time frame... in the future. You might be able to guess how much I care about this.
Now, don't get me wrong - Timmies was a staple of the Canadian (or Ontarian) experience by the 1990s. If you're not from there, I'd explain it by saying it was an omnipresent experience, unless you lived in a rural area like I did and didn't get one until...sometime in the mid 2000s (by which I mean 2005 or so). But there was one or two in Peterborough, a city 45 minutes from home, and I learned to stomach developed a taste for coffee drinking Tim's double doubles (double cream, double sugar), but the real draw was the donuts.
To be honest though, I preferred Country Style Donuts' donuts to Tim's... their cherry crullers were to die for (though a friend who worked there later told me how many eggs went into a batch of those donuts - I think it was 48 eggs per dozen... those things were heavy... but delicious). At any rate, Tim Hortons and their drive throughs were all over the place on highways in Ontario, so they served as a good way to refuel with caffeine on hours-long drives across wide-open Ontario spaces, as bathroom stops, or, as time went on and their menus broadened, a place to grab a slightly-wider range of sandwich and soup options, in addition to donuts and coffee. But my memories of working in Guelph, Ontario, in the late 1990s, feature runs to Tims to grab a cardboard flat that would hold 4 or 5 coffees to bring back to work for your coworkers, and in that way Tims contributed to fuel the office and retail grind of suburban Ontario (I can't speak for the rest of Canada).
But now, Timmies has opened up franchises in Gangnam, the 'Beverly Hills' of Korea, or whatever. And while the the company and its Korean partners are clearly banking on a "premium" image to propel sales in Korea ("Canada's greatest most popular coffee and donuts!"), this is being undone by Korean media outlets keen to question things foreign and - more importantly - the throngs of Koreans who have studied in Canada, which can't help but make me chuckle, considering the effort the Canadian embassy was putting into promoting university or English language study in Canada a decade ago (when I had contacts there), which I'm sure continues now.
The Korea Times reports on the woes of someone who studied in Canada years ago:
Stepping inside Korea's first Tim Hortons that opened last month, however, he scanned the menu and was disheartened to see that everything was way more expensive than he remembered. A medium-size cup of black coffee was 3,900 won ($3.97 Canadian). The same is sold in Canada for $1.83.
"I was hugely disappointed," said Kim who expected prices similar to Canada's. "If Tim Hortons in Canada sold their double-double and French Vanilla at the same prices as here in Seoul, I would have never gone there and neither would local patrons there."
Similar woes are reported by a former language student in Canada who "couldn't accept the fact that the brand's prices are almost on par with those of other high-end coffee brands here. 'I don't get why they raised the prices to the levels of other coffee brands here. Is this some kind of localization?'"
Um... yes? Obviously? The only way to feel you're at some place on the cutting edge of hip in Korea is to feel a bit (or a lot) sore in your wallet at the cash register. If you want cheap, you can go to campus cafeterias, but you're not going to find the Instagram influencers businesses are increasingly spending their advertising budgets on there. Thinking Timmies could expand here by undercutting local budget places would be a good way to guarantee they close up shop within a few months.
Mostly, though, I'm surprised at the focus on coffee and the lack of mention of anything about the cost of their old fashioned glazed or their timbits. What of their sandwiches? Do these coffee drinking philistines care nothing about Canadian cuisine?!?
Postscript
I don't remember Timmies having anything like Country Style's cherry crullers, but apparently last year, for a limited time, Tim's brought back "cherry sticks", which I don't remember from back in the day (trust me, I would have noticed if they had something like a cherry cruller), but which is very similar. Those things were heavy bars which could likely take out someone's eye if you aimed just right.
The second thing to note is that, whatever fun I may poke at Tims, whenever I've gone home and eaten one of their donuts (an obvious choice since Tims is rather ubiquitous at this point), I've thought they were delicious, but when this prompted me to have a Dunkin' Donuts donut in Korea, I'd remember that Koreans like their sugar spread throughout their food, and not concentrated into a singular point like the bottom of a gravity well the way Canadians do, and I'd wrinkle my nose at the local donuts' blandness and avoid them thereafter.
