Tim Hortons, Second Cup, Starbucks: Two Lines for Coffee or Lose All Your Coffee Business

Just like the whole world, I have long noticed that there are two kinds of coffee buyers—people who want coffee, and people who would like to buy something else.  –also a coffee, to be sure, but an _experience_.

Well, I gave up on Starbucks abt 5 years ago, and I gave up on Tims (with its deeply cherished bad grammar) at around the same time.

These franchises refused to respond to consumer demand in the most obvious of ways: one line for people who just wanted a coffee (not a macchiato or whatever), another line for people who didn’t.

Starbucks, Tims, they said to themselves, “well, we can keep people in line forever, and, once they finally get to the till, they will be so exhausted and influenced by other buyers that they will say to themselves, “yes, yes, I want the $14.95 macchiato.”  Didn’t happen for me; didn’t happen for many.  No wonder McDonald’s is so successful now.  Not only do they serve much better coffee than Tims, and come nigh on equalling anything else, but it just doesn’t matter whether some mom’s ordering 15 teenburgers for a softball team or not in front of you—you’re _still_ going to get your coffee much faster.  Bingo dingo.  I’m in there.  When I think fast decent coffee now, I think McDonald’s.  Oh, sure, I could stand in line at Starbucks or Tims for 20 mins, but if I haven’t got the latest encyclicals with me to read, no go.

The truth is (sorry multis) that I mostly only patronize 2 indies near me.  One is one where the woman I know (who, incidentally, runs a successful coffee shop _across_ from a Second Cup only cops go to) and can somehow, despite all the things she has to handle, get my order quickly.  Oh, she’s got all the liqueurs and shooters and so on, the console of machines, but, miraculously, even with all the black pens and cardboard sleeves, she can actually pull off a coffee in a couple mins. or so—I’d like to say she loves me, but really, she probably just wants my business.    I’d like to love her, but really she just gives me a good coffee 20X faster than Tims can.

Then there’s the trendy place I go to.  They don’t even pretend to make you wait.  You just go off and wait by yourself.  But they sure do call it out pretty quickly.

Anyway, massive failure by major chains like Starbucks, thinking it was ok to alienate coffee drinkers by prioritizing coffee experiencers.  Starbucks’ logo could be purple, for all I remember now, and Tims, sheltered in blacked-out marts along lonely sub-urban ways, well, it could be Toms, for all I know.  I want a decent coffee, and I want it fast, and McDonalds has beaten the shit right out of Starbucks and Tims and Second Cup and all the contenders.  I won’t leave my indies, but when I really need and want a coffee, McDonalds has pulled it off.  The latter has priced themselves out of the market, and demonstrated egregious contempt for consumers, while wily McDonalds has worked itself in.  Maybe one day McDonalds will work themselves out of it, but their track record suggests to me that I kind of doubt it.   You gotta have coffee, you gotta have coffee.  This is a restaurant/service concept Tims and Starbucks have showered with contempt, and in their race to provide sandwiches and tarts to people who don't drink coffee, I guess they will meet in the middle with McDonalds—but that middle is going to be a steep, hard climb.

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