Dear Diary: Inside the thoughts of Tim Hortons pizza

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This week, Tim Hortons added pizza to its menu. The history of established restaurant chains diversifying into pizza is not a good one; the McDonald’s McPizza still stands out as an icon of doomed fast foods.

But Tim Hortons is trying to get more customers into its locations for lunch, and so they engineered a single-serving flatbread pizza that works well with their existing equipment.

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In Dear Diary, the National Post satirically re-imagines a week in the life of a newsmaker. This week, Tristin Hopper takes a journey inside the thoughts of Tim Hortons pizza.

Monday

My God, what has happened to this place? Tim Hortons stands athwart an empire premised on one solemn principle: Sell Canadians industrial amounts of caffeine and sugar for basically nothing, and ideally do it in such as way that customers don’t even need to exit their vehicle. Maximize the calories going in, minimize the calories expended in obtaining it.

Canada is a savage country of ice, snow, early darkness, vast distances and terrible FM radio. It is a land that cannot be faced without some permutation of low-level chemical dependencies, and for 60 years we’ve offered the best. Everything we’ve done — every ad, every sponsorship, every promotion — it’s all driven by one singular consideration: Will this result in more of our glucose and caffeine ending up in the collective national bloodstream?

And now they’ve created me. Pizza. Pizza in a Tim Hortons. Within our national temple to corn sugar and legal stimulants, it’s hard not to feel like an interloper.

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Tuesday

It’s not like Tim Hortons didn’t have other core functions that were crying out for innovation. Our coffee cups remain constricted to just five size offerings. Our customers would buy whole kegs of coffee at a sitting if they could, but we deny them this. Most of our restaurants offer but a single drive-thru, when we could be channelling five-lane thoroughfares through a system of automated “Always Fresh” tollbooths.

We could be building seating areas that transform into high-density dorms after hours to house our imported staff.  And Tim Hortons has hardly scratched the surface of what Canadians are prepared to eat in donut form. A cruller with as many as five distinct cream compartments has worked in initial tests, but requires more research.

But against all this, we went with pizza. Our parent company, who is literally named Restaurant Brands International, took a look at the world’s top-selling takeout foods and picked the first entry. It would have taken exactly as much creativity to start selling cannabis brownies.

Wednesday

Have you ever woken up, stared into the eyes of your spouse, and seen a stranger staring back at you? This is your life partner, your alleged soul mate. But you suddenly realize you know nothing about them.

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Similarly, have you considered why you go to Tim Hortons? Why you’ve spent more time in our queues than you have with most relatives? It certainly can’t be the quality of our offerings; our coffee is acrid and fishy, our donuts are baked-from-frozen and are rapidly shrinking to the size of medallions.

Could your devotion to our brand be one of mere inertia? Something you’ve always done and never questioned? A song that is familiar and reminds you of your youth, but otherwise has no redeeming musical characteristics. Is the apple fritter a quality baked good, or is it Patio Lanterns?

Thursday

It is right that Tim Hortons should be Canada’s unofficial national symbol. Because what is this country if not a tired and faded institution coasting off its past reputation?

You are a G7 economy, yes, but do you dwell in an house of your own making? Or are you mere Italian peasants living in the ruins of the Roman Empire, and overwhelmed by the shame that you don’t know how to do things that were done with ease by your forebears. Was the Coliseum even built by man, or was it the creation of giants?

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So I’ll admit it: We couldn’t do this again. We couldn’t start a hyper-scaleable concept from scratch and saturate the market in a single generation. All we can do is manage the decline. And if pizza staves off the end just a little longer, so be it.

Friday

If a donut shop is to suddenly posture at being a pizza place, may I suggest we are merely joining a national trend towards pretence?

The Canadian economy is quite simple: You pull things from the ground and sell them, while a handful of oligopolies supply the groceries, telecommunications and transportation. But to hear politicians speak, you’d think this place was Switzerland; a land of elite financial services and precision manufacturing. You’re so embarrassed at the truth you’d rather subsidize EV factories than sell beef or petroleum.

In foreign affairs, you pretend at being a principled defender of global norms. When in reality, you’re an unreliable freeloader who gets invited to summits mostly because your delegations speak an easy-to-understand dialect of English.

So yes, let’s say that Tim Hortons is a sugar and coffee merchant shamelessly passing itself off as a culinary destination. How is my cloak of artifice any different than yours?

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