Last year, customers spent more than $5 billion at Tim Hortons. Five billion dollars. That’s $13.7 million worth of coffee and doughnuts per day. Which, in theory, should leave everyone—head office, shareholders and individual franchisees—with plenty of proï¬t to go around. (Don Schroeder, recently fired as Tim’s CEO, pocketed $5.7 million just for walking away and keeping quiet.)
But not everyone agrees with how the pot is divvied up. Arch and Anne Jollymore, both long-time Hortons franchisees, were in a Toronto courtroom last week hoping to certify a hefty class-action lawsuit against the iconic company, arguing that Tim’s historic shift to frozen doughnuts nearly a decade ago has taken a huge bite out of their cash registers—while providing head office with “spectacular†returns. Their legal briefs are complex (the court file is tens of thousands of pages) but the couple’s claim boils down to this: Hortons “forced†franchisees to scrap their deep fryers, then sold them frozen fritters and crullers for triple the cost of the scratch-baked versions. Read more.