When you're trying to be angry with them, it is very deflating to speak to Tim Horton's employees face-to-face. They're so nice - it's hard to keep your "Hulk Angry" rage going.
Today, for the 2nd time this week, I decided to get exercise by going for a walk around town, and decided to combine this with picking up Tim Horton's litter on the side of the streets. The first time, I picked up a garbage bag (plus some overflow into a 2nd bag) in just over half an hour. Today I picked up the same amount but in about an hour and a half. Both times I took the garbage into Tim Horton's locations (different one each time) and spoke with the manager.
You kind of want to be confronted with Dick Cheney when you're angry about something like the lack of recycling of cups, the litter, the "anti-idle zone" conspiracy. Instead you just meet a good person trying to do their job. In a way it's annoying. If you haven't seen this Cheney joke before, click on the picture to enlarge it. It's pretty funny.
Anyway - after talking with two local Tim Horton's managers, I've been mulling over the "we're not responsible for what our customers do with their coffee cups" line. Sure - in a way that's true. But I think responsibility still lies on Tim Horton's shoulders for two reasons:
- Scale - The fairly well known study in Nova Scotia, which found Tim Horton's accounting for 22% of all roadside litter in that province (with McDonald's a distant 2nd at 10%), probably doesn't tell the whole story. My city has about 7 Tim Horton's locations for a population of 30 000. I think we're way over 22% here - and I bet that is true for GTA regions like Durham & Oakville as well. If your company accounts for that much garbage - you should feel some corporate responsibility for the recovery of that garbage.
- Lack of effective incentives to properly dispose of cups - Tim Horton's standard line is that they will engage in educational means of telling people not to litter (ie in commercials and messages on their cups). Maybe I'm blind, but I really don't remember ever seeing "don't litter" Tim Horton's ads... and that standard dark brown Tim Horton's cup sure as hell doesn't have any "don't litter" text on it. If Tim Horton's was really serious about preventing their cups from ending up on city streets, they'd provide monetary incentives to avoid disposable cups in their first place (i.e. more than just a .10c savings for using a travel mug) and they'd give gift cards to people who brought in clear plastic bags full of cups they'd picked up off the side of roads.
Additionally, I think Tim Horton's should come out and set themselves the goal of selling more "travel mug" coffees than they do disposable cup coffees - and make public the action steps they intend to take to reach that goal.
The disposable cup really has to be considered a nightmare - come on... 45 minutes of usefulness between its birth when a forest is cut down, and its death when it joins hundreds of millions of others (in one year in one province alone) heading to a landfill.
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