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Cigar-tin story #137. In the shop.

* * * * *
Story on the radio this morning, some book about how Tim Horton's has seized and exploited a privileged parcel of cultural territory on the Canadian middle-class landscape, which is pretty extraordinary for a coffee franchise. (I do apologize for not knowing the name of the book, but I didn't write it down at the time, and there's no way to look it up on the CBC website. Of course.)

Very recently I promised myself that I wouldn't go into Tim Horton's anymore. The reasons were multiple and obvious:
• the ones downtown are usually crowded with the kind of people who yell at their kids not to hit each other with bottles

• the ones downtown are usually dirty

• the ones in the suburbs are swarming with cars, seemingly crazed, as if the drive-thru led into Willy Wonka's chocolate factory

• and then the military shows up, not caring if they stand there forever, ordering entire meals in vast trays

• while they're very good at taking my order, they're also very good at losing my order, until I have to ask for it, in an apologetic way

• the coffee is only okay

• and why the fuck can't they give you a coffee sleeve?

Anyway, Canadian icon or not, I'm done. To be honest, I always found the way people "identified" with the place a little creepy.
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